Alone at Night Page 5

  He said, “What’s the matter with her?”

  “She’s being used, I’d say. Ask yourself why a man like Slater Burr married her. When you have the answer to that one, ask yourself why he’s so obsessed with seeing that his name replaces her maiden name—on everything—even on the building you live in.”

  “I see… and you think I’m that way?”

  “I don’t think it.”

  “Well, Laura and I don’t want anything from you. We’ve never asked anything from you yet.”

  “And don’t.”

  “Thank you for the drink, sir.” Buzzy poured the rye into the ginger ale, then wished he had drunk it straight, though he was not sure why he wished it. He did not like the taste of whiskey, and he was unaccustomed to drinking it.

  “It’s the last thing I’ll buy you, the last thing I’ll give you. The first and last. I want that clear.”

  “I don’t expect anything.”

  “Ho! Ho!”

  “I don’t.”

  “Wait until Laura’s doctor bills come…You know, don’t you, that among other things, Laura is a hypochondriac?”

  “Maybe you’ve made her one, sir.”

  “We’re discussing effect, not cause. Laura is a very complicated person. She’s different from other girls her age, and she always was. You know she’s different.”

  “We’ve been all through this, Mr. Leydecker.”

  “If you loved her—if—you’d let her have the chance to go to college, where her mind can be developed properly, and appreciated. She’s very sensitive, a very nervous girl. You won’t be able to handle her. You’re nowhere near knowing her yet… Just wait. Watch her this evening, around other people. You’ll see how well you know her.”

  Leydecker’s bald head glistened in the light as he peered up at Buzzy Cloward. His small, bitter mouth was turned to a slant as he spoke, and he seemed to Buzzy like a weird, little angry bird, who wanted to peck out Buzzy’s eyes.

  “I know you hate me,” the Actor said, “but I’ll show you I’m not what you think I am.”

  “I don’t hate you. I loathe you,” Leydecker answered quietly.

  “I don’t care. I’m going to marry Laura.” But his knees were weak, as they always were in a confrontation with Laura’s father. The palms of his hands were wet, and he felt breathless as he stood there.

  When Laura joined them, her father acted as though there had been no harsh words spoken. During the first dance, Buzzy said, “Well, he was at me again.”

  “Father is persistent. It’s one of his major characteristics.”

  “He said he loathed me.”

  “It’s so crowded here. I hope I’m not getting synovitis of the ankle joint.”

  “Where do you learn all those medical terms?”

  “I just know them. I like to know what’s wrong when I feel ill.”

  They danced the whole set, to “Hernando’s Hideaway” and “Hey, There”, “I Love Paris” and “Young at Heart”. At the end of the set, Laura went back to the Ladies. There were many couples there their age, but when they waved at her (Buzzy knew none of them) she seemed embarrassed.

  “Let’s meet some of them, talk to them,” said Buzzy.

  “No. They don’t really like me. I want to look at my ankle, besides.”

  He was not disappointed. He felt a strange exhilaration growing among the crowd of young people near the west wall, where they all sat in a gang. It was as though they were all witnesses to some imminent accident, waiting for it on their front-row folding chairs, holding drinks to tide them through the count-off.

  A few times, meeting some of them had been unavoidable—in the lobby of The Palace or on the street, and always it was their amused countenances against the confusion of Laura, and a sullen defenselessness in Buzzy, so that Buzzy went away with the feeling that he and Laura were paired-off left-overs in life, mavericks of the town.

  Buzzy wandered to the bar while Laura was gone, and drank rye without the ginger ale, a few shots. He saw Kenneth Leydecker, little and smug, standing at a table talking with the people seated there, rocking back and forth on his heels. He decided he would get Laura back in Leydecker’s car when she came out; let The Kantogee Country Club go to hell! He would control her—he knew how to control her perhaps better than he knew anything else—and he thought of his hands on her, his mastery, the way her body went through every pace he put it to, the soft feel of it answering his commands, and then having her, after a long time, controlling her until he was ready… until he said so.

