John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

“The State Police reported it?”

A silence. At last he said, “Funny you should ask that. No, as a matter of fact. Luke’s mother reported it. Got it from his father. The troopers—” He stood thinking, staring into space perhaps.

“What?” she said.

“Nothing. Kept it under their hat, that’s all. Not even on the radio. Funny.”

She nodded. If there was something wrong, something mysterious going on, she was to blame. Such is the language of the blood.

But Clumly had his shoes on now, and the suitcoat, and he was getting out his good wool coat, though the night was warm.

“Do you really think you should wear that?” she said.

“Now Esther,” he said, “you just leave that to me. There are some occasions when a uniform just isn’t needed, and tonight is one of ’em.”

She was startled. It was not what she’d meant, and his misunderstanding after all these years in the same house, saying the same words at the same time, thinking the same very thoughts, made her suddenly suspect — oh, more than that, know— that they’d struck something. They expect him to come in his uniform, she thought. He refuses. She said, “Dead. I can’t believe it!”

A silence.

“It’s tragic,” Clumly said.

She nodded.

They held their silence like years stretching backward and forward out of sight, like a vast space of quiet ocean at night. He put his hand on her shoulder and, strange to say, with the thought of death enclosing them like the space beyond the farthest stars, like the shell of an empty house, Esther felt safe.

“Be home early,” she said.

“I always do the best I can,” he said.

“I know that,” she said. She patted his hand. She could feel how old it was.

She got up when he started downstairs, and she went down behind him, sliding her hand on the banister smooth as the one at City Hall, and felt comfortable with the closeness of the walls around her and Clumly’s presence below her and, in the air, the scent of his passing, a mixture — mysteriously pleasing to her, almost holy, in fact — of cologne and Ivory soap. She saw him to the porch, listened to his footsteps crunching on the gravel, going down the driveway behind the house to where the car was parked. She heard the door, then the motor starting up, and he backed to the street. She closed the door and turned the key in the lock. She switched off the lights.

They used no sirens, but she could feel them coming, moving toward her like subterranean creatures pressing mysteriously upward out of darkness into the cellar and on to the kitchen where she sat, to nibble her bones. She heard their cars purr softly to the curb out in front of the house, heard the doors open, the occasional mutters of the radio — two cars, perhaps, or possibly three, or one. She closed her hand more tightly on the neck of the bottle. I am not quite as sober as intended, she thought with dignity, stock still. This is unusual. I am not, generally speaking … She lost the thread. For a moment she couldn’t remember whether she’d turned off the lights. She went through it again in her mind — Clumly’s leaving, her quiet listening there on the porch, her return. I locked the door, switched off … She heard them coming up, their boots loud on the porch steps. Voices. “Nobody home, looks like.” “Ring the bell.” “I don’t know. I mean the house all dark—” “Maybe we should wait till tomorrow? You know what I mean?”

She thought sadly of her life, but the details were a trifle confused. She reached out to touch the pistol, making sure it was there. But she didn’t take it in her hand yet, merely waited. They were still talking, on the porch. Poor Miller, she thought. She knew pretty well how it must be for him. After all those years, he and Fred there together, “serving together,” as Fred would say, as much like husband and wife as like father and son. She was sorry. She nodded in the dark of the kitchen. The doorbell rang. She touched the pistol again and, after a moment’s thought, picked it up. It was surprisingly heavy now, as heavy as the cast-iron spider she cooked his eggs in.

Perhaps she was going to die. There was no telling. She knew only that they could not have the tapes. She had no idea whether the tapes would seem worth the trouble to them, but if they were, they would have to shoot her to get them. Her mind was made up. How absurd it seemed now, all those years of self-pity when she’d thought she must even the score with him, pay him back for what had no price on it, no more than her own devotion had a price. The ho-hum evenings, the long triviality of breakfasts and suppers, the conversations without talk. Nobody’s life, she thought, is perfect. Fred’s expression. How true! Yes, yes, how true!

Again, the doorbell.

They had loved each other, she thought, frowning. Again the bird in the back of her mind stirred and fluttered. Duty, she remembered. But duty was merely turning love into a thought. Without love — if there was no love — then duty

Meaningless. Evil.

“Duty is evil,” she said aloud. She smiled. Drunk as a pig. If anyone should see me

They were pounding now. Banging on the door like the Gestapo or something. It amused her, the thought of poor gentle Miller and wordless Kozlowski and that trembling little tame rabbit John Figlow, or whoever was there, banging the door like the whole German army under orders to kill all Jews.

“Just a moment,” she called.

The banging stopped.

She moved toward the dining room, holding the pistol in one hand, the bottle in the other. I feel better now, thank you, she thought. Quite sober. Standing in the livingroom she said, “I’m sorry, you can’t come in.”

“Mrs. Clumly?” someone called. A voice she couldn’t place.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s my duty to keep you out. You don’t have a warrant, do you?”

Silence.

Eventually, Officer Tank’s voice: “Mrs. Clumly, we need to talk to you.”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

Another silence. Then, loud as gunshots, a knocking.

“For Christ’s sake, Esther, let us in.” It was Miller this time.

She smiled.

It might have been all civilization, for all she cared, out there banging and asking admission. She said, “What do you want?”

“We want to talk,” Miller said.

She waited.

He was quiet for a long time. They were whispering something.

“Mrs. Clumly,” Miller said softly, almost too softly to hear. “It’s about — what we talked about. You remember?” Another silence. She could hear the house waiting, observing with detachment but a certain remote curiosity. In the cellar, nothing stirred. Then Miller’s voice: “Esther, the tapes.”

She squeezed. The explosion filled the room and the gun kicked into her stomach so hard all her breath went out, and the world was full of the violent smell of the gunpowder or whatever it was as she fell down gasping and amazed. She heard plaster falling from the ceiling. And then they were howling as if they’d all been shot in the left hind leg, and there were doors opening all up and down the street, and the second explosion was louder than the first and the third explosion still ten times louder, and Ed Tank screamed as if he’d gone stark crazy, “Mrs. Clumly put down that gun before you kill yourself!” They were banging again. She heard the hinges break.

At last, with vast satisfaction, as though huge iron chains had been sawed from her legs and her eyes, were opened and her womb filled with life, she fainted. More brave than was intended, she said in her mind.

4

Arthur Hodge Jr, brother to Will Sr and Ben, sat, all triangles and squares, hooking colored wires together in a pattern so intricate no ordinary man could have read the chart. He was making what he called, by some queer lapse of mind or twist of humor, a Victrola, to anyone else a stereo phonograph. He was a lover of music and did not understand, since he’d forbidden it, that what his seven daughters would play on his machine would be music by, at best, the Jefferson Airplane. The phone rang. His oldest daughter answered. She brought him the news.