Alone at Night Read online

  Jen said, “Are you home for good now?”

  “No, ma’am. Just for a few days. I’m going to work in New York City, I think.” He looked back at Slater, standing behind Jen.

  “Oh, I envy you!” said Jen. “I adore New York!” Cloward picked up his beer glass, and before he swallowed, tipped it slightly in Jen’s direction. “Well, Merry Christmas.”

  “Merry Christmas to you… is it Fuzzy?”

  “Buzzy… I’m called Donald nowadays.”

  “Donald. Merry Christmas, Donald.”

  Slater excused himself and went back into the Men’s. He leaned against the sink, pausing to collect his thoughts. He was just a little tight, but he knew he should have been more effusive, should have pumped the boy’s arm in the old gesture of bygones-be-bygones… was that right?

  The shock at seeing Cloward so suddenly had thrown him off. He should have feigned the attitude of forgiveness, just as he always went out of his way to ask old man Cloward how Donald was, and to send the Christmas cards each year. He remembered the stumbling, remorseful letter Cloward had sent from Brinkenhoff the first year, and the agonized expression on Cloward’s face when Slater confronted him on the night of August 30th. The events of the night began to whirl through Slater’s brain, beginning with Carrie saying:

  II.

  “Actually, I was thinking of a way to increase the velocity of the power hammer, on the Rolli machine.”

  They were standing near the parking lot at The Kantogee Country Club, off to the right, on the bank, where there was a sudden drop to the highway.

  He had seen her leave the clubhouse, while he was at the bar talking with Jen. Jen was telling him that it was hopeless; she was making arrangements to go back to Paris to work, and he was trying to keep his voice down, trying, without moving his lips, to tell Jen he loved her, his eyes looking away from her as though it were merely a quiet conversation, not the desperate intense moment it was, when he saw Carrie leave. He saw her face in profile, the cigarette in her mouth, the hunched-over posture he had found so endearing and sad, so long ago, her awkward walk in the long dress (her awkwardness too, he had always found dear and winning) and the solemn paleness of her face. She was furious, he knew; liable to take the car and go, if she were in such a mood, and it would cause gossip, inspire Jen to go ahead all the quicker with her departure plans… so he had excused himself from Jen and followed Carrie. When he caught up with her, he asked her if everything were all right. She gave him her usual shrug, looking off in the direction of the lake, not speaking to him. Then he had said: “What are you thinking?”

  It was her usual answer too, to any attempt on his part to probe her mind. She considered her evasiveness a part of her immense control; it was Carrie’s conceit that she never raised her voice, spoke an angry word, or discussed anything which bothered her, other than something like increasing a power hammer’s velocity.

  There were times when she would weep, but she would always have some strange explanation for it: her desk in the solarium was in the wrong place, or her cactus plant was dead (she was a specialist in cacti), and then she would do something about it, move the desk, bury the dead cactus, and the tears would be gone as suddenly as they had come… and the iron control back, the stiff expression on her face, the spring of vitality in her movements, as she drove herself through a day.

  When Slater had first met Carrie, she was home on vacation from college. Slater was managing the Stewart Company plant, and Carrie had appeared one afternoon by herself to look over the machinery. Mechanics fascinated her; and her attitude, as Slater showed her about, was very much like a man’s, poking and fooling with this part, adjusting that one, inquiring in her technical way about the use of the lever on one machine, or the roller on another. She wore fly-front pants and a white shirt, rolled to the elbows, showing firm-muscled white arms, and her stride as she went through the plant was long and sure, and over the shirt she wore a suede tunic, a pack of cigarettes stuck in one pocket of the tunic. Her face was marvelously handsome; a tinge of pink lipstick on very wide lips, deep brown eyes, a good nose, and black eyelashes, long and dark in contrast to the fair and perfect skin. As Slater had watched her, his heartbeat was deep and powerful; it seemed to him like some thrilling secret that her soft woman’s breasts must be buttoned up in the shirt, covered with the suede tunic, that all of her softness and tender flesh in hiding that way was all the more intriguing and lovely than girls who showed themselves more daringly, as if to offer for approval what she took for granted and covered. So he told himself, and his blood burned. His excitement at that first encounter was at a pitch that stayed through all the other meetings with her. And he liked the way she was so natural on her tours through the plant, and the way the men liked her, not one of them fresh or disrespectful to Miss Carrie. He would hear them talk about her afterwards, all the talk admiring and amiable, as though she were a woman who cut through the vulgar and unnecessary underbrush of male-female differences, and class differences, and was simply liked for herself; not the way it should be with every woman, but the way it was around Carrie: her special individuality.