  He had another drink when the set started, and Laura was still in the Ladies. He wandered back to the Men’s. He combed his hair and washed his hands, feeling the Negro attendant’s eyes studying him—his clothes. What did a nigger know anyway, but he felt a panic. Then, as he was drying his hands on the towel the Negro handed him, Slater Burr walked in.

  “Hello, Mr. Burr!”

  “Buzzy.”

  “Nice to see you here!”

  “How are you?”

  “You know I’m getting married.”

  “So I hear.”

  “The Leydeckers. I mean, Laura.”

  “Yes.” Slater turned on the faucet.

  Buzzy took out his comb. He began to comb his hair, standing beside Slater Burr. He said, “We’re being married in September.”

  “Umm hmm.”

  “We’re going to ask you to our wedding.”

  “Fine.”

  “It’s at Second Presbyterian Church. I don’t know how big it will be yet. We have a lot of plans to make. Were you married at Second Presbyterian Church, Mr. Burr?”

  “No.”

  “Well, Mr. Leydecker suggested it. I don’t know how big it will be yet. We have to go over everything. I was telling Ken tonight, we want it just right.” The “Ken” surprised Buzzy as he said it, and he was thinking perhaps he was just a little high. Then suddenly Slater Burr snapped, “Stop combing your hair!”

  He stared at Slater Burr. Slater looked away from him, flipped a coin at the attendant, and walked out the door.

  “I was just combing my hair,” Buzzy said to the attendant. “Just combing my hair.”

  The attendant shrugged, and began rearranging the bottles of aspirin and hair tonic on his white glass tray.

  Buzzy wandered back into the bar and ordered another shot. Slowly, all the while he was thinking over Slater Burr’s flare-up, thinking over how he would get Laura back in the car, and how he was becoming just a little, very little high, he became very drunk.

  It was not an unruly intoxication, not like the wild noise of wine drunk down by the lockers at Industrial High. It was a quiet, moody drunkenness, in which his words came out thick and lisping, and his coordination went off; he dropped a glass, knocked over an ashtray. He was aware at one point of Laura.

  “I’m almost positive now that it’s synovitis of the ankle joint.”

  He was aware of voices telling Laura he was in no condition… and at one point, aware of Chris McKenzie offering to drive them both home… and then, aware of telling Laura she could go, if she wanted to.

  “I’m afraid I’m ill and must.”

  He stood at the bar and felt better, and soon, he felt he had a second wind.

  Mr. Leydecker said he did the right thing, letting Laura go.

  He smiled down at Leydecker, and he had a drink with Leydecker. The hands of the clock above the bar whirled when he looked up there, and he grinned and told Leydecker time was flying, time was flying.

  “You ought to go home.”

  “I know. I know.”

  “You can take my car.”

  “Oh thank you, very much obliged.”

  They stood in the lot, near a tree in the shadows, with Leydecker’s arm around his shoulder. Leydecker was on tiptoe to accomplish it. Little Laura Leydecker’s father; little roach he had not stepped on; little bird with button eyes—peck, peckpeck.

  “Wait a minute. The keys. Is the way clear? No sense walking
around so drunk, for everyone to see.”

  “Thank you very kindly, old sir.”

  “Not at all.”

  “See you around, old bird, and many, many thanks.” He sat behind the wheel. “Get in there!” to the keys… Singing, “Hey, there, you with your nose in the air. Love nev-ver made a fool—”

  Somewhere then… sometime then… hands on his shoulders.

  Ultimately—screaming.

  “It’s Mrs. Burr!”

  Buzzy Cloward stared up at a million winking stars, whirling in a black August sky.

  Then he looked down, and there were more little lights—a strange dashboard, needles, buttons, levers… A Jaguar.

  “She was run over!” a voice shouting again. “Oh, Jesus Christ, she isn’t moving!”

  II.

  With his fingers, Donald Cloward squashed the cigarette in the ashtray.

  He stretched out on the hide-a-bed.

