“I mean it won’t affect the series I’m working on now,” Frank told him. “I’ll have plenty of time to finish that; it’s just that anything beyond that is—you know, pretty much out of the question.”
Pollock’s nodding continued for a while. Then he said, “Frank, let me put it to you this way. Nothing’s ever so definite a man can’t change his mind. All I’m asking is, I’d like you to give a little thought to this chat we’ve had today. Sleep on it a while; talk it over with your wife—and that’s always the main thing, isn’t it? Talking it over with your wife? Where the hell would any of us be without ’em? And I’d like you to feel free to come to me at any time and say, ‘Bart, let’s have another chat.’ Will you do that? Can we leave it that way? Fine. And remember, this thing I’m talking about would amount to a brand-new job for you. Something that could turn into a very challenging, very satisfying career for any man. Now I’m sure this other thing looks very desirable to you right now”—he winked—“you’ll never catch me knocking a competitor; and of course it’s entirely your decision. But Frank, in all sincerity, if you do decide for Knox I believe it’ll be a thing you’ll never regret. And I believe something else, too. I believe—” He lowered his voice. “I believe it’d be a fine memorial and tribute to your dad.”
And how could he ever tell April that these abysmally sentimental words had sent an instantaneous rush of blood to the walls of his throat? How could he ever explain, without bringing down her everlasting scorn, that for a minute he was afraid he might weep into his melting chocolate ice cream?
Fortunately, there was no chance to tell her anything that night. She had spent the day at a kind of work she had always hated and lately allowed herself to neglect: cleaning the parts of the house that didn’t show. Breathing dust and spitting cobwebs, she had hauled and bumped the screaming vacuum cleaner into all the corners of all the rooms and crawled with it under all the beds; she had cleaned each tile and fixture in the bathroom with a scouring powder whose scent gave her a headache, and she had thrust herself head and shoulders into the oven to swab with ammonia at its clinging black scum. She had torn up a loose flap of linoleum near the stove to reveal what looked like a long brown stain until it came alive—a swarm of ants that seemed still to be crawling inside her clothes for hours afterwards—and she’d even tried to straighten up the dripping disorder of the cellar, where a wet corrugated-paper box of rubbish fell apart in her hands as she lifted it out of a puddle, releasing all its mildewed contents in a splash from which an orange-spotted lizard emerged and sped away across her shoe. By the time Frank came home she was too tired to feel like talking.
She didn’t feel like talking the next night, either. Instead they watched a television drama which he found wholly absorbing and she declared was trash.
And it was the next night, or the next—he could never afterwards remember which—that he found her pacing the kitchen in the same tense, high-shouldered way she had paced the stage in the second act of The Petrified Forest. From the living room came the muffled strains of horn and xylophone, interspersed with the shrieks of midget voices; the children were watching an animated cartoon on television.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.”
“I don’t believe you. Did something happen today, or what?”
“No.” Then the perfection of her curtain-call smile began to blur and moisten into a wrinkled grimace of despair and her breathing became as loud as the boiling vegetables on the stove. “Nothing happened today that I haven’t known about for days and days—and oh God, Frank, please don’t look so dense; do you really mean you haven’t known it too, or guessed it or anything? I’m pregnant, that’s all.”
“Jesus.” His face obediently paled and gaped into the look of a man stunned by bad news, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to keep it that way for long: an exultant smile was already struggling up for freedom from his chest; he had to take hold of his mouth to stop it. “Wow,” he said quietly through his fingers. “Are you sure?”
“Yes.” And she came heavily into his arms as if the act of telling him had taken all her strength away. “Frank, I didn’t want to clobber you with it before you’ve even had a drink or anything; I meant to wait until after dinner but I just—the thing is, I’ve really been pretty sure all week and today I finally saw the doctor and now I can’t even pretend it’s not true any more.”
“Wow.” He gave up trying to control his face, which now hung aching with joy over her shoulder as he pressed and stroked her with both hands, muttering mindless words into her hair. “Oh, listen, it doesn’t mean we can’t go; listen, it just means we’ll have to figure out some other way of going, is all.”
The pressure was off; life had come mercifully back to normal.
“There isn’t any other way,” she said. “Do you think I’ve thought about anything else all week? There isn’t any other way. The whole point of going was to give you a chance to find yourself, and now it’s ruined. And it’s my fault! My own dumb, careless…”
“No, listen to me; nothing’s ruined. You’re all upset. At the very worst it only means waiting a little while until we can work out some—”
“A little while! Two years? Three years? Four? How long do you think it’ll be before I can take a full-time job? Darling, think about it a minute. It’s hopeless.”
“No, it’s not. Listen.”
“Not now; don’t let’s try to talk about it now, okay? Let’s at least wait’ll the kids are asleep.” And she turned back to the stove, wiping the inside of her wrist against one dribbling eye in a childish gesture of shame at being seen in tears.
“Okay.”
