“Hi,” he said kindly. “You have any trouble about yesterday? With Mrs. Jorgensen, I mean?”
“No. She didn’t say anything.” She seemed to be having some difficulty in meeting his eyes; she was looking mostly at the knot of his tie. Standing there and smiling down at her, with the constant hum and bustle of people milling just out of earshot in the dry lake beyond them, he could easily have been stopping to pass the time of day or to ask her about a typing job; there was nothing in his face or his stance to arouse the curiosity of onlookers. Yet at close range, from where she sat, he knew there could be no doubt of his intimate sincerity.
“Look, Maureen,” he began. “If I thought there was anything to be gained by it, for either of us, I’d say let’s go somewhere this afternoon and have a talk. And if you want to, if there’s anything at all you want to tell me or ask me, that’s what we’ll do. Is there?”
“No. Except that I—well, no. There isn’t really. You’re right.”
“It isn’t a question of being ‘right.’ I don’t want you to think I’m—well, never mind. But listen: the important thing in a thing like this is not to have any regrets. I don’t; I hope you don’t, and if you do I hope you’ll tell me.”
“No,” she said. “I don’t.”
“I’m glad. And listen: You’re swell, Maureen. If there’s ever anything I can—you know, do for you or anything, I hope you’ll let me know. I guess that sounds sort of crummy. All I mean is that I’d like us to be friends.”
“All right,” she said. “So would I.”
And he walked away up the aisle of cubicles, moving slowly and confidently in a new, more mature version of the old “terrifically sexy walk” of Bethune Street. As simple as that! If he’d spent days planning and rehearsing it, filling page after page of scratch paper with revised and crossed-out sentences, he could never have come up with a more dignified, more satisfactory speech. And all on the spur of the moment! Was there anything in the world he couldn’t do?
“Morning, Dad,” he said to Jack Ordway.
“Franklin, my son. How good to see your shining morning face.”
But first things first; and the next thing now was his IN basket. No; it was the batch of papers he’d dropped on the middle of his desk yesterday, the things Maureen had pulled from the central file, which brought up the whole disorderly problem of the branch manager in Toledo and the production control brochure. Was he going to let a thing like that harass him? Certainly not.
“Intra-company letter to Toledo,” he said into the mouthpiece of his Dictaphone, leaning back in his swivel chair and working his foot into its wooden saddle on the drawer edge. “Attention B. F. Chalmers, branch manager. Subject: NAPE conference. Paragraph. With regard to recent and previous correspondence, this is to advise that the matter has been very satisfactorily taken in hand, period, paragraph.”
He went that far without any idea of how the matter was going to be taken in hand, if at all; but as he sat fingering the mouthpiece he began to get ideas, and soon he was intoning one smooth sentence after another, pausing only to smile in satisfaction. The branch manager in Toledo was turning out to be as easy to handle as Maureen Grube.
F. H. Wheeler, or “we,” wholly agreed that the existing brochure was unsuitable. Fortunately, the problem had now been solved in a way which “we” were confident would meet with the branch manager’s approval. As the branch manager doubtless knew, the NAPE delegates would be given dozens of competitive promotion brochures, most of which were certain to end up in the wastebaskets of the convention floor. The problem, then, was to develop something different for Knox—something that would catch the delegate’s eye, that he would want to put in his pocket and take back to his hotel room. Just such a piece was now in production, designed specifically for the NAPE conference: a brief, straightforward sales message entitled “Speaking of Production Control.” As the branch manager would see, this document relied on no slick format, no fancy artwork or advertising jargon to tell its story. Crisply printed in large, easy-to-read type, in black and white, it had all the immediacy of plain talk. It would “give the NAPE delegate nothing more or less than what he wants, colon: the facts.”
After putting a new belt in the Dictaphone machine, he leaned back again and said, “Copy for Veritype. Heading: Speaking of Production Control, dot, dot, dot. Paragraph. Production control is, comma, after all, comma, nothing more or less than the job of putting the right materials in the right place at the right time, comma, according to a varying schedule. Period, paragraph. This is simple arithmetic, period. Given all the variables, comma, a man can do it with a pencil and paper, period. But the Knox ‘500’ Electronic Computer can do it—dash—literally—dash—thousands of times faster, period. That’s why…”
“Coming down for coffee, Franklin?”
“I guess not, Jack. I better finish this thing.”
And he did finish it, though it took him all morning. Fingering through the papers from the central file with his free hand, lifting a sentence here and a paragraph there, he continued to recite into the Dictaphone until he’d explained all the advantages of using a computer to coordinate the details of factory production. It sounded very authoritative when he played it back (“Once the bill of materials has been exploded,” he heard his own voice saying, “the computer’s next step is to scan the updated parts inventory”). No one could have told that he didn’t quite know what he was talking about. When the typescript came back he would polish it up—maybe he’d have it checked over by one of the technical men, just to be safe—and then he’d have it Verityped and sent to Toledo in the required number of copies. For self-protection he would send one copy to Bandy, with a note saying “Hope this is okay—Toledo wanted something short & sweet for the NAPE thing,” and with luck he’d be off the hook. In the meantime he could safely remove all the troublesome Toledo correspondence from the stack of things he couldn’t bring himself to face just now, and put it in his OUT basket marked “File,” along with all the brochure material.
