John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

Car brakes screeched beside her and she jumped, but it was all right. She was still on the sidewalk, it was not for her that he had stopped. The driver called, “You want a rrr-rrr — want a rride, Mrs. C–C-Clumly?” She recognized the voice. Ed Burlington. “No thank you, Ed,” she answered, and gave him a little wave. She leaned toward the sound of the car’s idling motor. “How have you been?” She’d had him in Sunday school when he was still in the grades. He was out of high school now, surely. A good boy, very serious. He’d been an Eagle Scout, when he was in high school — Fred had read her the piece about it — and she’d felt as proud of him as she’d have been if she were his mother. She hadn’t bumped into him for, it must be, three years or so. She moved off the sidewalk a step, cautiously, toward him.

“J-j-just ff-fine, Mrs. Clumly. I got a g-g-great j-j-j-job, I work for the puh-paper.”

“Wonderful,” she said.

He said, “Are you sure you don’t w-w-want a rrr-ride?”

She shook her head. “No thank you, Ed. I need exercise.”

He said nothing for a moment, but he didn’t leave yet. At last: “They didn’t th-th-THINK I couldddd-do it, at ff-first, because of mmy handicap. B-but the writing p-p-p-p-p-part I do vvv, uh, vvv, uh, the writing p-p-p-p — part I do vvv, uh, vvvvery well.”

“I’m sure you do,” she said.

“I see your husband all the t-t-t-t-ime, Mrs. Clumly. I didn’t get to do the mmmmMURDERS, b-b-b-but I dddd, uh, ddddd, uh, I dddd, uh, b-b-but I ddddd-”

She was fleetingly conscious of a difficulty about how to arrange her face as she waited for him to slam through the d into his word. Should she help? A thousand times she’d wondered that, when she was waiting for an answer from him in Sunday school. She could feel the uneasiness of the whole class growing, could feel the teacherly smile on her face going frozen, her mind backing off from the pain of watching it, and she could feel, too, the rising force of his effort, a hint of stubbornness and anger coming into the struggle as it became, as if because of the stubbornness and anger, impossible. At last, as if in rage against all the observers of his tongue’s anguish, Ed Burlington would clap his hands or stamp his foot, and the word would burst into daylight, like spirit through recalcitrant clay. And so it was now:

“DID get to write on the Woodworth robbery!”

She touched the ends of her fingers together. “The Woodworths? I didn’t hear!”

“Oh y-y-yes. They were robbed one-one day b-b-b-by a wwwwwwwild 1-1-1-looking m-m-man. I wwwwrote it up.”

“My goodness,” she said. Fred must have skipped reading it to her on purpose, sheltering her. She thought instantly of the bearded man who’d broken out of jail. “Did they catch the robber?” she asked.

“N-n-n-never dddd, uh, did.”

“My goodness,” she said. It came to her that she was going to visit the Woodworths. “Well it’s so good to see you, Eddie,” she said.

“Same t-t-t-t-, uh, same t-t-twice OVER,” he said.

She gave him her little wave. The sound of the car enveloped her, a roar like some kind of animal’s, with a queer clicking noise in it, and then, as though a part of the sound, the half-pleasant smell of exhaust rose up around her. She gave her little wave again. Then, cautiously, she turned around and got herself back onto the sidewalk.

“It’s right on my way,” she said to herself. “It’s only three more blocks to Ross Street. I ought to have dropped in on them long ago, for that matter. How lonely it must be for them!” She lined herself up with the edge of the sidewalk and began her quick march east.

The wallpaper had a peculiar softness, a sort of weakness about it, like cardboard that has gotten wet and then dried out. The wooden floor of the entryway was oddly dry under your feet, like the floor of a granary that has had nothing in it for years but a few old sacks, a rusty shovel, an old-fashioned wood-and-tin bagger. That was what the smell of the house made you think of, too: an abandoned barn. It used to be that at the Woodworth house you would be greeted by a beautiful and mighty scent of crabapple jelly or applesauce or pumpkin pie, but there was not so much as a trace of a cooking smell now. It was as if they had given up eating entirely, and perhaps they really had: Octave’s hand was as small as a child’s, and as meatless and dry as a limp cloth glove with sticks in it.

“What a pleasant surprise!” Octave Woodworth said. Her full name was Octave Thanet Woodworth. She had been named for a famous lady novelist. Her father the minister had been a radical in his day, although a Baptist, and had greatly admired Octave Thanet’s opinions — so much so, in fact, that he had invited her to the house when she was passing through on a lecture tour one time. (It was toward the end of Miss Thanet’s life, Octave had told Esther, when Miss Thanet weighed more than two hundred pounds and had a wooden leg and carried a pistol.) It was because of Miss Thanet that Editha, the older of the Woodworth sisters, had become a lady of letters.

“Won’t you come in!” Octave said. “Editha will be so pleased.”

They passed through the entryway into the hushed parlor. Octave held Esther Clumly’s arm to guide her through the maze of wobbly tables, umbrella stands, lamps, bric-a-brac. The smell of decay was stronger here, a smell that reminded you, to tell the truth, of the air in a bathroom where an elderly person has recently moved his bowels.

“Editha, dear, look who’s come to see us!”

Esther smiled and waited with her bony hands folded, nodding politely in the direction toward which Octave Woodworth seemed to have spoken. She had a distinct impression that the room they stood in was absolutely dark, or that Editha Woodworth was behind a screen, so that the smile and nod could not possibly be perceived.

There was no answer from Editha.

“She hardly ever speaks any more, don’t you know,” Miss Octave said. “She’s more than nine-tenths dead, poor thing. She’s a hundred and eight years old, and you know how it is after all that time. I really don’t know why she hangs on. But that’s how the Woodworths have always been. Agnes lived to a hundred and four or it may have been a hundred and five, the records weren’t clear, don’t you know. She was just like Editha, hardly said a word, those last few years, except that she used to curse, poor thing. My! Father would have turned in his grave! We used to tell people she wasn’t right in the head when she started her cursing. Such language! You wonder where on earth she learned it. “Agnes is not herself,” we’d say to people when they heard her doing it, but oh she was an imp. “I am so myself,” she’d say. “It’s you people. You’re the crazy ones.” She used to take off all her clothes, don’t you know, and sit on an upside-down pail in the livingroom. It was a terrible problem. In the end we had to lock her up in there, even if it made her break things, because if we didn’t, you know, she’d come walking right out where we had company and not a stitch of clothes on. I thank the Lord Editha don’t curse, at least. And of course we’re lucky that she can’t get around very well, or undress herself. All things considered, she’s a very good girl, aren’t you Editha.”

Editha said nothing.

“Well,” Miss Octave said. “Won’t you sit down. Let me get you some tea.” She guided Esther to a wobbly little chair with a velvet cushion and forced her to sit.

“Yes, thank you,” Esther said.

But as soon as Esther Clumly was seated, Miss Octave turned and began shuffling very slowly toward (presumably) the kitchen. “I won’t be a minute,” she said. “You and Editha have a nice talk while I get the tea.”