All Fall Down Read online

I thought for a minute, then I decided to blurt it out.

  “I’ve done about twenty-five more notebooks.”

  Her mouth fell open, then she leaned back, closed her eyes, and as her breath came out, she sort of intoned it. Gradually she pulled herself together again and sat forward, touching my wrist with her fingertips. “Thank you for telling me the truth. We won’t talk any more just now, but thank you.”

  I started into the bedroom with my coffee.

  “Clinton?” I stopped walking. She talked to my back. “Are you going in there now and shut your door?” I nodded. “I see. And get everything all caught up to date? Is that it?”

  I said, “Can I go now?”

  “Yes. And make sure you don’t leave anything out.”

  I don’t think I have. There was some more about the blankets, but it was repetitious.

  Later there were a couple of telephone calls, too. The first one from the Gas Company. Talk not very interesting. Annabel had sent Water Board check to Gas Company and vice versa.

  The second call was from Willidene Gibbs, wife of an old lawyer and former partner of Ralph’s. Annabel picked it up on the first ring.

  “Helloah? (Pause) No, I don’t. Look, I can’t guess, so I think you better tell me. (Pause) Willidene! Oooh! (Fake pleasure, not too convincing.) If you had a dollar for every time I’ve thought of you, you could travel all over the world on it. Look, I’ve got cookies in the oven (lie), so I may have to be abrupt. Oatmeal cookies, that’s the only kind they’ll touch. How’s mister? —Well, make him understand that carrying all that weight is a drain on the heart, look at Laird Cregar! (Pause) Oh, Ralph never changes, you know Ralph. (Implication: Ralph is my cross.) You wouldn’t know these boys, talk about big and handsome. Berry-berry’s traveling now, you know. Just seeing the country and we couldn’t be happier about it (lie), footloose and twenty-one, writes regularly (lie), says the Grand Canyon is breathtaking (lie), and I don’t know where all he’s been (true). Did you know if you throw a penny down it, you’ll never have arthritis? The Grand Canyon. I didn’t either, but that’s the saying. (Pause) Oooh! That little snotnose (me), do you know what he did? Quit school and didn’t say a word to either of us. We’re looking around for something private for him, more advanced; it’s so hard for him to drag behind with the slowpokes, I don’t blame him a bit. Do you know what I wish we could afford? An old-fashioned tutor! I may do it myself, you know, three hours a day, classes in the kitchen, we could make a game of it.”

  There followed a series of seven yesses and two wonderfuls. But I don’t think Annabel was listening to Willidene Gibbs. The “cookies” started to burn, and she hung up.

  Tonight there was a conversation between Annabel and Ralph in the basement.

  Ralph uses the basement all the time now. He has his card table set up in front of the furnace. When the new stoker was put in, he went down there every few minutes to make sure it was operating right and to sneak a drink of Old Grandad, which he’s got bottles of hidden all over hell. Then finally he set up a card table and started working jigsaw puzzles and just stayed there. I think it makes him feel more like a Socialist to sit in a basement. Because upstairs Annabel’s got all kinds of Venetian blinds and knickknacks and it’s hard to think about proletarians, etc. Anyway he hates it up there. So do I. There’s something creepy about those two bedrooms going to waste, Berry-berry’s and the guest room. For a while Ralph tried to get Annabel to take in refugees so they wouldn’t be empty any more, but she put thumbs down on the whole idea. So now when Ralph sits in the basement it’s kind of like pouting. Sometimes I sit there with him and help him with the puzzles. But we don’t talk much because Annabel has got the basement tapped. Not exactly tapped. She uses the laundry chute. You open a little door in the bathroom and put your head inside, and you can hear everything that goes on in the basement. This does not bother me any. I understand the impulse. But it slows Ralph down some. However, when he is in a certain mood, he likes the idea that she’s listening and says some things especially for her benefit. For instance, before the refugee question simmered down, he had these regular broadcasts about how all women are fascists at heart, etc. For a while it was pretty nerve-racking.

  This evening, Annabel went down there after the dishes were put away, and I took her place on the edge of the bathtub with my head in the clothes chute. It is none too comfortable. Sometimes in fact, when the conversation drags, it hardly seems worth the effort.