This made such a surprising reduction in the clutter of his desk that he was encouraged, after lunch, to tackle two or three other matters in the stack of things he couldn’t face. One of them involved a ticklish letter explaining why “we” had allowed an obsolete model of adding-machine demonstrator to be shipped to the Chicago Business Fair, and he made it an airtight masterpiece of evasion; another, a thick sheaf of letters that he’d been avoiding for weeks, turned out to be much simpler than he’d thought in that it all boiled down to a decision left squarely up to him. Should solid-gold tie clasps ($14.49) or solid-gold lapel buttons ($8.98) be offered as the prizes in a quota-breaking contest among the tabulating-equipment salesmen of Minneapolis-St. Paul? Tie clasps! And into the OUT basket it went.
He was a demon of energy; and it wasn’t until four o’clock, walking blearily to the water cooler (“Watch the big bubble come up—Blurp!—Isn’t that funny?”) that he realized why. It was because April had left a small pocket of guilt in his mind last night by saying that he’d “worked like a dog year after year.” He had meant to point out that whatever it was he’d been doing here year after year, it could hardly be called working like a dog—but she hadn’t given him a chance. And now, by trying to clear all the papers off his desk in one day, he guessed he was trying to make up for having misled her. But what kind of nonsense was that? How could it possibly matter what he’d been doing here year after year, or what she thought he’d been doing, or what he thought she thought he’d been doing? None of it mattered any more; couldn’t he get that through his head? And as he stumbled back from the water cooler, wiping his cold mouth with a warm hand, he began to understand for the first time that in another few months he would leave this place forever. All of it—lights, glass partitions, chattering typewriters—the whole slow, dry agony of this place would be cut away from his life like a tumor from his brain; and good riddance.
His final act of that day in the office involved no work at a
ll and very little energy, though it did take a certain amount of courage. He opened the big bottom drawer of his desk, carefully lifted out the whole stack of Real Goodies—it weighed as much as a couple of telephone books—and tipped it into the wastebasket.
For an indeterminate number of days after that, the office all but vanished from his consciousness. He went through the motions, shuffling his papers, having conferences with Bandy, having lunch with Ordway and the others, smiling with dignity whenever he passed Maureen Grube in the corridors and even stopping to chat with her now and then, to show that they were friends—but the fact was that the daytime had ceased to have any meaning except as a period of rest and preparation for the evening.
He never seemed to come fully awake until the moment he swung down from the train at sunset and climbed into his station car. Then came the stimulation of drinks with April, while the children lay silenced by television, and then the pleasure of dinner, which in conversational intensity was very like the dinners they’d had before they were married. But the day didn’t really begin until later still, when the children were in bed with their door firmly shut for the night. Then they would take their places in the living room—April curled attractively on the sofa, usually, and Frank standing with his back to the bookcase, each with a cup of black Italian coffee and a cigarette—and give way to their love affair.
He would begin to pace slowly around and around the room as he talked, and she would follow him with her eyes, often with the tilt of her whole head and shoulders. From time to time when he felt he’d made a trenchant point he would wheel and stare at her in triumph; then it would be her turn to talk, while he walked and nodded, and when her turn was over their looks would meet exultantly again. Sometimes there was a glint of humor in these embraces of the eye: I know I’m showing off, they seemed to say, but so are you, and I love you.
And what did it matter? The very substance of their talk, after all, the message and the rhyme of it, whatever else they might be saying, was that they were going to be new and better people from now on. April, tucked up on the sofa with her skirt arranged in a graceful whirl from waist to ankle, her tall neck very white in the soft light and her face held in perfect composure, bore hardly any resemblance to the stiff, humiliated actress who had stood in the curtain call—and still less to the angrily sweating wife who had hauled the lawnmower, or to the jaded matron who had endured the evening of false friendship with the Campbells, or to the embarrassed, embarrassingly ardent woman who had welcomed him to his birthday party. Her voice was subtle and low, as low as in the first act of The Petrified Forest, and when she tipped back her head to laugh or leaned forward to reach out and tap the ash from her cigarette, she made it a maneuver of classic beauty. Anyone could picture her conquering Europe.
And Frank was modestly aware that something of the same kind of change was taking place in himself. He knew for one thing that he had developed a new way of talking, slower and more deliberate than usual, deeper in tone and more fluent: he almost never had to recourse to the stammering, apologetic little bridges (“No, but I mean—I don’t know—you know—”) that normally laced his speech, nor did his head duck and weave in the familiar nervous effort to make himself clear. Catching sight of his walking reflection in the black picture window, he had to admit that his appearance was not yet as accomplished as hers—his face was too plump and his mouth too bland, his pants too well pressed and his shirt too fussily Madison Avenue—but sometimes late at night when his throat had gone sore and his eyes hot from talking, when he hunched his shoulders and set his jaw and pulled his necktie loose and let it hang like a rope, he could glare at the window and see the brave beginnings of a personage.
