The Clock Winder Read online

  “The owner drinks,” Timothy said.

  “She said for him to come back when he got a decent job. He never did. It’s been three weeks now.”

  “Matthew is the crazy one in the family,” Timothy said.

  “Oh, I thought that was Andrew.”

  “Well, him too. But Matthew is downright peculiar: I don’t believe he hears a word Mother says to him. He visits her every week, no matter what she’s up to. Brings tomatoes he’s grown himself, stays an hour or two.”

  “Not any more he doesn’t,” Elizabeth said. “Will he get another job, do you think?”

  “No.”

  “Well, what then? Won’t he ever come home again?”

  “Oh, sooner or later Mother will give up. Then he’ll wander in again and that’ll be the end of it.”

  “I doubt if he’s crazy at all,” Elizabeth said.

  She parked haphazardly in a space barely longer than the car, and they climbed out. Standing on the curb she peeled her paint-shirt off, shut it in the car, and brought a curling vinyl wallet from her jacket pocket. “I wonder how much turkeys cost,” she said.

  “Let me pay. It was my idea.”

  “No, I have enough.”

  “Aren’t you saving up for college or something?” “Not really,” Elizabeth said.

  The grocery store was vast and gloomy, even under the fluorescent ice-cube trays that hung from the ceiling. There was a smell of damp wood, cardboard, cracker crumbs. They had barely stepped inside when someone said, “Timothy Emerson!”—a sharp-edged woman in a fur stole, one of Mrs. Emerson’s tea guests. “Don’t tell me you’re honoring your mother with a visit,” she said. “Did she recognize you?” She flung out a little peal of laughter. Elizabeth slid past her and went over to the meat counter. “I’d like a turkey,” she told the butcher. “Kind of fat.”

  “Fifteen pounds? Twenty?”

  “I wouldn’t know. Could you let me hold one?”

  He disappeared into a back room. Mrs. Emerson’s friend could be heard all over the store. “… never known a braver woman, just so sweet and brave. Disappointments never faze her. I said, ‘Pamela,’ I said, ‘why don’t you sell that big old house and find yourself an apartment now that—’ ‘Oh no, my dear,’ she told me, ‘I’ll need all that space for my children, if ever they choose to come home.’ “

  The butcher reappeared, carrying three turkeys. “This one?” he said. “This one?” He held them up one by one, while Elizabeth frowned and twirled her car keys. “Let me try that last one,” she said finally. She reached across the counter for it and weighed it in her hands. “Wait a minute. I’ll be back.”

  “How is your twin brother, dear?” the friend was saying. “I understand he’s in the care of a doctor again. Now, wouldn’t you think he should be in his own home? New York is no place for a, for someone who’s …”

  “Try this,” Elizabeth told Timothy. “Add intestines and such. Feathers. Feet. Do you think he’s about the right size?”

  Timothy, who had lit a pipe, stuck the pipe between his teeth and took hold of the turkey. “Feels okay to me,” he said.

  Mrs. Emerson’s friend said, “It’s Elizabeth, isn’t it? How are you this fine day? Planning for a great many dinner guests?”

  “Well, not exactly,” Elizabeth said. “Forget you saw me buying this.” She left the woman staring after her and went back to the butcher. “I like it,” she told him, “but I could do without that piece of metal in his tail.”

  “That’s to pin his legs down.”

  “I’d prefer it without, anyway,” Elizabeth said.

  While he was wrapping the turkey she went off in search of stuffing mix. Timothy by now was coasting down the aisle on the back of a shopping cart. He took several long strides and then hopped on the rear axle, leaning far forward to keep his balance. The pipe in his round face looked comical, like a snowman’s corncob. “This is something I’ve always wanted to do,” he told her when he had coasted to a stop. “Mother never took us to grocery stores; she telephoned. Up until Margaret ran away with the delivery boy.”

  “Telephoned!” Elizabeth said. “Didn’t it cost more that way?”

  “Why not? We’re rich.”