  Once—a year ago? two?, he had talked about it with Guy. “Guy, I know damn well someone took me from the Chrysler to the Jag. Those hands on my shoulder are as clear as—”

  “Why didn’t you remember it at the time?”

  “Guy, I was scared! I just fell apart! I’d murdered someone!”

  “Spilt Milk Department. Anyway, you still drove the car,” Guy had answered. “It’d still be manslaughter… Your concern is getting out of Brinkenhoff. I think I can expedite things, but I can’t do it, if you brood over August 30, 1954!”

  “All right… I’ll concentrate on my typing and shorthand, and maybe next month, the warden will let me study dressmaking.”

  “If dressmaking will help you qualify for a job as my secretary, you’re damn right you’ll study dressmaking!”

  “Okay, Guy.”

  “Just forget the whole business.”

  “Okay, I will.”

  But he didn’t, and he wouldn’t… not until after his talk with Slater Burr.

  seven

  “Hello? Hello? Good morning, sir?”

  Kenneth Leydecker opened his eyes. There was a crack of light from the hall. Just outside his bedroom door, Mrs. Basso’s shadow.

  “A moment, please.”

  Leydecker scrambled out of the large double bed, and scampered across the chilly carpet to the Martha Washington chair. He took his blue-and-gray striped robe from its back, and wiggled into it. He was a small man, who often bought suits from the Ayres Boy’s Department—size 16, usually—a thin, balding man, squinting for his eyeglasses now, finding them on the bedside table. Once he had them on, he got back under the covers, propped his pillows against the scrolled headboard, and leaned back with his hands folded on his lap.

  “Come in, please,” said Mr. Leydecker.

  He was not a man accustomed to having his breakfast in bed. He liked to breakfast in the dining room, while reading yesterday’s New York Times; then, on the dot of eight-forty, leave his home for Leydecker Electric, stay there as late as possible.

  On holidays, he was acutely aware of his loneliness; he was lost and restless and nearly always teary-eyed.

  Mrs. Basso carried a huge silver tray to the bedtable.

  “Merry Christmas, sir.”

  “Merry Christmas to you, Mrs. Basso.”

  “The sun’s out, and it’s a nice bright day, after yesterday’s wet. I’ll pull the blinds for you, sir, and there’s more Christmas cards on your tray there, beside your paper.”

  “Thank you.”

  “That makes 172 Christmas cards came for you and Miss Laura, so far, sir.”

  “So far? I should think this would be the end of it.”

  “Oh well, there’s often two or three that’ll straggle in the day after, and the day after that too.”

  “At least someone’s paying attention to them.”

  “Oh, now, I think Miss Laura looks at them. I think sometimes when no one’s around, Miss Laura looks at them, sir.”

  “Did she have her breakfast yet?”

  “She was down early, same as always. There were dishes in the sink when I got here this morning.”

  Leydecker eased the tray over onto his lap, and put the napkin across his chest. “Mrs. Basso,” he said, “there’s something you’d better know.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “The Cloward boy is back.”

  “I know that, sir. My son told me last night. He saw him walking up East Genesee Street yesterday, carrying his bags to The Burr Building.”

  “Umm hmmm, well, I don’t know what we can expect.”

  “No, sir, I don’t either.”

  “Well,” and Leydecker let out a long sigh, “well, Mrs. Basso, we’ll just wait and see. Merry Christmas again.”

  “Yes, sir, and thank you for my envelope.”

  She went out the door, closing it behind her.

  Leydecker worked at his soft-boiled eggs. Usually, on holidays, he stayed in his room, or downstairs in his study, avoiding the kitchen and second bathroom, and the hallway to the back stairs—Laura’s ambit… In the beginning, he had done it out of sadness, kindness, and embarrassment, but now with the passing of the years, he did it to spite her, for he realized whatever brief and bitter encounter they had in the house was a source of perverse satisfaction to her. She would say the most wicked things to him, laughing out at his reaction, in her high-pitched tones of near hysteria, as though she were parodying all the scenes of madness she had ever seen at the movies, before her voluntary seclusion. Sometimes Kenneth Leydecker wished she had gone truly mad, but the wish filled him with contrition and self-accusation, for he was ready to accept the blame for Laura; if not blame, responsibility.