  There had never been a single doubt in Slater’s mind that Carrie was a fascinating woman; his marriage had endured for the sole reason she was so fascinating, but she was not vulnerable as he had once imagined when he was younger and had thought of the soft white breasts behind the tunic, white and unseen, waiting to be awakened; nor was she sad and needing protection, behind the façade of surety. She was a force, to whatever end, she was one.

  That night in August, wearing the pink-and-white dotted chiffon she looked uncomfortable in, there was the same quality of wistful awkwardness and defenselessness, but Slater saw through the mask. He said quite flatly, “Carrie, you know very well about Jen and me, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” she answered.

  “Carrie, I’m going to say something that has to be said, much as you hate this kind of personal discussion. I’m very deeply in love with Jen.”

  “I’m not surprised,” she said, not at all abashed. A slice of orange moon in the summer sky showed a placid, cool look on her face. She dropped her cigarette butt on the gravel and erased its hot ash with the tip of her evening slipper. From her beaded bag, she took another cigarette, ignoring Slater’s fumbling for his lighter, and lit the cigarette with her own.

  Slater said, “Is that all you have to say… that it doesn’t surprise you?”

  “Yes… That, and that I’d like to go home. Incidentally, Slater, the Cloward boy is back there in Kenneth Leydecker’s car. He’s very intoxicated. I saw Leydecker give him the keys. Leydecker must be out of his mind. The boy can’t drive in his condition. We’d better drop him on our way.”

  “Carrie,” Slater said, “don’t skip over this one. Not this one!”

  “I’m not skipping over it. I heard you.”

  “And you have no reaction to the fact I love someone else?”

  She gave him a polite smile. “I don’t really believe in love. It’s a convenient word, one of those words which can force chaos into a more traditional pattern, at least ostensibly.”

  “I want to talk about it, Carrie, not around it—about it. I don’t know what all this crap means… convenience and chaos! What does all that crap mean?”

  She said, “If a man says he’s deeply in love with someone, it gives him a more traditional license to behave as he intends to anyway.”

  “And when I was in love with you?”

  “You intended to marry me, didn’t you?” said Carrie. “It wouldn’t have been easy for you to marry me, without saying that you were in love. I didn’t require your avowal of love, but you required it of yourself. It was easier for you to believe it, or at least to say it, whether you believed it or not.”

  “I loved you when I married you, Carrie.”

  “We don’t have to get psychosemantic about it. We’re married, and that’s that.”

  “You used to say you loved me.”


  “You wanted to hear it, Slater. You used to remark how awkward I seemed saying it… No, I was never comfortable with the word ‘love’; you were right.”

  Slater said, “Then what did you marry me for?”

  “I thought we would be good together, that simple.”

  “Good how? In bed?” Slater gave a bitter chuckle.

  “I’m sorry if bed was a disappointment. I know I didn’t place much emphasis on it, but I never refused you, Slater.”

  “There’s more to it than not refusing me, Carrie.”

  “I don’t doubt it, but there never was for me. Either way, it never seemed a problem to me.”

  “You could take it, or leave it alone.”

  “Yes.”

  Then she said, “It doesn’t come as a surprise to you, Slater. We’ve been married 14 years, so don’t act as though this is the moment of truth, simply because it’s never been discussed between us… I’m quite serious about the hammer on the Rolli. I want to draw up some plans, speak with Secora on Monday. Will you drive me home now?”