  He wheeled the cart over to the meat counter, where they collected the turkey. Then Elizabeth went off to find snacks for Alvareen’s sick-days. Timothy followed, pretending the turkey was a baby in a carriage. “Who do you think he favors?” he asked, and he lovingly rearranged a patch of butcher’s tape. Then he hopped on the cart and coasted off again. “I must find Mrs. Hewlett,” he called back. “She has such a consuming interest in little Emersons.” Periodically, in her trips down the aisles, Elizabeth caught sight of him. He whizzed past sober ladies and grim-faced clerks, a flash of yellow hair topped with a red feather. When she met him at the check-out counter he had parked the cart and was carrying a gigantic sack of dog food that hid his face and reached to his knees. All she saw were his hands clutching the sides of it. “I know we don’t have a dog,” he said, poking his head around the sack, “but I can never resist a bargain, can you?” And he turned to put it back again, his knees buckling, staggering beneath its weight, all to make her smile.

  But when they were back in the car his mood had changed completely. He sat hunched in his seat, staring out the side window and fiddling with his pipe but not smoking it. “I’d have liked to find a turkey with a couple of feathers left,” Elizabeth told him. Timothy didn’t answer. Then when they stopped for a light he said, “Maybe we could just drive around for a while.”

  “Where would you like to go?” said Elizabeth.

  “I don’t know. Nowhere. Home,” he said, and he slouched down in his seat and tapped his dead pipe on his knee all the rest of the ride.

  Elizabeth parked in front of the house. The minute the car doors slammed Mrs. Emerson appeared on the veranda, stepping forward and then back on the welcome mat with both hands clasped in front of her. “Timothy!” she said. “What are you—why—?”

  “My car is down back,” Timothy said. He climbed the steps and bent to kiss her on one cheek. Mrs. Emerson’s face was tilted up to him, her eyes half closed by the frown she wore, and she kept her hands pressed tightly together. “I still don’t understand,” she said.

  “How are you, Mother?”

  “Oh, just fine. I’m doing beautifully. I’m managing very well.”

  “You look well.”

  Elizabeth passed them and went into the house, carrying the groceries. As soon as she reached the kitchen she dumped the whole bag in one swoop, stripped the turkey of its wrappings and set it on the counter. Then she put the other items away more slowly and folded the paper bag. Alvareen came in with a scrub pail full of gray water. “Is that him?” she asked, looking at the turkey.

  “Pretty neat job, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Then what’s that other feller doing, running around out back?”

  “Oh, Lord.”

  Elizabeth went out the kitchen door and found the turkey squatting by a basement window. “Shoo!” she said, and clapped her hands. The turkey moved a few feet off before he stopped again. “Shoo, boy! Shoo!”

  Mrs. Emerson appeared on the back porch, followed by Timothy. “Now, how on earth—” she said. “I thought I told you to kill that thing.”

  “I was just getting set to,” Elizabeth said.

  “Then what did I see in the kitchen? What is that creature on the counter?”

  Timothy handed his pipe to his mother and came down the porch steps. “Drive him this way,” he told Elizabeth. “I’ll be here to grab him.”

  “I would rather drive him off again.”

  “Explain that, please,” Mrs. Emerson said. “I gave you a perfectly simple chore to do, one that Richard would have seen to in five minutes. The only thing in my life I ever won and you shoo him off like a common housefly. Then try to fool me with one from the butcher. That is what you did, isn’t it? That’s where you and Timothy came in from toget
her, looking so smug?”

  Because neither Elizabeth nor Timothy felt like answering, they concentrated on the turkey. They closed in on him tighter and tighter, although the last thing they wanted to do was catch him. The turkey did a little mumbling dance with himself, stiff-legged.

  “I can’t trust anyone,” Mrs. Emerson said.

  “Oh, Mother. What’d you ask her to do it for, anyway? She’s too tender-hearted.”

  “Too what? Elizabeth?” Mrs. Emerson set the pipe down, in the exact center of the top porch step, and folded her arms against the cold. “It isn’t the turkey I mind, it’s the deception,” she said. “The two of you going off like that, laughing at me behind my back. Conspiring. That naked, storebought-looking bird lying on my kitchen counter.”

  Timothy had driven the turkey to a spot directly in front of Elizabeth, but Elizabeth made no move to catch him. She was watching Timothy, who was growing pinker and stonier but not answering back. He stood so close to her that she heard the angry little puff of his breath when his mother spoke to him.