  He could not blame himself for his intense reaction to Min Brister Leydecker’s death. He had been raptly dedicated to Laura’s mother; her death, when Laura was ten, had left him not only immensely bereaved, but simply inconsolable. He could find no sense to his wife’s sudden death, nor any justification; there was only grief, and the numb acceptance of reality. As time wore on, he was aware of Laura, but he put her off. Mrs. Basso looked after her; he drowned himself in work, pleased and tortured himself with memories of Min, and Laura grew up. By the time he tore himself from the past and took an interest in her, she was behaving like some distant cousin his own age, with her spinsterly mannerisms and outfits, her imaginary ailments, and her nearly morbid addiction to reading. She was sixteen then.

  Once he asked, “Laura, why is it that you don’t wear saddle shoes, skirts and sweaters? Don’t the other girls at High dress that way?”

  “Yes, they do. I get a chill without stockings, and there is no support in those shoes, father. They’re younger than I am too, you know, in their viewpoint. But I admire them; they seem very gay, filled with alacrity.”

  “Don’t you ever mix with them?”

  “I’m bound to, father. We have classes together. We’re not close, though. They think I’m odd, and I suspect I am, from their point of view.”

  At such times he would think again of her mother, the same way he used to think of the dead as a small boy… as though she were just invisible now, but very much present and watching all of it. Often, alone in his room, he would weep and whisper, “But what can I do about it, Min? What? Show me!” as though the dead could show someone how to live.

  He had an idea that college would be the answer for Laura. She was terribly bright, and he knew from his own college days at Princeton that the most incredible eccentrics often bloomed into astonishingly well-liked individuals. Radcliffe, he had always heard, was very successful with women like Laura, who were brilliant and withdrawn. He had once dated a girl from Radcliffe, who was now a leading physicist. She had married a Harvard scientist, and she was not nearly as well-endowed as Laura was physically. She had stuttered so badly, it was painful to hold a conversation with her; still she was very popular, voted something or other in her class, Leydecker could never remember what.

  He had mentioned Radcliffe to Laura. She had seemed most enthusiastic… That was to have been
the answer, and he had put her off again, suspecting least of all that a Donald Cloward would intervene.

  Leydecker sighed and buttered his toast. At some point on this Christmas Day, he would have to go to Laura, and tell her Cloward was back.

  Kenneth Leydecker had always thought of himself as a Christian man, and hating another human being was incompatible with that thought. But he had meant it when he had told the Cloward boy that he loathed him, and he had meant for Cloward to kill himself the night he gave him the keys to his Chrysler. If he had not killed himself, Leydecker would have prosecuted him for auto theft.

  Again, because he thought of himself as a Christian man (even as he walked back into the clubhouse that night, leaving Fate to decide Cloward’s course) he believed that a Divine Power had interceded. Somehow Cloward had decided on a flashier car for his departure from The Kantogee Country Club (just give their kind an inch), and Carrie Burr had paid for his drunken audacity. Leydecker reasoned The Divine Power did not cause Carrie’s death; it simply put Cloward’s sort in perspective, removed any tinge of guilt from Leydecker.

  When Cloward insisted to the police that Leydecker gave him his keys. Leydecker accepted the indisputable Scheme of Things, and lied. What would it have profited Cloward, had Leydecker admitted it? It would not bring Slater Burr’s wife back to life; it would simply have involved Kenneth Leydecker unnecessarily.

  Blood will tell; Min had always said that.

  So it did; the Chrysler was not good enough for a Donald Cloward.

  And then, it should have been that everything would go back to normal, to the way it was before that fluke meeting of his daughter with Cloward. Laura should have gone on to Radcliffe… to marriage… to the things a girl of Laura’s background went on to. Never mind her bad start; it would have all been ironed out at college.