The Blunderer Read online

  “All right,” Walter said. “I’ll order a steak. Jeff can have most of it.”

  “You say it in such a martyred tone!”

  The steaks were not very good at the Lobster Pot. Walter had ordered steak the other night because of Jeff. Jeff refused to eat fish. “It’s perfectly okay with me, Clara. Let’s not argue about anything our last night.”

  “Who’s arguing? You’re trying to start something!”

  But, after all, the steak had been ordered. Clara had had her way, and she sighed and looked off into space, apparently thinking of something else. Strange, Walter thought, that Clara’s economy extended even to Jeff’s food, though in every other respect Jeff was indulged. Why was that? What in Clara’s background had made her into a person who turned every penny? Her family was neither poor nor wealthy. That was another mystery of Clara that he would probably never solve.

  “Kits,” he said affectionately. It was his pet name for her, and he used it sparingly so it would not wear out. “Let’s just have fun this evening. It’ll probably be a long time till we have another vacation together. How about a dance over at the Melville after dinner?”

  “All right,” Clara said, “but don’t forget we have to be up at seven tomorrow.”

  “I won’t forget.” It was only a six-hour drive home, but Clara wanted to be home by mid-afternoon in order to have tea with the Philpotts, her bosses at the Knightsbridge Brokerage. Walter slid his hand over hers on the table. He loved her hands. They were small but not too small, well-shaped, and rather strong. Her hand fitted his when he held it.

  Clara did not look at him. She was looking into space, not dreamily but intently. She had a small, rather pretty face, though its expression was cool and withdrawn, and her mouth looked sad in repose. It was a face of subtle planes, hard for a stranger to remember.

  He glanced behind him, looking for Jeff. Clara had let him off the leash, and he was trotting around the big room, sniffing at people’s feet, accepting titbits from their plates. He would always eat fish from other people’s plates, Walter thought. It embarrassed Walter, because the waiter had asked them the other evening to put the dog on a leash.

  “The dog is all right,” Clara said, anticipating him.

  Walter sampled the wine and nodded to the waiter that it was satisfactory. He waited until Clara had her glass, then lifted his. “Here’s to a happy rest of the summer and the Oyster Bay sale,” he said, and noticed that her brown eyes brightened at the mention of the Oyster Bay sale. When Clara had drunk some of her wine, he said, “What do you say if we set a date for that party?”

  “What party?”

  “The party we talked about before we left Benedict. You said towards the end of August.”

  “All right,” Clara said in a small, unwilling voice, as if she had been bested in a fair contest and had to forfeit a right, much as she disliked it. “Perhaps Saturday the twenty-eighth.”

  They began to make up the guest list. It was not a party for any particular reason, except that they had not given a real party since the New Year’s Day buffet, and they had been to about a dozen since. Their friends around Benedict gave a great many parties, and though Clara and Walter were not always invited, they were invited often enough not to feel left out. They must have the Iretons, of course, the McClintocks, the Jensens, the Philpotts, Jon Carr, and Chad Overton.

  “Chad?” Clara asked.

  “Yes. Why not? I think we owe him something, don’t you?”

  “I think he owes us an apology, if you want my opinion!”

  Walter took a cigarette. Chad had come by the house one evening, just dropped in on the way back from Montauk, and somehow—Walter didn’t even know how—had taken on enough martinis to pass out on their sofa, or at least to fall deeply asleep. No amount of explaining that Chad had been tired from driving all day in the heat had been of any use. Chad was on the blacklist. And yet they’d stayed at Chad’s apartment several times on nights when they went to New York to see a play, when Chad, as a favor to them, had spent the night at a friend’s in order to give them his apartment.

  “Can’t you forget that?” Walter asked. “He’s a good friend, Clara, and an intelligent guy, too.”

  “I’m sure he’d pass out again, if he were in sight of a liquor bottle.”