  The beginning was very slow. Much fussing with laundry, putting away of empty bottles, etc., and a few feeble openers like, “If that’s The Grand Canal of Venice, I believe there’s a piece missing.”

  No answer from Ralph. It is well known in this family that The Grand Canal has got a piece missing in the sky part.

  (Hello, notebook. Sometimes when I’m putting stuff down in here, I like to stop and kiss the page. I don’t know why. It just makes me feel good for some reason.)

  A moment passed, and then Annabel said: “When they’re not interlocking, it drives me crazy.”

  “The Grand Canal of Venice,” said Ralph, “is interlocking.”

  “No it’s not, sweetheart. Look. See? If it was interlocking these pieces would just hang together in the air.”

  No answer from Ralph.

  Then she said, “Have you talked with Clinton yet?”

  “Nope.”

  “Do you have any intention of so doing?”

  “If he comes to me of his own free will.”

  “Oh, but you don’t believe in free will,” she said.

  “That’s right.”

  “End of conversation!” After a few seconds, she said: “I’d like to have one of your cigarettes, please. Will you light it for me?” He probably handed her the matches. I could tell by her tone when she said, “Thank you.”

  This clothes chute is a lot better than the radio. They always spell it all out for you on the radio, but with this thing, you have to fill in with your imagination.

  Annabel said, “I respect the fact that you have nothing to say, but I do. I intend to send him to a— some kind of a psych—some sort of counselor.”

  “Send who to a what?”

  “That’s what I want to discuss. As his father, it occurs to me you should have some say-so.”

  “You bet your ass . . . !”

  “Ralph!”

  “. . . I’ve got some say-so!”

  “Do you forbid it?”

  “Yes. I forbid it.”

  “What about his own free will? You just said . . . !”

  “Aaaannnnabelll.” He dragged it out for about ten seconds. This dragging out of a person’s name has got about three uses. Ralph says it makes a person reconsider what they’ve said, it lets them know how foolish it sounded, and it’s a good stall. When he went on, his voice seemed to be addressing some little kid. “The free will in which I disbelieve is the Catholic kind that’s got to do with committing sins. I say if a man beats up his poor old grandmaw, free will’s got nothing to do with it. His glands, his environment, and all the powers of the universe since time began have conspired to force that man to take a clip at her.”

  “A nasty old woman to begin with.” This was Ralph’s usual line, but Annabel slipped it in.

  “Right! Now, to the subject at hand. If Clinton wants to speak to me, I want it to be his glands, his environment, et cetera, and not because his mother shoved him down the stairs feet first. Ditto when it comes to going to a psychiatrist.”

  “Are you proud,” Annabel said, “that your thinking on the subject is forty years behind? Are you proud of your open mind?”

  “Oh, keep still.” A pause. “I have got an open mind.”

  “This cigarette is bone dry.”

  “What’s wrong with Clinton?” Ralph said. “Point A, as you well know, he quit school. Blithely.”

  “Well, if you’re gonna do a thing, you might as well do it blithely.”

  “I assume you do not care that he’s quit school.”<
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  “Doesn’t faze me.”

  “Without your permission?”

  “All the better, show’s independence. What’s point B?”

  “Point B. Now listen, Ralph, this is very serious and very difficult to put over. You’ll have to meet me halfway. I know that’s a strain, but . . . Ralph, listen, all those days he wasn’t in school he was sitting in the Aloha Sweet Shop.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “On Mound Road, but that’s not the point. The point is, he was doing conversations. He filled twenty-five notebooks. Now don’t say anything silly, because Ralph, this is serious. You remember those very intelligent kids that used to be on the radio? Well, one of them grew up to be insane. He went around memorizing streetcar transfers and they finally put him away. No, Ralph, this isn’t just normal or anything like that. Say he wanted to be a newspaper reporter and was practicing; well, it’s not like that at all. It’s more like a very very terrible form of nail-biting and he can’t help himself. When he was in the sixth grade, I thought he was going through a stage, but those teachers at John Marshall were driven crazy. Ralph, last year at Central he failed every single subject except shorthand. Normal? I should say not!”

  “I thought he’d quit that notebook business.”

