And all right, all right; maybe that was kid stuff, soldier stuff, field commission stuff; all right.
But oh God, to be there with April Wheeler. To swing down those streets with April Wheeler’s cool fingers locked in his own, to climb the stone stairway of some broken old gray house with her; to sway with her into some high blue room with a red-tiled floor; to have the light husky ripple of her laugh and her voice up there (“Wouldn’t you like to be loved by me?”); to have the lemon-skin smell of her and the long, clean feel of her when he—when she—oh Jesus.
Oh, Jesus God, to be there with April Wheeler.
THREE
SINCE 1936, when they moved out of the city forever, Mr. and Mrs. Howard Givings had changed their place of residence every two or three years; and they had always explained that this was because Helen had a way with houses. She could buy one in a rundown condition, move in, vigorously improve its value and sell it at a profit, to be invested in the next house. Beginning in Westchester, moving gradually north into Putnam County and then over into Connecticut, she had done that with six houses. But their present house, the seventh, was a different story. They had lived in it for five, almost six years now, and they doubted if they’d ever move away. As Mrs. Givings often said, she had fallen in love with the place.
It was one of the few authentic pre-Revolutionary dwellings left in the district, flanked by two of the few remaining wineglass elms, and she liked to think of it as a final bastion against vulgarity. The demands of the working day might take her deep into the ever-encroaching swarm of the enemy camp; she might have to stand smiling in the kitchens of horrid little ranch houses and split levels, dealing with impossibly rude people whose children ran tricycles against her shins and spilled Kool-Aid on her dress; she might have to breathe the exhaust fumes and absorb the desolation of Route Twelve, with its supermarkets and pizza joints and frozen custard stands, but these things only heightened the joy of her returning. She loved the last few hundred yards of shady road that meant she was almost there, and the brittle hiss of well-raked gravel under her tires, and the switching-off of the ignition in her neat garage, and the brave, tired walk past fragrant flowerbeds to her fine old Colonial door. And the first clean scent of cedar and floorwax inside, the first glimpse of the Currier and Ives print that hung above the charming old umbrella stand, never failed to fill her with the sentimental tenderness of the word “home.”
This had been an especially harrowing day. Saturday was always the busiest day of the real estate week, and this afternoon, on top of everything else, she’d had to drive all the way out to Greenacres—not to visit her son, of course, for she never did that unless her husband was along—but for a conference with his doctor, a thing which always left her feeling soiled. Weren’t psychiatrists supposed to be wise, deep-voiced, fatherly sorts of people? Then how could you feel anything but soiled in the presence of a red-eyed, nail-biting little man who used adhesive tape to hold his glasses together and a piece of Woolworth jewelry to keep his tie clamped flat against his white-on-white shirt—who had to thumb moistly through a dozen manila folders before he could remember which of his patients you had come to see him about, and who then said, “Yes; oh yes; and, what was your question?”
But now, by the grace of whichever saint it was that protected weary travelers, she was home. “Hello, dear!” she sang from the vestibule, for her husband was certain to be reading the paper in the living room, and without stopping to chat with him she went directly into the kitchen, where the cleaning woman had left the tea things set out. What a cheerful, comforting sight the steaming kettle made! And how clean and ample this kitchen was, with its tall windows. It gave her the kind of peace she could remember knowing only as a child, gossiping with the maids in the kitchen of her father’s wonderful house in Philadelphia. And the funny thing, she often reflected, was that none of her other houses, some of which had been every bit as nice as this, or nicer, had ever made her feel this way.
Well, of course, people do change, she sometimes told herself; I suppose it’s simply that I’m getting old and tired. But in her heart, shyly, she cherished quite a different explanation. Her ability to love this house, she truly believed, was only one of many changes in her nature these past few years—deep, positive changes that had brought her to a new perspective on the past.
“Because I love it,” she could hear her own voice saying years and years ago, in reply to Howard’s exasperated wish to know why she refused to quit her job in the city.
“It certainly can’t be very interesting,” he would say, “and it certainly isn’t as if we needed the money. Why, then?” And her answer had always been that she loved it.
“You love the Horst Ball Bearing Company? You love being a stenographer? How can anybody love things like that?”
“It happens that I do. Besides, you know perfectly well we do need the money, if we’re going to keep a full-time servant. And you know I’m not a stenographer.” She was an administrative assistant. “Really, Howard, there’s no point in discussing this.”
And she’d never been able to explain or even to understand that what she loved was not the job—it could have been any job—or even the independence it gave her (though of course that was important for a woman constantly veering toward the brink of divorce). Deep down, what she’d loved and needed was work itself. “Hard work,” her father had always said, “is the best medicine yet devised for all the ills of man—and of woman,” and she’d always believed it. The press and bustle and glare of the office, the quick lunch sent up on a tray, the crisp handling of papers and telephones, the exhaustion of staying overtime and the final sweet relief of slipping off her shoes at night, which always left her feeling drained and pure and fit for nothing but two aspirins and a hot bath and a light supper and bed—that was the substance of her love; it was all that fortified her against the pressures of marriage and parenthood. Without it, as she often said, she would have gone out of her mind.