  No use telling her he’d never known Chad to pass out before or since. No use reminding her that he actually owed his present job to Chad. Walter had worked at Adams, Adams and Branower, Counsellors at Law, as Chad’s assistant the year after he graduated from law school. Walter had quit the firm and gone to San Francisco with an idea of opening his own office, but he had met Clara and married her, and Clara had wanted him to go back to New York and keep on in corporation law, which was more profitable. Chad had recommended him more highly than he deserved to a legal advisory firm known as Cross, Martinson and Buchman. Chad was a good friend of Martinson. The firm paid Walter a senior lawyer’s salary, though Walter was only thirty. If not for Chad, Walter thought, they wouldn’t be sitting in the Lobster Pot drinking imported Riesling at that moment. Walter supposed he would have to ask Chad to lunch some time in Manhattan. Or lie to Clara and spend an evening with him. Or maybe not lie to her, just tell her. Walter drew on his cigarette.

  “Smoking in the middle of your meal?”

  The food had arrived. Walter put the cigarette out, with deliberate calm, in the ashtray.

  “Don’t you agree he owes us something? A bunch of flowers, at least?”

  “All right, Clara, it’s all—right.”

  “But why that horrid tone?”

  “Because I like Chad, and if we keep on boycotting him the logical result is that we’ll lose him as a friend. Just as we lost the Whitneys.”

  “We have not lost the Whitneys. You seem to think you’ve got to lick people’s boots and take all their insults to keep them as friends. I’ve never seen anybody so concerned with whether every Tom, Dick and Harry likes you or not!”

  “Let’s not quarrel, honey.” Walter put his hands over his face, but he took them down again at once. It was an old gesture he made at home, and in private. He couldn’t bear to do it at the end of a vacation. He turned around to look for Jeff again. Jeff was way across the room, trying his best to embrace a woman’s foot. The woman didn’t seem to understand, and kept patting Jeff’s head. “Maybe I ought to go and get him,” Walter said.

  “He’s not harming anything. Calm yourself.” Clara was dismembering her lobster expertly, eating quickly, as she always did.

  But the next instant a waiter came up and said smilingly, “Would you mind putting your dog on a leash, sir?”

  Walter got up and crossed the room towards Jeff, feeling painfully conspicuous in his white trousers and bright blue jacket. Jeff was still making efforts with the woman’s foot, his black-spotted face turned around and grinning as if he couldn’t quite take it seriously himself, but Walter had a hard time disengaging his wiry little legs from the woman’s ankle. “I’m very sorry,” Walter said to her.

  “Why, I think he’s adorable!” the woman said.

  Walter restrained an impulse to crush the dog in his hands. He carried him back in the prescribed manner, one hand under the dog’s hot, panting little chest and the other steadying him on top, and he set him down very gently on the floor beside Clara and fastened the leash.

  “You hate that dog, don’t you?” Clara asked.

  “I think he’s spoiled, that’s all.” Walter watched Clara’s face as she lifted Jeff to her lap. When she petted the dog her face grew beautiful, soft, and loving, as if she were fondling a child, her own child. Watching Clara’s face when she petted Jeff was the greatest pleasure Walter got out of the dog. He did hate the dog. He hated his cocky, selfish personality, his silly expression that seemed to say whenever he looked at Walter: “I’m living the life of Riley, and look at you!” He hated the dog because the dog could do no wrong with Clara, and he could do no right.

  “You really think he’s
spoiled?” Clara asked fondling the dog’s floppy black ear. “I thought he followed rather well this morning when we were on the beach.”

  “I only meant you chose a fox terrier because they’re more intelligent than most dogs, and you don’t take the trouble to teach him the most rudimentary manners.”

  “I suppose you’re referring to what he was doing across the room just now?”

  “That’s part of it. I realize he’s almost two years old, but as long as he keeps on doing that I don’t think we should let him roam around dining-rooms. It’s not particularly pleasant to look at.”

  Clara arched her eyebrows. “He was having a little harmless fun. You talk as if you begrudge him it. That astounds me—coming from you,” she said with cool amusement.

  Walter did not smile.

  They got home the following afternoon. Clara learned that the Oyster Bay sale could easily hang fire for a month, and in her state of suspense a party was out of the question until she either sold it or didn’t.