  “Some goddamned marriage!”

  “I doubt that anyone’s is perfect.”

  “I doubt it too, Carrie, but now I want a little more than what we have.”

  “You’ve found ways before, to have more than what we have.”

  “You knew about the other women too?”

  “I presumed something like that went on during your trips.”

  “Did you know about Caxton’s niece? That went on right under your nose, here in Cayuta.”

  “Yes. I received one of those nasty anonymous phone calls that fall.”

  “And you didn’t give a damn?”

  “I haven’t been unhappy with you, put it that way, Slater.”

  “You should have been, if you’d had feelings.”

  She took a drag on her cigarette; the smoke spiraled up between them, and she said: “I should have objected, I suppose, when you decided to replace father’s name with yours on the company. Oh, everyone said I should. Lawyers, bankers. Why, the Stewart Company is a tradition, everyone said: it’s always been the Stewart Company. I realized that it wasn’t that important to me, but it seemed important to you… I let it happen… I feel the same way about your women.”

  Slater said, “What is important to you?”

  “Father was. The Burr Company is. Having a child was, when we were involved in that… There are certain things I wasn’t made for, I suspect. I couldn’t carry a child beyond the third month, and I was never taken with bed… I suppose I live day-to-day, Slater. I like to work, and I’m not displeased with our life, except during these analyses of it.”

  “Carrie,” Slater said, “I want a divorce. I want to marry Jen.”

  “When we were young,” she said, “you came to me with the idea of changing your name from Francis to Slater.”

  “Slater was my middle name,” he said. “A lot of men take their middle name.”

  “All right, but let me finish… At the time, I thought it was a silly notion. You were very intent on it, though, remember?”

  “Francis is a hell of a name for a man!”

  “I don’t think it would have bothered a man. But you were a boy, really, twenty-four, twenty-five… a boy. I thought at the time what a lot of trouble it would be—changing it on the checking account, legal papers, so forth… to say nothing of getting people used to it… Well, it wasn’t going to be trouble for me. I said to go ahead, if you wanted to, and you did. It worked out fine. I don’t think anyone in Cayuta calls you Francis now.”

  “What has this got to do with a divorce, Carrie?”

  “My yardstick has always been how much trouble it would cause me. A divorce would upset my whole life, Slater, and I don’t want one.”

  Slater said, “Do you know I could kill you right now? I could honest-to-God kill you.”

  “No, Slater, that’s something you can’t make yourself believe just because you say the words. You’re letting off hot air, that’s all. Most of this discussion is; most discussions are.”

  “You wouldn’t know anything about hot, Carrie.”

  “I know about you. I know a little about hot, too. I know that hot doesn’t stop and figure things out, as you do. Hot—love—whatever you want to call it, takes what it wants. There’s nothing to stop hot from running off with a Jennifer McKenzie, anytime he’s ready. Oh, he’d have to give up a lot, but isn’t hot, love—whatever you want to call it—irrational?… Hot takes what it wants, and it keeps what it wants, Slater. I know a little about it. I don’t go in for labelling things, but I know about things, a whole lot more than you do… Now, take me home, and bring the Cloward boy. He’s too drunk to drive.”

  “I’ll take you home, all right!” He was shaking with fury, shaking and holding himself back from simply walking over and knocking her backward, down into the highway, a drop that was far enough to kill anyone… even Carrie, hard and tough as she was.

  “And bring the Cloward boy.”

  “The hell with the Cloward boy!”

  “He could be you, Slater, years ago.”

  “Meaning what, Carrie?”

  “Meaning stop hiding behind words. You were the same kind of kid he is… wide-eyed at the rich, always with the comb in your back pocket ready to preen, dreaming of driving the kind of car you’re driving tonight, chasing after some maverick daughter of a rich man, calling it love… and then fourteen years later, surprised that it all didn’t turn out like Paramount Pictures… surprised that there’s responsibility attached, and then you can’t just walk out as easily as you walked in!”

