needed insurance. But eight years of living in Milburn had changed Freddy Robinson. He no longer took pride in his ability to sell, since he had learned that it was based on an ability to exploit fear and greed; and he had learned half-consciously to despise most of his fellow salesmen-in the company's phrase, the 'Humdingers.'
It was not his marriage or children which had changed Freddy, but living across the street from John Jaffrey's house. At first, he had thought that the old boys he saw trooping in once a month or so were comic, unbelievably stuffy-looking. Dinner jackets! They had looked unprecedentedly grave-five Methuselahs padding out their time.
Then he began to notice that after sales meetings in New York he returned home with relief; his marriage was going badly (he was finding himself attracted to the high school girls his wife, two children ago, had rather resembled), but home was more than Montgomery Street-it was all of Milburn, and most of Milburn was quieter and prettier than anywhere he'd ever lived. Gradually he felt that he had a secret relationship to Milburn; his wife and children were eternal, but Milburn was a temporary restful oasis, not the provincial backwater he had first thought it. And once at a conference, a new agent sitting next to him unpinned his Humdinger badge and dropped it under the table, saying, 'I can stand most of it, but this Mickey Mouse crap drives me up the wall.'
Two further events, as unremarkable as these, assisted Freddy's conversion. One night, aimlessly walking about an ordinary section of Milburn, he went past Edward Wanderley's house on Haven Lane and saw the Chowder Society through a window. There they sat, his Methuselahs, talking among themselves; one raised a hand, one smiled. Freddy was lonely, and they seemed very close. He stopped to stare in at them. Since moving to Milburn, he had gone from twenty-six to thirty-one, and the men no longer seemed so old; while they had stayed the same, he had aged toward them. They were not grotesque, but dignified. Also, something he had never considered, they were enjoying themselves. He wondered what they were talking about, and was assailed by the sense that it was something
Lewis was the focus of Freddy's feelings. Closer to Freddy's age than the others, he showed what Freddy might become.
He watched his idol at Humphrey's Place, noticing how he raised his eyebrows before answering a question and how he tilted his head to one side, often, when smiling; how he used his eyes. Freddy began to copy these mannerisms. He copied too what he thought was Lewis's sexual pattern, but scaling down the ages of the girls from Lewis's twenty-five or twenty-six to seventeen or eighteen, which was the age of the girls who interested him anyhow. He bought jackets like those he saw Lewis wearing.
When Dr. Jaffrey invited him to his party for Ann-Veronica Moore, Freddy thought the doors of heaven had opened. He pictured a quiet evening, the Chowder Society and himself and the actress, and told his wife to stay home; when he saw the crowd, he began behaving like a fool. He stayed downstairs, too shy and disappointed to approach the older men he wanted to befriend; he made eyes at Stella Hawthorne; when he finally gathered the nerve to approach Sears James- who had always terrified him-he found himself talking about insurance as if under a curse. After Edward Wanderley's body was discovered, Freddy crawled away with the other guests.
After Dr. Jaffrey's suicide, Freddy was desperate. The Chowder Society was disintegrating before he had even had a chance to prove his worthiness for it. On that night, he saw Lewis's Morgan pull up to the doctor's house, and ran out to comfort Lewis-to make his impression. But again it had not worked. He was too nervous, he had been fighting with his wife, and he had been unable to keep from mentioning insurance; he had lost Lewis again.
Therefore, knowing nothing of what Stringer Dedham may have tried to describe to his sisters as he lay bleeding to death into a blanket on his kitchen table, Freddy Robinson, whose children were already noisy strangers and whose wife wanted a divorce, had no idea of what lay before him when Rea Dedham called him one morning and said that he had to come out to the farm. But he thought that what he saw there, a bit of silk scarf fluttering on a wire fence, gave him a way into the gracious company of friends he needed.
At first it seemed like another morning's work-another tiresome claim to be settled. Rea Dedham made him wait ten minutes on her frozen porch. From time to time he heard a horse neighing in the stables. Finally she appeared, wrinkled and hunched in a plaid shawl over her dress, saying that she knew who did it, yessir, she knew, but she'd looked at her policy and it didn't say anywhere that you didn't get your money if you knew, did it? And would he like any coffee?
'Yes, thank you,' Freddy said, and pulled some papers from his briefcase. 'Now if we could get into some of these claim forms, the company can start processing them as soon as possible. I'll have to look at the damage, of course, Miss Dedham. I guess you had some kind of accident?'
'I told you,' she said. 'I know who did it. It wasn't any accident. Mr. Hardesty is coming out too, so you'll just have to wait for him.'
'So this is a case of criminal loss,' Freddy said, checking off a box on one of his papers. 'Could you just tell me about it in your own words?'
'They're the only words I have, Mr. Robinson, but you'll wait until Mr. Hardesty is here. I'm too old to say it all twice. And I'm not going out in that cold twice, not even for money. Brr!' She hugged herself with her bony arms and shivered theatrically. 'Now you sit still and get some coffee into yourself.'
Freddy, who had been awkwardly holding all his papers, his pen and his briefcase, looking around for a vacant chair. The Dedham girls' kitchen was a dirty cave filled with junk. One chair supported a couple of table lamps, another a stack of
'That's it. You people owe me some money-a
Freddy heard something heavy rolling toward the kitchen through the house, and soundlessly groaned. 'I'll just get started on the preliminary details,' he said, and bent over so that he would not have to look at Nettie Dedham.
'Nettie wants to say hello,' Rea said. So he had to look up anyhow.
A moment later the door creaked inward, admitting a heap of blankets in a wheelchair. 'Hello, Miss Dedham,' Freddy said, half-standing and clutching the briefcase with one hand, the papers with the other. He gave her a quick glance, then fled back into his papers.
Nettie uttered a noise. Her head seemed to Freddy to be chiefly gaping mouth. Nettie was covered up to the chin in blankets, and her head was pulled back by some terrible constriction of the muscles so that her mouth was permanently open.
'You remember nice Mr. Robinson,' Rea said to her sister, putting down cups of coffee on the table. Rea apparently ate all her meals standing up, for she made no move to sit now. 'He's going to get our money for poor dear Chocolate. He's filling out the forms now, isn't he? He's filling out the forms.'
'Get us our money, that's right,' Rea said. 'There's nothing wrong with Nettie, Mr. Robinson.'
'I should say not,' he said, and looked away again. His eye fell on a stuffed robin under a glass bell, surrounded by dark brown leaves. 'Let's get down to business, shall we? I gather the animal was named-'
'Here's Mr. Hardesty,' Rea said. Freddy could hear another car coming up the drive, and lay the pen across the papers in his lap. He glanced uneasily at Nettie who was working her mouth and staring dreamily at the mottled ceiling. Rea set down her cup and began to struggle toward the door.
'Sit down, for heaven's sake,' the old woman snapped.
Hardesty's boots crunched across the snow, mounted the porch. He had knocked twice before Rea got to the door.
Freddy had seen Walt Hardesty in Humphrey's place too often, sneaking into the back room at eight and