  During the following fortnight Chad was rebuffed when he called and asked to come by, refused and perhaps hung up on before Walter could get to the telephone. Jon Carr, Walter’s closest friend, was put off right in front of Walter on Saturday morning when he telephoned. Clara told Walter that Jon had invited them to a little dinner party he was giving the following week, but Clara hadn’t thought it worth driving in to Manhattan for.

  Walter had dreams sometimes that one, or several, or all of his friends had deserted him. They were desolate, heartbreaking dreams, and he would awaken with a breathless feeling in his chest.

  He had already lost five friends—for all practical purposes lost them because Clara wouldn’t have them in the house, though Walter still wrote to them, and, when he could, he saw them. Two were in Pennsylvania, Walter’s home state. One was in Chicago, and the other two in New York. And Walter, to be honest with himself, had to admit that Howard Graz in Chicago and Donald Miller in New York were so down on him that he no longer cared to write them letters. Or perhaps they owed him letters.

  Walter remembered Clara’s smile, really a smile of triumph, when he had heard about a party at Don’s in New York to which he had not been invited. It had been a stag party, too. Clara had been sure then that she had alienated him from Don, and she had been delighted.

  It was really then, about two years ago, that Walter had realized for the first time that he was married to a neurotic, a woman who was actually insane in some directions, and moreover a neurotic that he was in love with. He kept remembering the wonderful first year with her, how proud he had been of her because she was more intelligent than most women (now he loathed the very word intelligence because Clara made a fetish of it), how much they had laughed together, how much fun they had had furnishing the Benedict house, and he hoped that the Clara of those days would miraculously return. She was, after all, the same person, the same flesh. He still loved the flesh.

  Walter had hoped that when she took the Knightsbridge job eight months ago it would be an outlet for her competitiveness, for the jealousy he saw in her, even of him, because he was making a career that was considered successful. But the job had only intensified the competitiveness and her curious dissatisfaction with herself, as if the activity of working again had unplugged the neck of a volcano that until now had only been smouldering. Walter had even suggested that she quit. Clara wouldn’t hear of it. The logical thing to occupy her would have been children, and Walter wanted them, but Clara didn’t, and he had never tried very hard to persuade her. Clara had no patience with small children, and Walter doubted that she would be any different with her own. And even at twenty-six, when she married, Clara had facetiously protested that she was too old. Clara was very conscious of the fact that she was two months older than Walter, and Walter had to reassure her often that she looked much younger than he did. Now she was thirty, and Walter knew the question of children would never come up again.

  There were times, standing with a second highball in his hand on somebody’s lawn in Benedict, when Walter asked himself what he was doing there among those pleasant, smugly well-to-do and essentially boring people, what he was doing with his whole life. He thought constantly of getting out of Cross, Martinson and Buchman, and he was planning a move with Dick Jensen, his closest colleague at the office. Dick, like himself, wanted his own law office. He and Dick had talked one night, all night, about starting a small claims office in Manhattan to handle cases that most law firms wouldn’t look at. The fees would be small, but there would be many more of them. They had dragged out Blackstone and Wigmore in Dick’s book-lined den, and had talked about Blackstone’s almost mystical faith in the power of law to create an ideal society. For Walter, it had been a return to the enthusiasm of his law-school days, when law had been a clean instrument that he was learning to use, when he had felt himself, in his secret heart, a young knight about to set forth to succor the helpless and to uphold the righteous. He and Dick had decided that night to get out of Cross, Martinson and Buchman the first of the year. They were going to rent an office somewhere in the West Forties. Walter had talked to Clara about it, and though she was not enthusiastic, she at least hadn’t tried to discourage him. Money was not a problem, because Clara was evidently going to earn at least $5,000 a year. The house was paid for: it had been a wedding present from Clara’s mother.