It was a strange time for the children, too. What exactly did going to France in the fall mean? And why did their mother keep insisting it was going to be fun, as if daring them to doubt it? For that matter, why was she so funny about a lot of things? In the afternoons she would hug them and ask them questions in a rush of ebullience that suggested Christmas Eve, and then her eyes would go out of focus during their replies, and a minute later she’d be saying “Yes, darling, but don’t talk quite so much, okay? Give Mommy a break.”
Nor did their father’s homecoming do much to help: he might throw them high in the air and give them airplane rides around the house until they were dizzy, but only after having failed to see them altogether during the disturbingly long time it took him to greet their mother at the kitchen door. And the talking at dinner! It was hopeless for either child to try and get a word in edgewise. Michael found he could jiggle in his chair, repeat baby words over and over in a shrill idiot’s monotone or stuff his mouth with mashed potato and hang his jaws open, all without any adult reproof; Jennifer would sit very straight at the table and refuse to look at him, feigning great interest in whatever her parents were saying, though afterwards, waiting for bedtime, she would sometimes go off quietly by herself and suck her thumb.
There was one consolation: they could go to sleep without any fear of being waked in an hour by the abrupt, thumping, hard-breathing, door-slamming sounds of a fight; all that, apparently, was a thing of the past. They could lie drowsing now under the sound of kindly voices in the living room, a sound whose intricately rhythmic rise and fall would slowly turn into the shape of their dreams. And if they came awake later to turn over and reach with their toes for new cool places in the sheets, they knew the sound would still be there—one voice very deep and the other soft and pretty, talking and talking, as substantial and soothing as a blue range of mountains seen from far away.
“This whole country’s rotten with sentimentality,” Frank said one night, turning ponderously from the window to walk the carpet. “It’s been spreading like a disease for years, for generations, until now everything you touch is flabby with it.”
“Exactly,” she said, enraptured with him.
“I mean isn’t that really what’s the matter, when you get right down to it? I mean even more than the profit motive or the loss of spiritual values or the fear of the bomb or any of those things? Or maybe it’s the result of those things; maybe it’s what happens when all those things start working at once without any real cultural tradition to absorb them. Anyway, whatever it’s the result of, it’s what’s killing the United States. I mean isn’t it? This steady, insistent vulgarizing of every idea and every emotion into some kind of pre-digested intellectual baby food; this optimistic, smiling-through, easy-way-out sentimentality in everybody’s view of life?”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes.”
“And I mean is it any wonder all the men end up emasculated? Because that is what happens; that is what’s reflected in all this bleating about ‘adjustment’ and ‘security’ and ‘togetherness’—and I mean Christ, you see it everywhere: all this television crap where every joke is built on the premise that daddy’s an idiot and mother’s always on to him; and these loathsome little signs people put up in their front yards—you ever notice those signs up on the Hill?”
“The ‘The’ signs, you mean; with the people’s name in the plural? Like ‘The Donaldsons’?”
“Right!” He turned and smiled down at her in triumphant congratulation for having seen exactly what he meant. “Never ‘Donaldson’ or ‘John J. Donaldson’ or whatever the hell his name is. Always ‘The Donaldsons.’ You picture the whole cozy little bunch of them sitting around all snug as bunnies in their pajamas, for God’s sake, toasting marshmallows. I guess the Campbells haven’t put up a sign like that yet, but give ’em time. The rate they’re going now, they will.” He paused here for a deep-throated laugh. “And my God, when you think how close we came to settling into that kind of an existence.”
“But we didn’t,” she told him. “That’s the important thing.”
Another time, quite late, he walked up close to the sofa and sat down on the edge of the coffee table, facing her. “You know what this is like, April? Talking like this? The whole idea of taking off to Europe this way?”
He felt tense and keyed up; the very act of sitting on a coffee table seemed an original and wonderful thing to do. “It’s like coming out of a Cellophane bag. It’s like having been encased in some kind of Cellophane for years without knowing it, and suddenly breaking out. It’s a little like the way I felt going up to the line the first time, in the war. I remember acting very grim and scared because that was the fashionable way to act, but I couldn’t really put my heart in it. I mean I was scared, of course, but that’s not the point. What I really felt didn’t have anything to do with being scared or not scared. I just felt this terrific sense of life. I felt full of blood. Everything looked realer than real; the snow on the fields, the road, the trees, the terrific blue sky all marked up with vapor trails—everything. And all the helmets and overcoats and rifles, and the way the guys were walking; I sort of loved them, even the guys I didn’t like. And I remember being very conscious of the way my own body worked, and the sound of the breathing in my nose. I remember we went through this shelled-out town, all broken walls and rubble, and I thought it was beautiful. Hell, I was probably just as dumb and scared as anybody else, but inside I’d never felt better. I kept thinking: this is really true. This is the truth.”
“I felt that way once too,” she said, and in the shyness of her lips he saw that something overpoweringly tender was coming next.