When she did quit the job and move to the country to break into real estate, it had been a difficult transition. There simply wasn’t enough work in the real estate business. Not many people were buying property in those days, and there was a limit to the amount of time she could spend on the study of mortgage law and building codes; there were whole days together with nothing to do but rearrange the papers on her rosewood desk and wait for the phone to ring, with her nerves so taut she was ready to scream, until she discovered that her passion could find release in the improvement of the things around her. With her own hands she scraped layers of wallpaper and plaster away to disclose original oak paneling; she installed a new banister on the staircase, took out the ordinary window sashes and put in small-paned, Colonial-looking ones instead; she drew the blueprints and closely supervised the building of a new terrace and a new garage; she cleared and filled and rolled and planted a hundred square feet of new lawn. Within three years she had added five thousand dollars to the market value of the place, had persuaded Howard to sell it and buy another, and had made a good start on improving the second one. Then came the third one and the fourth, and so on, with her real estate business growing all the time, so that during one peak year she had been able to work eighteen hours a day—ten on business and eight on the house. “Because I love it,” she had insisted, crouching far into the night over the endless tasks of chipping and hammering and varnishing and repair, “I love doing this kind of work—don’t you?”
And hadn’t she been silly? In the sense of calm and well-being that suffused her now, as she arranged the tea things on their tray, Mrs. Givings breathed a tolerant sigh at the thought of how silly, how wrong and foolish she had been in those years. Oh, she had changed, there was no doubt of it. People did change, and a change could be a bloom as well as a withering, couldn’t it? Because that was what it seemed to be: a final bloom, a long-delayed emergence into womanliness.
Oh, the growth of her feeling for this house and the dwindling of her fixation on work were
only the smallest, the most superficial symptoms of it; there were deeper things as well—disturbing, oddly pleasurable things; physical things. Sometimes a soaring phrase of Beethoven on the kitchen radio could make her want to weep with the pain of gladness. Sometimes, chatting with Howard, she would feel stirrings of—well, of desire: she would want to take him in her arms and press his dear old head to her breast.
“I thought we’d just have the plain tea today,” she said, carrying the tray into the living room. “I hope you don’t mind. The point is, if we fill up now we won’t be hungry for dinner, and we’ll be having a very early dinner you see because I’m expected over at the Wheelers’ at eight. Rather awkward timing all around, I’m afraid.” She set the tray gently on an antique coffee table whose surface was faintly scarred with glue, showing the places where it had split when John threw it across the room on the awful night the State Police came.
“Oh, isn’t it lovely to sit down,” Mrs. Givings said. “Is there anything nicer than sitting down after a hard day?”
It wasn’t until she fixed his tea the way he liked it, with three sugars, and held it out for him to take, that she looked up to make sure her husband was there. And it wasn’t until that instant, suddenly smelling the tea and seeing her, that Howard Givings realized she was home. His hearing aid had been turned off all afternoon. The shock of it made his face flinch like a startled baby’s, but she didn’t notice. She went on talking while he put down his Herald Tribune, fumbled at the dial of the hearing aid with one unsteady hand and reached out the other to take the cup and saucer, which chattered in his grip.
Howard Givings looked older than sixty-seven. His whole adult life had been spent as a minor official of the seventh largest life insurance company in the world, and now in retirement it seemed that the years of office tedium had marked him as vividly as old seafaring men are marked by wind and sun. He was very white and soft. His face, instead of wrinkling or sinking with age, had puffed out into the delicate smoothness of infancy, and his hair was like a baby’s too, as fine as milkweed silk. He had never been a sturdy man, and now his frailty was emphasized by the spread of a fat belly, which obliged him to sit with his meager knees wide apart. He wore a rather natty red-checked shirt, gray flannel trousers, gray socks, and an old pair of black, high-cut orthopedic shoes that were as infinitely wrinkled as his face was smooth.
“Isn’t there any cake?” he inquired, after clearing his throat. “I thought we still had some of the cocoanut cake.”
“Well yes, dear, but you see I thought we’d just have the plain tea today because we’ll be having such an early dinner…” She explained all over again about her engagement with the Wheelers, only dimly aware of having told him before, and he nodded, only dimly aware of what she was saying. As she talked she stared in absent-minded fascination at the way the dying sun shone crimson through her husband’s earlobe and made his dandruff into flakes of fire, but her thoughts were hurrying ahead to the evening.
This would be no ordinary visit to the Wheelers’ it would, in fact, be the first careful step in fulfilling a plan that had come to her in a kind of vision, weeks and weeks ago. At twilight one evening, taking a stroll to calm her nerves in the blue depths of her back lawn, she had found it peopled in her mind’s eye with a family gathering. April Wheeler was there, seated in a white wrought-iron chair and turning her pretty head to smile with affection at some wise and fatherly remark by Howard Givings, who sat beside her near a white wrought-iron table set with ice and cocktail mixings. Across from them, standing and leaning slightly forward with a glass in his hand, Frank Wheeler was engaged in one of his earnest conversations with John, who was reclining in dignified convalescence on a white wrought-iron chaise longue. She could see John smile, composed and courteous, begging to differ with Frank on some minor point of politics or books or baseball or whatever it was that young men talked about, and she could see him turn his head to look up at her and say:
“Mother? Won’t you join us?”
