The only real mistake, the only wrong and dishonest thing, was ever to have seen him as anything more than that. Oh, for a month or two, just for fun, it might be all right to play a game like that with a boy; but all these years! And all because, in a sentimentally lonely time long ago, she had found it easy and agreeable to believe whatever this one particular boy felt like saying, and to repay him for that pleasure by telling easy, agreeable lies of her own, until each was saying what the other most wanted to hear—until he was saying “I love you” and she was saying “Really, I mean it; you’re the most interesting person I’ve ever met.”
What a subtle, treacherous thing it was to let yourself go that way! Because once you’d started it was terribly difficult to stop; soon you were saying “I’m sorry, of course you’re right,” and “Whatever you think is best,” and “You’re the most wonderful and valuable thing in the world,” and the next thing you knew all honesty, all truth, was as far away and glimmering, as hopelessly unattainable as the world of the golden people. Then you discovered you were working at life the way the Laurel Players worked at The Petrified Forest, or the way Steve Kovick worked at his drums—earnest and sloppy and full of pretension and all wrong; you found you were saying yes when you meant no, and “We’ve got to be together in this thing” when you meant the very opposite; then you were breathing gasoline as if it were flowers and abandoning yourself to a delirium of love under the weight of a clumsy, grunting, red-faced man you didn’t even like—Shep Campbell!—and then you were face to face, in total darkness, with the knowledge that you didn’t know who you were.
And how could anyone else be blamed for that?
When she’d straightened up the desk and made Frank’s bed, with fresh sheets, she carried the wastebasket outdoors and around to the back yard. It was an autumnal day, warm but with a light sharp breeze that scudded stray leaves over the grass and reminded her of all the brave beginnings of childhood, of the apples and pencils and new woolen clothes of the last few days before school.
She took the wastebasket out across the lawn to the incinerator drum, dumped the papers in it and set a match to them. Then she sat down on the edge of the sun-warmed stone wall to wait for their burning, watching the all but invisible flame crawl slowly and then more rapidly up and around them, sending out little waves of heat that shimmered the landscape. The sounds of bird song and rustling trees were faintly mingled with the faraway cries of children at play; she listened carefully but couldn’t make out which were Jennifer’s and Michael’s voices and which were the Campbell boys’—or even, with certainty, whether the voices were coming from the Campbells’ part of the Hill.
From a distance, all children’s voices sound the same.
“And listen! Listen!—you know what else she brought me, Margie? Listen! I’m trying to tell you something.”
“Wha-ut?”
Margie Rothenberg and her little brother George and Mary Jane Crawford and Edna Slater were there, fooling around at the place by the hedge where all the grass was worn away, the place with the little cave and the flat rock where they kept their collection of Dixie Cup lids.
“I said you know what else she brought me? My mother? She brought me this beautiful blue cashmere sweater, for school, and socks that match, and this beautiful little perfume atomizer? This little bottle with a thing that you squeeze? With real perfume in it? Oh, and we drove into White plains with Mr. Minton, that’s my mother’s friend, and we went to the movies and had ice cream and everything, and I stayed up till ten minutes after eleven.”
“How come she was only here two days?” Margie Rothenberg inquired. “You said she was staying a week. George, you quit that now!”
“I did not; I said she might stay a week. Next time she probably will, or maybe I’ll go and stay a week with her, and if I do that—”
“George! The very next time you pick your nose and eat it I’m gonna tell! I mean it!”
“—and if I do that, you know what? If I do that I won’t have to go to school or anything for a whole week; ha, ha. Hey Margie? You want to come home and see my sweater and stuff?”
“I can’t. I have to get home in time for ‘Don Winslow.’”
“We can hear ‘Don Winslow’ in my house. Come on.”
“I can’t. I have to get home. Come on, Georgie.”
“Hey Edna? Hey Mary Jane? Know what my mother brought me? She brought me this beautiful—Hey, listen Edna. Listen…” There was the sound of an upstairs window rattling open, and she knew that if she turned around she would see the dim shape of Aunt Claire peering out through the copper screen.
“Aay-prul!”
“She brought me this beautiful blue sweater, it’s cashmere, and this beautiful—”
“Aay-prul!”
“What? I’m over here.”
“Why didn’t you answer, then? I want you to come in this instant and get washed and changed. Your father just called. He’s driving out and he’ll be here in fifteen minutes.”
And she ran for the house so fast that her sneakers seemed hardly to touch the ground. Nothing like this had ever, ever happened before: two whole days with her mother, and then, now, the very next day…
She took the stairs two at a time and flew to her room and began to undress in such haste that she popped a button off her blouse, saying, “When did he call? What did he say? How long is he staying?”
“I don’t know, dear; he said he’s on his way up to Boston. You certainly don’t need to tear your clothes. There’s plenty of time.”
Then she was out on the front porch in her party dress, watching down the street for the first glimpse of his long, high-wheeled, beautiful touring car. When it did come into sight, two blocks away, she forced herself not to start running down the path; she waited until it pulled up and stopped in front of the house, so she could watch him get out.