  “Ha-ha, he quit doing it in front of us, that’s all. What do you think he did this morning? I said something about blankets, some trivial thing, and he couldn’t wait to get it into his notebook.”

  “Listen, Annabel,” Ralph spoke quietly. “How do you suppose Upton Sinclair spent his boyhood, looking at a blackboard? And listening to a gang of old maids?”

  “Ralph, how do we know that Upton Sinclair was sane?”

  This was the first time I’d ever heard Ralph let somebody take a jab at Upton Sinclair without defending him. He wrote all about immigrant labor being oppressed in the Chicago stockyards, and so Ralph used to give away copies as presents to people. Usually, in a case like this, he’d raise his voice and say that The Jungle was the finest book ever written in the English language. But I suppose he thought Annabel was hopeless.

  “Then Victor Hugo. Do you suppose he didn’t take an interest in the things people said to each other?”

  “Can’t I make you understand? This is a—an obsession!”

  “Balls.”

  “Thank you. Point C. I don’t know why I bother—but I might as well finish. — Ralph?”

  A long silence. Maybe she was lighting another one of his bone-dry cigarettes.

  “Ralph, he has no friends. At all. And he misses his brother.”

  Neither one of them talked for a long time. I wondered what was going on. Then I heard Ralph.

  “I think we did wrong to move in here. It’s a barn, all those rooms. If Berry-berry’d given us some hint he wasn’t gonna make the move with us, we could’ve . . . It’s almost spooky up there. All you can hear is the clock and that goddamned refrigerator.” (A pause) “If he’d just said, ‘Now look here, Ralph, I may not make the move with you to Seminary Street, I may just fly the coop instead,’—Christ knows I wouldn’t of sit on him. Hell, with all those rooms, I feel like a Boston billionaire. And what am I worth, I’m not worthy fifty thousand dollars. But I hate an empty room. Did you throw away The Painted Desert when we moved?”

  “No,” Annabel said. “It’s in your closet. Do you want it? It’s not interlocking either, but if you want it, I’ll get it.”

  “No, I just wanted to make sure we still had it.”

  A moment passed, and then Ralph said, “No postcards, no nothin’, huh?”

  “No.”

  “Well, he’s too damn busy and more power to him. You can bet your (pause) bottom dollar, I didn’t sit around writing postcards when I was on the bum.”

  “Don’t say ‘on the bum’! It was a lecture tour, and you know it. —Clinton! Are you in that bathroom?”

  I moved away from the laundry chute.

  “Yes, why?”

  “Listening?”

  “Listening to what?”

  “Never mind,” she said. That was the end of the talk between Ralph and Annabel. She is now at the kitchen table writing a letter to Bernice O’Brien. I hope she asks me to mail it for her.

  While Annabel Williams wrote her letter that evening, Clinton sat in the basement helping his father with the jigsaw puzzle. There was no conversation between them. Clinton knew the old man’s mind was not on the puzzle: once, for instance, he had hold of the very piece he was looking for, but instead of putting it in, he went to his hiding place behind the furnace and poured himself some bourbon.

  These puzzles had been in the family for more than twenty years so that by now the pieces were as familiar to Ralph as his own memories. Some days they would fall together almost without any effort at all on his part; at other times the cardboard fragments seemed so capricious it would have been a relief to learn that some devil had actually reshaped them, carved new notches into some and, into others, totally irreconcilable curves. His rememberings followed a similar pattern. Therefore, whenever he came upon one of these snags in the puzzle, his thoughts would turn inevitably to his old days on the road.

  In his youth Ralph Williams had spent fifteen years in public speaking. Times were bad then and he had gone about the country as a tramp, penniless, riding boxcars, giving speeches on Socialism in parks and along railroad sidings. He wrote many of these speeches himself. They were made up of statistics he had found in pamphlets and library books, vivid anecdotes he had collected in his travels or filched from other speakers. It was during this public activity that he perfected certain theatrical devices for holding the interest of his audience. For example: at a moment of flagging attention he might lower his head to one side, cock an eyebrow and stand for a long moment utterly motionless and silent; soon the crowd was under this hushed spell, and when next Ralph spoke it would be in a quiet and simple fashion that brought cheers to almost anything he chose to say. Ralph never abandoned these devices. In his routine daily encounters with people, even his own family, he still employed these old charms and tricks, left over from the days of his public life, used them with all the pride and assurance of an aged belle who continues to show her ankles and her shoulders, as if by habit, long after they have ceased to be objects of beauty.