The picture kept recurring for days until it was as real as a magazine illustration, and she kept improving on it. She even found a place in it for the Wheelers’ children: they could be playing quietly in the shadows behind the rosebushes, dressed in white shorts and tennis shoes, catching fireflies in Mason jars. And the more vivid it grew, the less fault she was able to find with its plausibility. Wouldn’t it do John a world of good to recuperate among a few sensitive, congenial people of his own age? And there need be no question of altruism on the Wheelers’ part: hadn’t they all but told her, time and again, how starved they were for friends of their own kind? Surely the tiresome couple on the Hill (Crandall? Campbell?) couldn’t offer them much in the way of—well, of good conversation and so on. And goodness only knew that John, whatever else he might or might not be, was an intellectual.
Oh, it was the right thing for all of them; she knew it; she knew it. But she knew too that it couldn’t be hurried. She had known from the start that it would have to be undertaken slowly, a step at a time.
For the past several visiting days, she and Howard had been allowed to take him for an hour’s drive outside the hospital grounds on what was called a trial basis. “I don’t think any home visits would be wise at this time,” the doctor had said last month, hideously cracking his ink-stained knuckles, one after another, on his desk blotter. “There still does seem to be a good deal of hostility concerning the, ah, home atmosphere and whatnot. Be better just to limit him to these preliminary outings for the present. Later on, depending how things work out, you might try taking him to the home of some close friend, where he’d feel more or less on neutral ground; that would be the next logical step. You can use your own judgment on that.”
She had talked it over with Howard—she had even mentioned it discreetly to John a few times, during their drives—and last week her own judgment, carefully weighing the factors, had decided that the time for this next logical step was at hand. She had arranged the conference with the doctor today simply to announce her decision, and to ask one small piece of advice. How much, in his opinion, should she tell the Wheelers about the nature of John’s illness? The doctor, as she should have predicted, was no help at all—she could, he said, use her own judgment on that too—but at least he hadn’t raised any objections, and all that remained now was to put the question to the Wheelers. It would have been ever so much more comfortable and gracious to have the talk here, as she’d planned, over a candlelit dinner table; but that couldn’t be helped.
“I do hope it doesn’t seem an imposition,” she whisperingly rehearsed as she rinsed out the tea things in the kitchen, “but I was wondering if I could ask a great favor. It’s about my son John…” Oh, it didn’t matter how she phrased it; she would find the right words when the time came, and she knew the Wheelers would understand. Bless them; bless them; she knew they would understand.
She could think of nothing else as she hurried through the preparation and the serving and the washing-up of the early dinner; and when she was ready, when she paused in the hall to freshen her lipstick and to call “I’ll see you later, then, dear” before setting off, she was as excited as a girl.
But the moment she walked chatting and laughing into the Wheelers’ living room her excitement changed to a kind of panic. She felt like an intruder.
She had expected to find them as tense and disorganized as ever—both talking at once, bobbing and darting around her, getting in each other’s way as they sprang to remove a sharp toy from the chair she was about to sit down on—but instead their welcome was serene. April didn’t have to insist that the house was in a terrible mess, because it wasn’t; Frank didn’t have to blurt “Get you a drink” and go lunging off to wrestle and bang at the refrigerator, because the drinks were there, nicely arranged on the coffee table. The Wheelers had, apparently, been quietly drinking and talking together here for some time before her arrival; they were cordially glad to see her, but if she hadn’t come they would have gone on tog
ether in perfect self-sufficiency.
“Oh, just a tiny dollop for me, thanks, that’s wonderful,” Mrs. Givings heard herself saying, and “Oh, isn’t it lovely to sit down,” and “My, doesn’t your house look nice,” and a number of other things; and then: “I do hope it doesn’t seem an imposition, but I was wondering if I could ask a great favor. It’s about my son John.”
The muscular contraction in both the Wheelers’ faces was so slight that the subtlest camera in the world couldn’t have caught it, but Mrs. Givings felt it like a kick. They knew! It was the one possibility she had completely overlooked. Who had told them? How much did they know? Did they know about the smashing of the house and the cutting of the phone wires and the State Police?
But she had to go through with it. Actually, her voice was telling them now, he hadn’t been at all well. What with overwork and one thing and another, he’d had what amounted to a complete nervous breakdown. Fortunately he was back in this vicinity for a time—she’d have hated the thought of his being ill so far from home—but all the same it was worrying, to his father and to her. His doctors had thought it wise for him to have a complete rest, so just for the present he was—
“—well, actually, just for the present he’s at Greenacres.” Her voice had become the only living thing in Mrs. Givings; all the rest was numb.
And actually, her voice assured them, they’d be surprised at what a really excellent place Greenacres was, from the standpoint of—oh, of facilities and staff and so on; much better, for instance, than most of the private rest homes and whatnot in the area.