In the living room, hugging their knees, the children were staring blankly at a cartoon bulldog who brandished a spiked club as he chased a cartoon cat through the wreckage of a cartoon house. “Hi,” Frank said, and made his way past them to the bathroom to wash up for dinner, allowing his mind to fill with the rhythm and the song of all the things he would say as soon as he and April were alone. “Listen,” he would begin. “Suppose it does take time. Look at it this way…” And he would begin to draw the picture of a new life. If there was indeed a two- or three-year span of waiting to be done, wouldn’t it be made more endurable by the money from Pollock’s job? “Oh, of course it’ll be a nothing-job, but the money! Think of the money!” They could get a better house—or better still, if they continued to find the suburbs intolerable, they could move back to town. Oh, not to the dark, roach-infested, subway-rumbling city of the old days, but to a brisk, stimulating, new New York that only money could discover. Who knew how much broader and more interesting their lives might become? And besides…besides…
He was washing his hands, breathing the good smell of soap and the aromatic fumes of April’s scouring powder, noticing that his face in the mirror looked ruddier and better than he’d seen it look in months—he was thus engaged when the full implication, the full meaning of his “besides” clause broke over him. Besides: why think of accepting Pollock’s money as a mere compromise solution, an enforced making-the-best-of-things until the renewal of her ability to support him in Paris? Didn’t it have the weight and dignity of a plan in its own right? It might lead to almost anything—new people, new places—why, it might even take them to Europe in due time. Wasn’t there a good chance that Knox, through Knox International, might soon be expanding its promotion of computers abroad? (“You and Mrs. Wheeler are so very unlike one’s preconceived idea of American business people,” a Henry James sort of Venetian countess might say as they leaned attractively on a balustrade above the Grand Canal, sipping sweet vermouth…)
“Well, but what about you?” April would say. “How are you ever going to find yourself now?” But as he firmly shut off the hot-water faucet he knew he would have the answer for her:
“Suppose we let that be my business.”
And there was a new maturity and manliness in the kindly, resolute face that nodded back at him in th
e mirror.
When he reached for a towel be found she had forgotten to put one on the rack, and when he went to the linen closet to get one he saw, on the top shelf, a small square package freshly wrapped in drugstore paper. Its newness and the incongruity of its being there among the folded sheets and towels gave it a potent, secret look, like that of a hidden Christmas gift, and it was this as much as his unaccountable, rising fear that made him take it down and open it. Inside the wrapping was a blue cardboard box bearing the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, and inside the box was the dark pink bulb of a rubber syringe.
Without giving himself time to think, without even wondering if it mightn’t be better to wait till after dinner, he carried the package back through the living room, swiftly past the place where the children watched their cartoon (the cat had turned now and was chasing the dog over acres of cartoon countryside), and into the kitchen. And the way her startled face began to harden when she looked at it, and then up into his eyes, left no doubt at all of her intentions.
“Listen,” he said. “Just what the hell do you think you’re going to do with this?”
She was backing away through the vegetable steam, not in retreat but in defiant readiness, her hands sliding tensely up and down her hips. “And what do you think you’re going to do?” she said. “Do you think you’re going to stop me?”
PART THREE
ONE
OUR ABILITY TO MEASURE and apportion time affords an almost endless source of comfort.
“Synchronize watches at oh six hundred,” says the infantry captain, and each of his huddled lieutenants finds a respite from fear in the act of bringing two tiny pointers into jeweled alignment while tons of heavy artillery go fluttering overhead: the prosaic, civilian-looking dial of the watch has restored, however briefly, an illusion of personal control. Good, it counsels, looking tidily up from the hairs and veins of each terribly vulnerable wrist; fine: so far, everything’s happening right on time.
“I’m afraid I’m booked solid through the end of the month,” says the executive, voluptuously nestling the phone at his cheek as he thumbs the leaves of his appointment calendar, and his mouth and eyes at that moment betray a sense of deep security. The crisp, plentiful, day-sized pages before him prove that nothing unforseen, no calamity of chance or fate can overtake him between now and the end of the month. Ruin and pestilence have been held at bay, and death itself will have to wait; he is booked solid.
“Oh, let me see now,” says the ancient man, tilting his withered head to wince and blink at the sun in bewildered reminiscence, “my first wife passed away in the spring of—” and for a moment he is touched with terror. The spring of what? Past? Future? What is any spring but a mindless rearrangement of cells in the crust of the spinning earth as it floats in endless circuit of its sun? What is the sun itself but one of a billion insensible stars forever going nowhere into nothingness? Infinity! But soon the merciful valves and switches of his brain begin to do their tired work, and “The spring of Nineteen-Ought-Six,” he is able to say. “Or no, wait—” and his blood runs cold again as the galaxies revolve. “Wait! Nineteen-Ought—Four.” Now he is sure of it, and a restorative flood of well-being brings his hand involuntarily up to slap his thigh in satisfaction. He may have forgotten the shape of his first wife’s smile and the sound of her voice in tears, but by imposing a set of numerals on her death he has imposed coherence on his own life, and on life itself. Now all the other years can fall obediently into place, each with its orderly contribution to the whole. Nineteen-Ten, Nineteen-Twenty—Why, of course he remembers!—Nineteen-Thirty, Nineteen-Forty, right on up to the well-deserved peace of his present and on into the gentle promise of his future. The earth can safely resume its benevolent stillness—Smell that new grass!—and it’s the same grand old sun that has hung there smiling on him all these years. “Yes sir,” he can say with authority, “Nineteen-Ought-Four,” and the stars tonight will please him as tokens of his ultimate heavenly rest. He has brought order out of chaos.
