bar where Vince and I had stopped earlier, I headed east to get us back on the Robert Moses.
Once on the highway, I was tempted to floor it, but was still worried about getting pulled over. I settled on a comfortable speed, above the limit, but not high enough to attract that much attention.
I waited until we were past Buffalo, heading due east to Albany. I can’t say that by then I was relaxed, but once we’d put some distance between ourselves and Youngstown, I felt the likelihood that we would get pulled over for what happened at the hospital, or what the police found at the Sloan home, diminishing.
That was when I turned to Clayton, who’d been sitting very quietly, his head leaned back and resting on the headrest, and said, “So let’s hear it. All of it.”
“Okay,” he said, and cleared his throat in preparation.
44
The marriage was predicated on a lie.
The first marriage, Clayton explained. Well, the second one, too. He’d get to that one soon enough. It was a long drive back to Connecticut. Plenty of time to cover everything.
But he talked about his marriage to Enid first. A girl he’d known in high school, in Tonawanda, a Buffalo suburb. Then he went to Canisius College, the one founded by the Jesuits, took business courses with a sprinkling of philosophy and religious studies. Wasn’t that far away; of course, he could have lived at home and commuted, but he got a cheap room just off campus, figured even if you didn’t go far away for college, you at least had to get out from under your parents’ roof.
When he finished, who was waiting for him in the old neighborhood but Enid. They started dating, and he could see that she was a strong-willed girl, used to getting what she wanted from those around her. She used what she had to her advantage. She was attractive, possessed a terrific body, had a strong sexual appetite, at least during their early courtship.
One night, teary-eyed, she tells him she’s late. “Oh no,” Clayton Sloan says. He thinks first of his own parents, how ashamed they will be of him. So concerned about appearance, and then something like this, their boy getting a girl pregnant, his mother would want to move out so she wouldn’t have to hear the neighbors talking.
So there wasn’t much else to do but get married. And right away.
A couple of months after that, she says she’s not feeling well, says she’s making an appointment to see her physician, Dr. Gibbs was his name. She goes to the doctor alone, comes home, says she lost it. The baby’s gone. Lots of tears. One day, Clayton’s in the diner, sees Dr. Gibbs, goes over to him and says, “I know I shouldn’t be asking you this here, that I should make an appointment, but Enid, losing the baby and all, she’ll still be able to have another one, right?”
And Dr. Gibbs says, “Huh?”
So now he has an idea what he’s dealing with. A woman who’ll say anything, tell any kind of lie, to get what she wants.
He should have left then. But Enid tells him she’s so sorry, that she thought she was pregnant, but was afraid to go to the doctor to have it confirmed, and then she turned out to be wrong. Clayton doesn’t know whether to believe her, and again worries about the shame he will bring on himself and his family by leaving Enid, starting divorce proceedings. And for a while there, Enid takes sick, is bedridden. Real or feigned, he’s not sure, but knows he can’t leave her when she is like this.
The longer he stays, the harder it seems to be to leave. He learns quickly that what Enid wants, Enid gets. When she doesn’t, there’s hell to pay. Screaming fits, smashing things. One time, he’s sitting in the bathtub, Enid’s in there with her electric hair dryer, starts joking around about dropping it into the water. But there’s something in her eyes, something that suggests that she could do it, just like that, wouldn’t have to think twice.
He puts his business education to use, gets a job in sales, supplying machine shops and factories. It’s going to have him driving all over the country, a corridor running between Chicago and New York that skirts past Buffalo. He’s going to be away a lot, his prospective employer warns him. That’s the clincher for Clayton. Time away from the harping, the screaming, the odd looks she sometimes gives him that suggest the gears inside her head aren’t always meshing the way they’re supposed to. He always dreads the drive home after a sales trip, wondering what list of grievances Enid will have prepared for him the moment he walks through the door. How she doesn’t have enough nice clothes, or he’s not working hard enough, or the back door squeaks when you open it, it’s driving her mad. The only thing that makes returning home worthwhile is seeing his Irish setter, Flynn. He always comes running out to greet Clayton’s car, like he’s been sitting on the porch from the moment he left, waiting for the second he returns.
Then she becomes pregnant. The real deal this time. A baby boy. Jeremy. How she loves that boy. Clayton loves him, too, but soon realizes it’s a competition. Enid wants the boy’s love exclusively, and begins, when Jeremy is barely walking, her campaign to poison the father’s relationship with his son. If you want to grow up strong and successful, Enid tells him, he’ll need to follow her example, that it’s too bad there’s no strong male role model under this roof. She tells him his father doesn’t do enough for her, and how it’s a sad thing that Jeremy has his looks, but that’s a handicap, over time, he can learn to surmount, with effort.
Clayton wants out.
But there’s something about Enid, this darkness about her, that to even hint at the subject of divorce, even some kind of separation, there’s no predicting how she’ll handle it.
Once, before leaving on one of his extended sales trips, he says he needs to talk to her. About something serious.
“I’m not happy,” he says. “I don’t think this is working out.”
She doesn’t cry. She doesn’t ask what’s wrong. She doesn’t ask what she could do to help the marriage, to make him happy.
What she does is, she gets up close to him, looks deep into his eyes. He wants to look away, but can’t, as though mesmerized by her evil. Looking into her eyes, it’s like looking into the soul of the devil. All she says is, “You will
He thinks about that on his trip. We’ll see about that, he tells himself. We’ll just see.
When he returns, his dog does not run out to greet him. When he opens the garage door to put away the Plymouth, there is Flynn, a rope drawn tightly around his neck, hanging from the rafters.
All Enid says to him is, “Good thing it was just the dog.”
For all she loves Jeremy, she’s willing to let Clayton believe the boy’s at risk should he ever decide to leave her.
Clayton Sloan resigns himself to this life of misery and humiliation and emasculation. This is what he’s signed on for, and he’s going to have to make the best of it. He’ll sleepwalk through life if that is what he has to do.
He works hard at not despising the boy. Jeremy’s mother has brainwashed him into thinking his father is unworthy of his affections. He sees his father as useless, just a man who lives in the house with him and his mother. But Clayton knows Jeremy is as much a victim of Enid as he is.
How can his life have turned out like this? he wonders.
There are numerous occasions when Clayton considers taking his own life.
He’s driving across the country in the dead of night. Coming back from Chicago, rounding the bottom of Lake Michigan, doing that short stretch through Indiana. He sees a bridge abutment up ahead and bears down on the accelerator. Seventy miles an hour, then eighty, ninety. The Plymouth begins to float. Hardly anyone wears seat belts, and even if they did, he’s unbuckled his, thereby assuring that he’ll go through the windshield and perish. The car eases over onto the shoulder, spewing gravel and dust behind it, but then, at the last minute, he veers back onto the highway, chickens out.
One time, couple of miles west of Battle Creek, he loses his nerve, steers back onto the road, but at that high speed, when the front right tire catches the ridge where shoulder meets pavement, he loses control. The car veers across two lanes, right into the path of a semi, plows into the median, coming to a stop in high grass.
What usually makes him change his mind is Jeremy. His son. He’s afraid to leave him alone with her.
He has to make a stop in Milford one time. On the prowl for some new clients, new businesses to supply.
He goes into a drugstore to buy a candy bar, and there is a woman behind the counter. Wearing a little name
