Clarkton by Howard Fast

it until I know more. I want to go to sleep.”
    â€œYou know as much as they do,” Abbott insisted.
    â€œI know that Danny Ryan likes to see things in a big way. I also know that nobody has a mind like a camera. A camera is one thing and a mind is another. I’m tired, and I’m not going to stay awake all night arguing because someone drove into the plant.”
    â€œBut you think George is capable—”
    â€œFor God’s sake, Elliott, what do you want me to say?”
    â€œI don’t know,” he said miserably.
    â€œCome to sleep.”
    By the time he got into bed, she was sleeping, the soft, even cadence of her breathing like a signature on all that had happened. He lay on one elbow, watching her, seeing her more and more clearly as his eyes accommodated themselves to the darkness. Right now, he felt very close to George Clark Lowell; otherwise, he was alone, a middle-aged New England doctor who had once had an unforgettable experience in Spain

14. A fter the Abbotts had left, Lowell went back into the library and sat down at the chessboard, a reflex to the single game man has invented that attempts to make, in black and white squares, a pattern and a duplication of life, a sane and understandable universe of the microcosmic. He stared at the board and considered that it was not the words between Elliott and himself, but the many things unspoken that rose in front of him now, large and demanding. His anger against Elliott died away, and he sat there finally with a quality so wretched that Lois could not fail to notice it when she came to call him.
    â€œWe’ll go to bed, George,” she said.
    He nodded and rose and went upstairs with her; and she, as a reflection of the tension, perhaps, or as an instinctive reaction to this new factor—more disturbing in some strange way than the death of a child, or an adulterous practice, or a scene of one kind or another—found herself wanting him as she had not wanted him for months, an ebbtide and flow in her that made her finger his clothes as he took them off: but afterward, when they were in bed, he was impotent, a shocking impotence and unwillingness that made him sick with himself.

Friday, December 7, 1945
    Y ear by year, Jack Curzon’s wife grew just a little fatter, not grossly fat, not unevenly fat, but filling out ripely, until, like one of Renoir’s nudes, she was as matronly as a woman can become without instantly being set down as an obese person. It cannot be said that Curzon was particularly conscious of this change in his wife over a period of twenty-two years of married existence, but he was aware that in some ways she became more attractive and that his pleasure in her did not dwindle, but rather the reverse. As a matter of fact, in his youth he had been something of a tomcat, randying around all over the place, a practice that continued without apparent letup even after his marriage, until he was able to say, at the age of forty, that it seemed to him that he had banged everything worth banging. In the ten years between forty and fifty, he gradually became accustomed to and practically accepted monogamous marriage, partly because his standing in the community made it preferable, partly because at the age of forty-seven he was brought back into the fold, to the tears and rejoicing of his wife, and partly because, as he put it himself, he was just damned sick and tired of chasing around.
    Whether if was because of this, or simply concurrent with this, he discovered his wife anew, a renaissance both pleasant and gratifying to Sally Curzon, who in the slow process of a generation had painlessly discovered that not all of her early notions concerning the relationships of men and women were correct.
    In Jack Curzon, this consciousness of his wife’s possibilities more or less rapidly developed into a habit. He was a man of habit, not concerned particularly—unless he had an attack of