  “This was your idea, wasn’t it. Elizabeth never did such a thing before. I always felt I could rely on her. Now I don’t know, I just don’t know. It isn’t enough that you leave me all alone yourself, you have to drive everyone else off too. Isn’t that it? Isn’t that what you’re hoping for?”

  “Good God,” said Timothy, and then in one swift lunge he scooped up the turkey and carried it squawking and flapping to the toolshed. He took such long steps that Elizabeth had to run to keep up with him. It seemed that the whole upper half of his body had turned into beating, whirling, scattering feathers. When he reached the chopping block he jammed the turkey down on it and held it there. Then for a moment everything stopped. The turkey held still. His head lay limp on the block, his eyes seemed fixed on some inner thought.

  “Timothy? Wait,” Mrs. Emerson called.

  Timothy reached for the axe without looking at it, hefted it in his hand to get a better grip and chopped the turkey’s head off. It took one blow. The turkey’s wings began flapping, but with doomed, slow beats that carried the body nowhere. The beady eyes stared at a disc of blood. Mrs. Emerson cried, “Oh!”—a single, splintering sound. Elizabeth said nothing. She stood at Timothy’s side with her hands in her jacket pockets, staring out over the trees and pinning her mind on something far away from here.

  3

  Two weeks before Christmas there was a heavy snowfall. Timothy had a date with Elizabeth, and it took him nearly an hour to make the drive to his mother’s house. Downtown was difficult enough, but once he reached Roland Park his was the only car on the road, laying new black tracks which wavered slightly if he traveled at more than a creeping pace. He hunched over the steering wheel and squinted through a fan of cleared glass while handfuls of soft snow floated soundlessly around him. His gloves were lost, his heater was broken, and he had forgotten to have his snow tires put on. The only comfort was his radio—a news announcer telling him, over and over, that Baltimore was experiencing a heavy snowstorm and traffic conditions were hazardous. “Exercise extreme caution,” he said. His voice was friendly and concerned. Timothy carried out a token pumping of his brakes, relieved that someone else had noticed these dreamlike puffs of white.

  He had begun to have spells lately of worrying that he had died, and that everyone knew it but him.

  The lights of the houses along the way were circled with bluish mist. Parked cars were being buried, quickly and stealthily. “If you don’t have to drive, stay home,” the announcer said. “Keep off the roads.” Timothy had no need to drive at all, and should have been safe in his own apartment, but he felt like seeing Elizabeth. He had started taking her out two and three times a week. They went to dinner or the movies, or sometimes they stayed home and played whooping, dashing games of chess, with Elizabeth making bizarre moves and sacrificing quantities of pieces whenever she grew bored. Timothy was more scientific about it. He knew all the famous matches by heart, and could solve any chess problem the newspapers offered him. But Elizabeth had a psychological trick of swooping into his territory from some unexpected corner of the board, stunning him with the swift arc of her long arm, so that even when the invasion was harmless he was taken off guard and made some unlikely move to counter hers. Their games ended in giggles. Everything they did ended in giggles. He kept trying to get on some more serious footing with her, but every time they saw each other they went sailing off into some new piece of silliness. He caught it from her; laughter came shimmering off her like sparkles of water. His mother watched them with a puzzled, anxious smile.

  The house was lit in every window, casting long yellow squares across the white lawn. He climbed out of the car and braced himself for a trip through the snow without boots, but before he took his first step Elizabeth rounded the house carrying a snow shovel. Sparks of white glinted on her cap, which seemed to be one of those fighter-pilot helmets with ear-flaps that little boys often wear. “Halt!” she said, and raised her shovel like a rifle. Then she placed herself squarely in front of the steps, set the shovel down at a slant, and started running. A narrow black line followed her magically, pausing each time she was stopped short by the creases between sidewalk squares. The rasping sound brought Timothy’s mother to an upstairs window—a silhouette against yellow lamplight. He laughed and waved at her. Then the blade of the shovel arrived at his shoe-tips and Elizabeth faced him, laughing too and out of breath. “There,” she said, and turned to lead him up the black carpet she had laid for him.