The early summer of 1955 might well have been intolerable for both the Wheelers, and might in the end have turned out very differently, if it hadn’t been for the calendar that hung on their kitchen wall. A New Year’s gift of A. J. Stolper and Sons, Hardware and Home Furnishings, illustrated with scenes of Rural New England, it was the kind of calendar whose page for each month displays two smaller charts as well, last month and next, so that a quarter of the year can be comprehended in a single searching glance.
The Wheelers were able to fix their date of conception in the latter part of the first week in May—the week after his birthday when they could both remember his whispering, “It feels sort of loose,” and her whispering, “Oh no, I’m sure it’s all right; don’t stop…” (she had bought a new diaphragm the following week, just to be sure), and this placed the first week in August, more than four weeks away and clear over on the next page, as the mysterious time “right at the end of the third month” when the school friend, long ago, had said it would be safe to apply the rubber syringe.
Panic had sent her straight to the drugstore the minute she was free of the doctor’s office that afternoon; panic had driven him down the hall to confront her with the thing the minute he found it in the closet that evening, and it was panic that held them locked and staring at each other in the vegetable steam, brutally silent, while the cartoon music floated in from the next room. But much later that same night, after each of them furtively and in turn had made studies of the calendar, their panic was drowned in the discovery that row on row of logical, orderly days lay waiting for intelligent use between now and the deadline. There was plenty of time for coming to the right decision on this thing, for working this thing out.
“Darling, I didn’t mean to be so awful about it; I wouldn’t have been if you hadn’t come at me with it like that, before either of us had a chance to discuss it in any kind of a rational way.”
“I know; I know.” And he patted her softly weeping shoulder. These tears didn’t mean she was capitulating; he knew that. At best they meant what he’d hopefully suspected from the start, that she halfway wanted to be talked out of it; at worst they meant only that she didn’t want to antagonize him, that in drawing her own kind of reassurance from the calendar she had seen the four weeks as a generous opportunity for gradually winning him over. But either way, and this was what filled him with gratitude as he held and stroked her, either way it meant she was considering him; she cared about him. For the time being, that was all that mattered.
“Because I mean we’ve got to be together in this thing, haven’t we?” she asked, drawing back a little in his grip. “Otherwise nothing’s going to make any sense. Isn’t that right?”
“Of course it is. Can we talk a little now? Because I do have a few things to say.”
“Yes. I want to talk too. Only let’s both promise not to fight, all right? It’s just not a thing we can afford to fight about.”
“I know. Listen…”
And so the way was cleared for the quiet, controlled, dead-serious debate with which they began to fill one after another of the calendar’s days, a debate that kept them both in a fine-drawn state of nerves that was not at all unpleasant. It was very like a courtship.
Like a courtship too it took place in a skillfully arranged variety of settings; Frank saw to that. Their numberless hundreds of thousands of words were spoken indoors and out, on long drives through the hills at night, in expensive country restaurants, and in New York. They had as many evenings-out in two weeks as they’d had in the whole previous year, and one of the ways he began to suspect he was winning, early in the second week, was that she didn’t object to spending so much money; she almost certainly would have done so if she’d still been wholly committed to Europe in the fall.
But by then he was in little need of such minor indications. Almost from the start he had seized the initiative, and he was reasonably confident of victory. The idea he had to sell, after all, was clearly o
n the side of the angels. It was unselfish, mature, and (though he tried to avoid moralizing) morally unassailable. The other idea, however she might try to romanticize its bravery, was repugnant.
“But Frank, don’t you see I only want to do it for your sake? Won’t you please believe that, or try to believe it?”
And he would smile sadly down at her from his fortress of conviction. “How can it be for my sake,” he would ask, “when the very thought of it makes my stomach turn over? Just think a little, April. Please.”
His main tactical problem, in this initial phase of the campaign, was to find ways of making his position attractive, as well as commendable. The visits to town and country restaurants were helpful in this connection; she had only to glance around her in such places to discover a world of handsome, graceful, unquestionably worthwhile men and women who had somehow managed to transcend their environment—people who had turned dull jobs to their own advantage, who had exploited the system without knuckling under to it, who would certainly tend, if they knew the facts of the Wheelers’ case, to agree with him.
“All right,” she would say after hearing him out. “Supposing all this does happen. Supposing a couple of years from now we’re both terribly sleek and stimulated and all that, and we have loads of fascinating friends and long vacations in Europe every summer. Do you really think you’d be any happier? Wouldn’t you still be wasting the prime of your manhood in a completely empty, meaningless kind of—”
And so she would play straight into his snare:
“Suppose we let that be my business.” How much, he would ask her, would his prime of manhood be worth if it had to be made conditional on allowing her to commit a criminal mutilation of herself? “Because that’s what you’d be doing, April; there’s no getting around it. You’d be committing a crime against your own substance. And mine.”