  “Goddam you, Carrie,” Slater said, “Goddam you!… I loved you when I married you. I was in love with you!”

  “Get the car, Slater, and bring him,” she said. “I’ll wait here.”

  He crossed the gravel drive with the fury ready to snap his brain. As he went by the rows of parked cars, he heard the strains of “Hey, There,” from the clubhouse, and he heard a voice singing lazily in the August night: “… love nev-ver made a fool of you, you used to be soooo wise, you—”

  He stopped by Kenneth Leydecker’s Chrysler. Behind the wheel was the Cloward boy, his head leaning against the window, his mouth hanging open, singing foolishly. The key was on in the ignition, with it, the car lights.

  Slater reached across the boy and turned off the key, the lights.

  “Thank you very much, old bird, but I better be moving along, Mr. Leydecker, sir, old bird.”

  “C’mon Cloward! Ass!”

  “Hey there, you with your nose in the air, love—” the boy sang; he was too drunk to understand anything.

  Slater put his hands on his shoulders and pulled him from the car. He walked him across to the Jaguar, put him in the front seat.

  He turned on his headlights when he got in on the other side. Straight ahead, on the bank, the pink-and-white dotted chiffon showed in the moonlight, the long white arm, the incongruous leather strap of her wrist watch. Beside him in the Jaguar, the Cloward boy leaned into him, kept up his intoxicated singing, stopping and starting up again, his words thick and slurred, head dangling.

  “Just shut up!” Slater yelled. His anger at Carrie was wild in his voice, and he wished now that he had gone back into the clubhouse to tell Jen good night, to tell her he would work something out; he wouldn’t lose her. He imagined her waiting for him, watching through the crowds for him, wondering where he was.

  He felt like just scaring the hell out of Carrie, roaring the Jag up with a near miss, so she would have to jump out of the way. He gunned the motor forward, headed right for her, and in the slow second before he swung to avoid hitting her, he imagined her jumping back and falling down the bank to the highway, a straight-line drop-off. The sudden thud of Carrie’s body against his grill amazed him. He slammed on the brakes and jumped out. The chiffon was already soaking with blood, and Carrie’s face—the eyes lusterless like those of a fish at the end of a hook—stared up at him.

 
He did not touch her, but instead, began to run. He ran up the side yard, for some reason toward the lights of the club kitchen, acting on a stupid impulse to get water, to wash out the blood, wipe away the incident… just clean it all away. Then he stumbled and fell to his knees, and in the darkness on his knees, he could hear someone shouting.

  “It’s Mrs. Burr!”

  He pulled himself to his feet.

  “Oh, Jesus Christ, she was run over! She isn’t moving.” This time he began running back toward the Jaguar, as though he had not been anywhere near it… as though he were running from the clubhouse.

  He saw two men standing by his car, pulling the Cloward boy from behind the wheel where he had slumped when Slater had jumped out.

  nine

  The door of the Men’s in Walsh’s Place opened and closed, and Slater Burr looked across at Cloward.

  “I’m sorry to barge in on you,” said Cloward, “but I wanted to talk with you. I called you last night around eleven, and three or four times today.”

  “How are you, Buzzy?”

  “I don’t go by that name much, any more, Mr. Burr. Donald.”

  “You wanted to talk to me?”

  “Yes… It’s not a very pleasant subject, and I’m sorry for that, on Christmas Day.”

  “Well?”

  “And thank you for the Christmas card. For all of them.”

  “All right.”

  “I wanted to talk to you about—the accident that night.”

  “I should think you’d want to forget it. I’ve forgotten it,” said Slater, “and I should think you’d want to… Are you out of Brinkenhoff for good now?”

  “They don’t give vacations, Mr. Burr… Yes, I’m out.”

  “I’m glad of it, Donald. It was very unfortunate—the whole thing. If you don’t mind,” and he started the motions of leaving, “I’d like to keep it forgotten.”

  Cloward touched the sleeve of his jacket. “Wait! Listen a minute. I’ve had a lot of time to think about that night, to go over everything, Mr. Burr.”