  They stamped their feet on the doormat. Elizabeth had on huge rubber boots with red-rimmed soles and flapping metal clasps; he had the feeling they were once his father’s. The cuffs of her jeans were stuffed into them, and her jacket collar was turned up so that her hair, streaming from the helmet, fell half inside and half out in honey-colored tangles. Other girls could waft through his mind in chiffon, or silk, or at least ruffled shirtwaists, but not Elizabeth. Elizabeth forever wore that thick, shabby jacket, and wore it badly—hands deep in her pockets, waist hiked up in back, shoulder seams reaching halfway to her elbows and the zippered front bellying out below her chest. He thought of the way she dressed as another joke played on him by the universe. If he was going to get so tied up with her, couldn’t she have at least one romantic quality? Couldn’t she smell like flowers, or be as light on her feet as a snowflake? But she smelled of wood shavings. When she stamped her boots, gleaming drops shot out to dampen his trousers all the way to the knees.

  “We still going to the party?” she asked.

  “If you want to. It’s still on. But you didn’t have to clear the walk for me, it’ll only get snowed under again.”

  “Oh, snow-shoveling’s my favorite job,” she said.

  So she would probably have done it anyway; it wasn’t for him at all.

  They stepped inside, into a blast of hot air. While Elizabeth bent to take her boots off Mrs. Emerson came down the front stairs. She kept her head perfectly level, one hand weightless on the banister. “Timothy darling, I can’t imagine why you tried driving on a night like this,” she said. She came up to him and took one of his hands between her own, which were so warm they stung him. “Mercy! Where are your gloves?” she said. “Where are your boots?”

  “I must’ve lost them.”

  “You’re surely not going out again. Are you? Stay here at home.”

  “Well, there’s this party I want to hit.”

  “Fiddlesticks,” said his mother.

  She drew him into the living room, skirt swirling as she turned. If anyone looked dressed for a party tonight, it was she. Surely not Elizabeth, who had taken off her jacket to expose a shirt that seemed to have mechanic’s grease down the front. “In a minute we’ll have the fire built up,” Mrs. Emerson said. “Matthew’s out getting more wood.”

  “Oh, is Matthew here?”

  “He got some time off.”

  “From what? Did he change out of the dead-end job?”

  H
is mother looked uncomfortable, but only for a minute. She picked up a poker and rearranged a pile of embers. “No,” she said, “but I had him come anyway. I hated to think of him out in that shack of his. He’s going to be working over Christmas, did you ever hear of such a thing? Well, no one else there could get a paper out.”

  “Are any of the others spending Christmas here?”

  “Andrew is, but not for long. Just two days.” She put the poker in its stand and began pacing in front of the couch, where Elizabeth was sitting now to slide her moccasins back on. “Mary will be with her in-laws. Margaret I haven’t heard from yet. Melissa,” she said, and frowned briefly but then shook it off, “is traveling with someone to Bermuda. It worries me who, I think I have some right to know these things, but in her last letter she ignored all my questions and she doesn’t answer her telephone. Peter’s going skiing with his roommate in Vermont.” She had ticked off the names on her fingers, like a hostess planning a dinner party. Now she looked over at Timothy, one last finger waiting to be tapped. “You will be here,” she said.

  “I guess so.”

  She settled herself in a wing chair. At the back of the house a door slammed, a log crashed to the floor and rolled with a splintery sound. Matthew appeared in the living room doorway with an armload of firewood. “Hello, Timothy,” he said, and crossed the room to shake hands. He was trailing clumps of wet snow, and had to reach awkwardly around a stack of logs that rose to his chin. Depend on Matthew to find the hardest way to do anything. When he dumped the wood beside the fireplace, bark and dead leaves flew across the rug. More bark clung to the front of his jacket, which was a plaid logger’s shirt whose sleeves did not cover his wristbones. No sleeves covered his wristbones. He was the longest, lankiest, knobbiest man Timothy had ever known. His face was bony and sad-looking, with clear-rimmed glasses forever slipping down his narrow nose. His straight black hair had last been cut months ago, probably by himself. If any jeans could be more faded than Elizabeth’s, his were, and when he hunkered down to build the fire Timothy saw that his ankles were bare, red and damp-looking above soggy gray sneakers. “Jeepers, Matthew,” he said. “It makes me uncomfortable just looking at you.”