And oh, how tall, how wonderfully slender and straight he was! How golden the sunlight shone on his hair and his laughing face—“Daddy!”—and then she was running, and then she was in his arms.
“How’s my sweetheart?” He smelled of linen and whiskey and tobacco; the short hairs at the back of his neck were bristly to the touch and his jaw was like a warm pumice stone. But his voice was the best of all: as deep and thrilling as blowing across the mouth of an earthen jug. “Do you know you’ve grown about three feet? I don’t know if I can handle a girl as big as you. Can’t carry you, anyway; I know that much. Let’s go on in and see your Aunt Claire. How’s everything? How’re all your boy friends?”
In the living room, talking with Aunt Claire, he was marvelous. His slim ankles, beneath trouser cuffs that had been raised to just the right height, were clad in taut socks of fluted black wool; his dark brown shoes were so shapely and so gracefully arranged on the carpet, one a little forward and one back, that she felt she ought to study them for a long time, to commit them to memory as the way a man’s feet ought to look. But her gaze kept straying upward to his princely knees, to his close-fitting vest with its fine little drape of watch chain, to the way he held himself in his chair and to his white-cuffed wrists and hands, one holding a highball glass and the other making slow, easy gestures in the air, and to his brilliant face. There was too much of him for the eye to behold all at once.
He was finishing a joke: “…so Eleanor drew herself up and said, ‘Young man, you’re drunk.’ The fellow looked at her and he said, ‘That’s true, Mrs. Roosevelt, I am.’ He said, ‘But here’s the difference, Mrs. Roosevelt: I’ll be all right in the morning.’”
Aunt Claire’s thick torso doubled over into her lap and April pretended to think it was unbearably funny too, though she hadn’t heard the first part and wasn’t sure if she would have understood it anyway. But the laughter had scarcely died in the room before he was getting up to leave.
“You mean you’re—you mean you’re not even staying for dinner, Daddy?”
“Sweetie, I’d love to, but I’ve got these people waiting in Boston and
they’re going to be very, very angry with your Daddy if he doesn’t get up there in a hurry. How about a kiss?”
And then, hating herself for it, she began acting like a baby. “But you’ve only stayed about an hour. And you—you didn’t even bring me a present or anything and you—”
“Oh, Ape-rull,” Aunt Claire was saying. “Why do you want to go and spoil a nice visit?”
But at least he wasn’t standing up any more: he had squatted nimbly beside her and put his arm around her. “Sweetie, I’m afraid you’re right about the present, and I feel like a dog about it. Listen, though. Tell you what. Let’s you and I go out to the car and rummage through my stuff, and maybe we can find something after all. Want to try?”
Darkness was falling as they left Aunt Claire and walked together down the path, and the silent interior of the car was filled with a thrilling sense of latent power and speed. When he turned on the dashboard lights it was like being in a trim, leathery home of their own. Everything they would ever need for living together was here: comfortable places to sit, a means of travel, a lighter for his cigarettes, a little shelf on which she could spread a napkin for the sandwiches and milk that would comprise their meals on the road; and the front and back seats were big enough for sleeping.
“Glove compartment?” he was saying. “Nope; nothing in here but a lot of old maps and things. Well, let’s try the suitcase.” He twisted around and reached into the back seat, where he unfastened the clasps of a big Gladstone. “Let’s see, now. Socks; shirts; that’s no good. Gee, this is quite a problem. You know something? A man ought never to travel without a fresh supply of bangles and spangles; can’t ever tell when he might come across a pretty girl. Oh, look. Wait a second, here’s something. Not much, of course, but something.” He drew out a long brown bottle with the picture of a horse and the words “White Horse” on its label. Something very small was attached to its neck by a ribbon, but he concealed it from view until he opened his penknife and cut it free. Then, holding it by the ribbon, he laid it delicately in her hand—a tiny, perfect white horse.
“There you are, my darling,” he said. “And you can keep it forever.”
The fire was out. She prodded the blackened lumps of paper with a stick to make sure they had burned; there was nothing but ashes.
The children’s voices faintly followed her as she carried the wastebasket back across the lawn; only by going inside and closing the door was she able to shut them out. She turned off the radio too, and the house became extraordinarily quiet.
She put the wastebasket back in its place and sat down at the desk again with a fresh sheet of paper. This time the letter took no time at all to write. There was only one big, important thing to say, and it was best said in a very few words—so few as to allow no possible elaborations or distortions of meaning.
Dear Frank,
Whatever happens please don’t blame yourself.
From old, insidious habit she almost added the words I love you, but she caught herself in time and made the signature plain: April. She put it in an envelope, wrote Frank on the outside, and left it on the exact center of the desk.
In the kitchen she took down her largest stewing pot, filled it with water and set it on the stove to boil. From storage cartons in the cellar she got out the other necessary pieces of equipment: the tongs that had once been used for sterilizing formula bottles, and the blue drugstore box containing the two parts of the syringe, rubber bulb and long plastic nozzle. She dropped these things in the stewing pot, which was just beginning to steam.
By the time she’d made the other preparations, putting a supply of fresh towels in the bathroom, writing down the number of the hospital and propping it by the telephone, the water was boiling nicely. It was wobbling the lid of the pot and causing the syringe to nudge and rumble against its sides.