  The only thing that could give Walter a positive answer to the question of what he was doing with his life was the law office he meant to open with Dick. He imagined the office flourishing, sending away streams of satisfied clients. But he wondered if the office would fall far short of what he expected; if Dick would lose his enthusiasm? Walter felt that perfect achievements were few. Men made laws, set goals, and then fell short of them. His marriage had fallen short of what he had hoped; Clara had fallen short, and perhaps he had not been what she expected, either. But he had tried and he was still trying. One of the few things he knew absolutely was that he loved Clara, and that pleasing her made him happy. And he had Clara, and he had pleased her by taking the job he had, and by living here among all the pleasant, dull people. And if Clara didn’t seem to enjoy her life as much as she should, she still did not want to move anywhere else to do anything else but what she was doing. Walter had asked her. At thirty, Walter had concluded that dissatisfaction was normal. He supposed life for most people was a falling slightly short of one ideal after another, salved if one was lucky by the presence of somebody one loved. But he could not put out of his mind the fact that Clara, if she kept on, could kill what was left of his hope for her.

  Six months ago in the spring, he and Clara had had their first talk about a divorce, and had later, inadequately, patched it up.

  3

  On the evening of September 18, about fifteen cars were lined along one side of Marlborough Road, and a few more had pulled up on the Stackhouse lawn. Clara didn’t like people to put their cars on the lawn: it had just undergone an invigorating treatment of superphosphate, agricultural lime and some fifty pounds of peat moss which had cost nearly two hundred dollars, including the labor. Clara told Walter to ask the people to move their cars.

  “I’d do it, but I think it’s a man’s place to ask them,” Clara said.

  “If we move these, there’ll only be more cars later,” Walter told her. “They move up because the women don’t want to walk so far in high heels on that road. You can understand that.”

  “I can understand that you’re afraid to ask them!” Clara retorted.

  Walter hoped she wouldn’t ask anybody to move. Everybody put cars on lawns in Benedict.

  All the guests, even the Philpotts, who were the oldest and more conservative, seemed to be in high spirits. Mr. Philpott wore a white dinner jacket and evening trousers and pumps, out of habit, Walter supposed, because Clara had made it clear that the men didn’t have to dress formally and the women could if they chose. The women always wanted to dress and the men never did. Mrs. Philpott had brought a large box of c
andy for Clara. Walter watched her present it with a few words of praise that made Clara’s face glow. Clara had sold the Oyster Bay estate to one of the Philpott clients about ten days ago.

  Walter went over to Jon Carr, who was standing by himself in front of the dogwood-filled fireplace. Jon’s face was taking on that look of imperturbable good humor that came after his fourth or fifth drink. Jon had told him he had just come from a cocktail party in Manhattan, and hadn’t had dinner. “How about a sandwich?” Walter asked him. “There’s stacks of them in the kitchen.”

  “No sandwiches,” Jon said firmly. “Got to watch my waistline and I’d rather add the inches with your Scotch.”

  “What’s new at the office?” Walter asked.

  Jon told Walter about the new issue of his magazine that was to be exclusively on glass and glass building materials. Jon Carr was the editor of Skylines, a six-year-old architectural magazine that he had founded himself, and that was now as strong as any group-published architectural magazine on the market. To Walter, Jon represented a rare type of American, well bred and well educated, and not above working like a navvy to get what he wanted. Jon’s parents had not been wealthy enough to help him in his career, and Jon had even worked the last part of his way through architectural school. Walter frankly admired Jon, and frankly was flattered that Jon liked him. Walter even put their friendship, from Jon’s standpoint, in the “unworthy friendship” category.

  Jon asked Walter if he could get away the following Sunday to go fishing with him and Chad in a sail-boat off Montauk Point. “If Clara wants to come along, that’s fine,” Jon said. “Chad has a new girl friend and I thought Clara could stay with her on the beach while the rest of us go fishing. Her name is Millie. She’s bright and Clara might like her. Clara likes beaches, doesn’t she?”

  “By the way, where is Chad?”

  Walter smiled a little. “Chad, I’m afraid, is persona non grata at the moment.”

  Jon made a little gesture with his hand that said, “All right, let it go.”