  Ralph Williams believed if he had not let himself get soft, he could have survived that life forever because of his sense of humor: this was his ace in the hole. He could always laugh in hot weather or cold, feast or famine, and make a joke of whatever bad straits he happened to be in. If he now questioned the absolute validity of certain doctrines he had preached, they still seemed to him a part of the grand humor of his life on the bum. He had entertained thousands of jobless people in those days, people gathered together in public places sharing their idleness with others.

  When times improved, he went to work at the Ford plant in Detroit and saved every penny he could. After two years he took his savings and moved to Cleveland where he set himself up as a real estate dealer. He did so well in real estate that it began to bother his conscience; because, even in those days, he could see no humor in a man’s loss of his ideals. One day he mentioned these misgivings to the girl who worked in his office. He told her what his ideals were and asked her if she believed his success in business made him technically a capitalist. After all, if a man bought a loaf of bread for a nickel and sold it for a dime, that margin of profit was pure theft: so he had always preached. But the girl reassured him that he was still a liberal, though perhaps not a Socialist. She told him of a movement called Munocracy—a contraction of municipal (or munificent? He couldn’t remember) and democracy—that was gathering momentum right there in Cleveland, a movement founded on the belief that a good liberal could also be a shrewd and successful businessman.

  He took a keen interest in this secretary. Her name was Annabel Holznagel. They began attending Munocracy meetings together, and one night, after a few months’ acquaintance, he talked her into sleeping in his
bed. He made it a challenge to her intelligence. She accepted. Ralph admired her for it and soon they were married. The first year, they moved into the house on Amelia Street in what they now called the Old Neighborhood. The second year, Berry-berry was born. And by the third year there was no longer any talk of Munocracy in the house. The movement had ceased to exist. On several occasions Ralph halfheartedly urged Annabel to think about Socialism. The first time she smiled at him indulgently, but on all subsequent occasions she looked at him blankly, as if she had not heard a word he said. But Ralph continued to need someone with whom he could discuss these urgent and radical matters. He took to spending many of his free hours in neighborhood speakeasies talking about his beliefs. But when a successful businessman talks about sharing the wealth, he sets himself up for a certain amount of ridicule. Ralph at first defended himself on the basis that if a tiger lives in a jungle, he has to obey its laws, but gradually he switched over to atheism, another radical idea that had less to do with a man’s pocketbook. The men respected Ralph Williams and they liked to listen and to try to argue with him. But his long practice gave him the edge in a discussion, and when these cronies grew tired of defeat they began to avoid him. He would then take his patronage to some new place, and before long he had an entire round of places where he was known and could visit them like stops on a vaudeville tour.

  He soon became known affectionately to the men in these bars as The Tiger of Amelia Street. They looked forward to his coming because he had charm and humor; and as the years passed by, he no longer felt the need to talk with them exclusively of urgent and radical matters. He even discovered that an occasional change of topic was needed to hold their interest and esteem. And a man with his genius for persuasion and good fellowship could as easily stiffen the ears of a group of men by recounting to them the wild doings of his son, as by telling over and over again of his profane beliefs.

  Berry-berry became his favorite topic, and he was shrewd enough to parcel out these stories with the discretion of an old trouper trained in judging the attention span of his audience. The first such story was of Berry-berry’s name, which needed an explanation because some men claimed it was a disease. The flat truth is that it came from some foolishness of Annabel’s: as a baby, the boy’s cheeks were astonishingly red; as she plucked them in quick succession she would say berry berry berry, to make the child giggle. But Ralph’s story was this: he claimed that in the Belgian Congo there is a tribe known as the Galbralians. Now, when the king of this tribe gathers all of his sons together, after the youngest has matured, he puts them through a long series of rigid competitions. The victor among them from that day forward is known as Berry-berry, which, in the Galbralian language invented by Ralph Williams, means Son of the Tiger.