It was nine-thirty. In another ten minutes she would turn off the heat; then it would take a while for the water to cool. In the meantime there was nothing to do but wait.
“Have you thought it through, April? Never undertake to do a thing until you’ve—”
But she needed no more advice and no more instruction. She was calm and quiet now with knowing what she had always known, what neither her parents nor Aunt Claire nor Frank nor anyone else had ever had to teach her: that if you wanted to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone.
EIGHT
AT TWO O’CLOCK that afternoon, Milly Campbell had just completed her housework. She was resting on the television hassock, addled with the smells of dust and floorwax and with the noise of the children outside (six kids were really too many for one person to handle, even for a couple of days) and she always said afterwards that she had “this very definite sense of foreboding” for at least a minute before hearing the sound that confirmed it.
It was a sound of emergency—of Fire, Murder, Police—the deep, shockingly loud purr that an automobile siren makes when the driver has just gotten started and has had to slow down for a turn before opening up to full speed. She got to the window in the nick of time to see it, down over the tops of the trees below the lawn: the long shape of an ambulance turning out of Revolutionary Road, catching the sun in a quick, brilliant reflection as it straightened out and pulled away down Route Twelve with its siren mounting higher and higher into a sustained, unbearable shriek that hung in the air long after the ambulance itself had vanished in the distance. It left her chewing her lips with worry.
“I mean I knew there were plenty of other people on that road,” she said afterwards. “It could’ve been anybody, but I just had this feeling it was April. I started to call her but then I stopped because I knew it would sound silly, and I thought she might be sleeping.”
So she sat uneasily at the telephone until it suddenly burst into ringing. It was Mrs. Givings, making the receiver vibrate painfully against Milly’s ear.
“Do you know what’s happened at the Wheelers’? Because I was just going past their place and there was an ambulance coming out of their drive, and I’m terribly alarmed. And now I’ve been trying to call them and there’s no answer…”
“I almost died,” Milly explained later. “After she hung up I just sat there feeling sick, and then I did what I always do when something horrible happens. I called Shep.”
Slowly rubbing the back of his neck as he stood looking out a window of the Allied Precision Laboratories, Inc., Shep Campbell was lost in a muddled reverie. For a week now, ever since the incredible night at the Log Cabin, he hadn’t been of much use to Allied Precision, to Milly or to himself. On the first day, like any lovesick kid, he had called her up from a phone booth and said, “April, when can I see you?” and she’d made it clear, in so many words, that he couldn’t see her at all and that he should have known better than to ask. The memory of this had rankled him all that night and the next day—God, what a loutish, unsophisticated clown she must have thought him—and caused him to spend many hours in whispered rehearsal of the cool, mature, understanding things he would say when he called her again. But when he got into the phone booth again he loused everything up. All the carefully practiced lines came out wrong, his voice was shaking like a fool’s and he started saying he loved her again, and the whole thing ended with her saying, kindly but firmly: “Look Shep; I really don’t want to hang up on you, but I’m afraid I’ll have to unless you hang up first.”
He had seen her only once. Yesterday, when she brought her kids over to the house, he had hidden trembling in the bedroom and peeked down through the dimity curtains to watch her getting out of her car—a tired, pregnant woman—and he couldn’t see her steadily for the beating of his heart.
“Phone, Mr. Campbell,” one of the girls called, and as he moved to pick it up at his desk he wondered, against all reasonable logic, if it might be April. It wasn’t.
“Hi, baby—what? Listen, now, calm down. Who’s in the hospital? When? Oh Jesus.”
But the
remarkable thing was that for the first time all week he felt a sense of competence. His rump dropped lightly to the felt pad of his chair, his legs flexed under it in a kind of squat, and he nestled the phone at his cheek with one hand and held his mechanical pencil poised in the other—a tense, steady paratrooper, ready for action.
“Calm down a second,” he told her. “Have you called the hospital yet? Honey, that’s the first thing we ought to do, before we start calling Frank…. Okay, okay, I know you’re all upset. I’ll call them and find out, and then I’ll call him. Now listen, you take it easy, hear me?” His pencil made a number of resolutely parallel lines on a scratch pad. “Okay,” he said. “And for God’s sake don’t let on to the kids that anything’s wrong—our kids or their kids…. Okay…. Okay, right. I’ll call you.”
Then he had the hospital on the phone and he was briskly cutting through all the confusion of the switchboard, dismissing the voices that couldn’t help him and taking just the right tone of quick, commanding inquiry with those that could.
“…undergoing emergency what?…Well, but I mean treatment for what?…Oh. You mean she had a miscarriage. Well, look: can you tell me how she is?…I see. And do you know how long that’ll be?…Doctor what?” His pencil jumped and wiggled as he wrote down the name. “Okay. One more thing: has anyone notified her husband yet?…Okay. Thanks.”
Hunching still lower over the phone, he put through a call to Knox Business Machines in New York.
“Mr. Frank Wheeler, please…. He’s where?…Well, get him out of conference, then. This is an emergency.” And only then, while he waited, did his guts begin to tighten with anxiety.