John Steinbeck - The Winter of Our Discontent

“You remember it all right. It’s mine.”

“Danny, you could sell it and get a new start.”

“I won’t sell it. The county takes a little bit of it for taxes every year. The big meadow is still mine.”

“Why won’t you sell it?”

“Because it’s me. It’s Daniel Taylor. Long as I have it no Christy sons of bitches can tell me what to do and no bastards can lock me up for my own good. Do you get it?”

“Listen, Danny—”

“I won’t listen. If you think this dollar gives you the right to preach to me—here! Take it back.”

“Keep it.”

“I will. You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’ve never been a—drunk. I don’t tell you how to wrap bacon do I? Now if you’ll go your own way, I’ll knock on a window and get some skull-buster. And don’t forget—I’m better off than you are. I’m not a clerk.” He turned around and put his head in the corner of the closed doorway like a child who abolishes the world by looking away from it. And he stayed there until I gave up and walked on.

Wee Willie, parked in front of the hotel, stirred out of his nap and rolled down the window of his Chevrolet. “Morning, Ethan,” he said. “You up early or out late?”

“Both.”

“Must have found yourself a fancy piece.”

“Sure did, Willie, an houri.”

“Now, Eth, don’t tell me you’d take up with no streetwalker.”

“I swear it.”

“Can’t believe nothing no more. I bet you was fishing. How’s Missus?”

“Asleep.”

“That’s where I’ll be, come shift.”

I went on without reminding him that’s where he’d been.

I walked quietly up my back steps and switched on the kitchen light. My note was on the table a little left of center. I’d swear I left it right in the middle.

I put the coffee on and sat waiting for it to perk, and it had just begun to bounce when Mary came down. My darling looks like a little girl when she awakens. You couldn’t think she is the mother of two big brats. And her skin has a lovely smell, like new-cut grass, the most cozy and comforting odor I know.

“What are you doing up so early?”

“Well may you ask. Please to know I have been up most of the night. Regard my galoshes there by the door. Feel them for wetness.”

“Where did you go?”

“Down by the sea there is a little cave, my rumpled duck. I crawled inside and I studied the night.”

“Now wait.”

“And I saw a star come out of the sea, and since it had no owner I took it for our star. I tamed it and turned it back to fatten.”

“You’re being silly. I think you just got up and that woke me.”

“If you don’t believe me, ask Wee Willie. I spoke to him. Ask Danny Taylor. I gave him a dollar.”

“You shouldn’t. He’ll just get drunk.”

“I know. That was his wish. Where can our star sleep, sweet fern?”

“Doesn’t coffee smell good? I’m glad you’re silly again. It’s awful when you’re gloomy. I’m sorry about that fortune thing. I don’t want you to think I’m not happy.”

“Don’t give it a worry, it’s in the cards.”

“What?”

“No joke. I’m going to make our fortune.” [16] I’m going to make our fortune: What Steinbeck wrote in Sea of Cortez provides a gloss to Ethan’s decision and to the ethical issues of this novel: “There is a strange duality in the human which makes for an ethical paradox. We have definitions of good qualities and of bad; not changing things, but generally considered good and bad throughout the ages and throughout the species. Of the good, we think always of wisdom, tolerance, kindliness, generosity, humility; and the qualities of cruelty, greed, self-interest, graspingness, and rapacity are universally considered undesirable. And yet in our structure of society, the so-called and considered good qualities are invariable concomitants of failure, while the bad ones are the cornerstones of success.... Perhaps no other animal is so torn between alternatives. Man might be described fairly adequately, if simply, as a two-legged paradox.”

“I never know what you’re thinking.”

“That’s the greatest difficulty with telling the truth. Can I beat the children a little to celebrate the day before Resurrection? I promise to break no bones.”

“I haven’t washed my face,” she said. “I couldn’t imagine who was rattling around in the kitchen.”

When she had gone up to the bathroom, I put my note to her in my pocket. And I still didn’t know. Does anyone ever know even the outer fringe of another? What are you like in there? Mary—do you hear? Who are you in there?

That Saturday morning seemed to have a pattern. I wonder whether all days have. It was a withdrawn day. The little gray whisper of my Aunt Deborah came to me, “Of course, Jesus is dead. This is the only day in the world’s days when He is dead. And all men and women are dead too. Jesus is in Hell. But tomorrow. Just wait until tomorrow. Then you’ll see something.”

I don’t remember her very clearly, the way you don’t remember someone too close to look at. But she read the Scripture to me like a daily newspaper and I suppose that’s the way she thought of it, as something going on happening eternally but always exciting and new. Every Easter, Jesus really rose from the dead, an explosion, expected but nonetheless new. It wasn’t two thousand years ago to her; it was now. And she planted something of that in me.

I can’t remember wanting to open the store before. I think I hated every sluggish sloven of a morning. But this day I wanted to go. I love my Mary with all my heart, in some ways much better than myself, but it is also true that I do not always listen to her with complete attention. When she tells the chronicle of clothes and health and conversations which please and enlighten her, I do not listen at all, so that sometimes she exclaims, “But you should have known. I told you. I remember very clearly telling you on Thursday morning.” And there’s no doubt at all about that. She did tell me. She tells me everything in certain areas.

This morning I not only didn’t listen, I wanted to get away from it. Maybe I wanted to talk myself and I didn’t have anything to say—because, to give her fair due, she doesn’t listen to me either, and a good thing sometimes. She listens to tones and intonations and from them gathers her facts about health and how my mood is and am I tired or gay. And that’s as good a way as any. Now that I think of it, she doesn’t listen to me because I am not talking to her, but to some dark listener within myself. And she doesn’t really talk to me either. Of course when the children or some other hell-raising crises are concerned, all that changes.

I’ve thought so often how telling changes with the nature of the listener. Much of my talk is addressed to people who are dead, like my little Plymouth Rock Aunt Deborah or old Cap’n. I find myself arguing with them. I remember once in weary, dusty combat I called out to old Cap’n, “Do I have to?” And he replied very clearly, “Course you do. And don’t whisper.” He didn’t argue—never did. Just said I must, and so I did. Nothing mysterious or mystic about that. It’s asking for advice or an excuse from the inner part of you that is formed and certain.

For pure telling, which is another way of saying asking, my mute and articulate canned and bottled goods in the grocery serve very well. So does any passing animal or bird. They don’t argue and they don’t repeat.

Mary said, “You’re not going already? Why you have half an hour. That’s what comes of getting up so early.”

“Whole flock of crates to open,” I said. “Things to put on the shelves before I open. Great decisions. Should pickles and tomatoes go on the same shelf? Do canned apricots quarrel with peaches? You know how important color relations are on a dress.”