“Listen a minute. I won’t touch you. I just want to say I’m sorry.”
“That’s wonderful. Now will you please leave me alone?”
THREE
A SHRILL METALLIC WHINE cut through the silence of his sleep. He tried to hide from it, huddling deeper into a cool darkness where the mists of an absorbing dream still floated, but it came tearing back again and again until his eyes popped open in the sunshine.
It was after eleven o’clock, Saturday morning. Both his nostrils were plugged as if with rubber cement, his head ached, and the first fly of the season was crawling up the inside of a clouded whiskey glass that stood on the floor beside a nearly empty bottle. Only after making these discoveries did he begin to remember the events of the night—how he’d sat here drinking until four in the morning, methodically scratching his scalp with both hands, convinced that sleep was out of the question. And only after remembering this did his mind come into focus on an explanation of the noise: it was his own rusty lawnmower, which needed oiling. Somebody was cutting the grass in the back yard, a thing he had promised to do last weekend.
He rolled heavily upright and groped for his bathrobe, moistening the wrinkled roof of his mouth. Then he went and squinted through the brilliant window. It was April herself, stolidly pushing and hauling the old machine, wearing a man’s shirt and a pair of loose, flapping slacks, while both children romped behind her with handfuls of cut grass.
In the bathroom he used enough cold water and toothpaste and Kleenex to revive the working parts of his head; he restored its ability to gather oxygen and regained a certain muscular control over its features. But nothing could be done about his hands. Bloated and pale, they felt as if all their bones had been painlessly removed. A command to clench them into fists would have sent him whimpering to his knees. Looking at them, and particularly at the bitten-down nails that never in his life had had a chance to grow, he wanted to beat and bruise them against the edge of the sink. He thought then of his father’s hands, and this reminded him that his dream just now, just before the lawnmower and the headache and the sun, had been of a dim and deeply tranquil time long ago. Both his parents had been there, and he’d heard his mother say, “Oh, don’t wake him, Earl; let him sleep.” He tried his best to remember more of it, and couldn’t; but the tenderness of it brought him close to tears for a moment until it faded away.
They had both been dead for several years now, and it sometimes troubled him that he could remember neither of their faces very well. To his waking memory, without the aid of photographs, his father was a vague bald head with dense eyebrows and a mouth forever fixed in the shape either of disgruntlement or exasperation, his mother a pair of rimless spectacles, a hair net, and a timorous smear of lipstick. He remembered too, of both of them, that they’d always been tired. Middle-aged at the time of his birth and already tired then from having raised two other sons, they had grown steadily more and more tired as long as he’d known them, until finally, tired out, they had died with equal ease, in their sleep, within six months of each other. But there had never been anything tired about his father’s hands, and no amount of time and forgetfulness had ever dimmed their image in his mind’s eye.
“Open it!” That was one of his earliest memories: the challenge to loosen one big fist, and his frantic two-handed efforts, never succeeding, to uncoil a single finger from its massively quivering grip, while his father’s laughter rang from the kitchen walls. But it wasn’t only their strength he envied, it was their sureness and sensitivity—when they held a thing, you could see how it felt—and the aura of mastery they imparted to everything Earl Wheeler used: the creaking pigskin handle of his salesman’s briefcase, the hafts of all his woodworking tools, the thrillingly dangerous stock and trigger of his shotgun. The briefcase had been of particular fascination to Frank at the age of five or six; it always stood in the shadows of the front hallway in the evenings, and sometimes after supper he would saunter manfully up to it and pretend it was his own. How fine and smooth, yet how impossibly thick its handle felt! It was heavy (Whew!) yet how lightly it would swing at his father’s side in the morning! Later, at ten or twelve, he had become familiar with the carpentry tools as well, but none of his memories of them were pleasant. “No, boy, no!” his father would shout over the scream of the power saw. “You’re ruining it! Can’t you see you’re ruining it? That’s no way to handle a tool.” The tool, whatever obstinate thing it was, chisel or gouge or brace-and-bit, would be snatched away from the failure of its dismally sweat-stained woodwork and held aloft to be minutely inspected for damage. Then there would be a lecture on the proper care and handling of tools, to be followed by a gracefully expert demonstration (during which the grains of wood clung like gold in the hair of his father’s forearm) or more likely by a sigh of manly endurance pressed to the breaking point and the quiet words: “All right. You’d better go on upstairs.” Things had always ended that way in the woodworking shop, and even today he could never breathe the yellow smell of sawdust without a sense of humiliation. The shotgun, luckily, had never come to a test. By the time he was old enough to go along on one of his father’s increasingly rare hunting trips the chronic discord between them had long precluded any chance of it. It would never have occurred to the old man to suggest such a thing, and what’s more—for this was the period of his freight-train dreams—it would never have occurred to Frank to desire the suggestion. Who wanted to sit in a puddle and kill a lot of ducks? Who, for that matter, wanted to be good with hobbyist’s tools? And who wanted to be a dopey salesman in the first place, acting like a big deal with a briefcase full of boring catalogues, talking about machines all day to a bunch of dumb executives with cigars?
Yet even in those days and afterwards, even in the extremities of rebellion on Bethune Street, when his father had become a dreary, querulous old fool nodding to sleep over the Reader’s Digest, then as now he continued to believe that something unique and splendid had lived in his father’s hands. On Earl Wheeler’s very deathbed, when he was shrunken and blind and cackling (“Who’s that? Frank? Is that Frank?”) the dry clasp of his hands had been as positive as ever, and when they lay loose and still on the hospital sheet at last they still looked stronger and better than his son’s.
“Boy, I guess the headshrinkers could really have a ball with me,” he liked to say, wryly, among friends. “I mean the whole deal of my relationship with my father alone’d be enough to fill a textbook, not to mention my mother. Jesus, what a little nest of neuroses we must’ve been.” All the same, in moments of troubled solitude like this, he was glad he could muster some vestige of honest affection for his parents. He was grateful that however uneasy the rest of his life had turned out to be, it had once contained enough peace to give him pleasant dreams; and he often suspected, with more than a little righteousness, that this might be what kept him essentially more stable than his wife. Because if the headshrinkers could have a ball with him, God only knew what kind of a time they would have with April.
In all the scanty stories she told about them, her parents were as alien to his sympathetic understanding as anything in the novels of Evelyn Waugh. Had people like that ever really existed? He could picture them only as flickering caricatures of the twenties, the Playboy and the Flapper, mysteriously rich and careless and cruel, married by a ship’s captain in mid-Atlantic and divorced within a year of the birth of their only child.
“I think my mother must’ve taken me straight from the hospital to Aunt Mary’s,” she’d told him. “At any rate I don’t think I ever lived with anyone but Aunt Mary until I was five, and then there were a couple of other aunts, or friends of hers or something, before I went to Aunt Claire, in Rye.” The rest of the story was that her father had shot himself in a Boston hotel room in 1938, and that her mother had died some years later after long incarceration in a West Coast alcoholic retreat.
“Jesus,” Frank said on first hearing these facts, one irritably hot summer night in the Bethune Street
place (though he wasn’t quite sure at the time, as he hung and shook his head, whether what he felt was sorrow for the unhappiness of the story or envy because it was so much more dramatic a story than his own). “Well,” he said. “I guess your aunt always really seemed like your mother, though, didn’t she?”
But April shrugged, drawing her mouth a little to one side in a way that he’d lately decided he didn’t like—her “tough” look. “Which aunt do you mean? I hardly remember Mary, or the others in between, and I always hated Claire.”
“Oh, come on. How can you say you ‘always hated’ her? I mean maybe it seems that way now, looking back, but over the years she must’ve given you a certain feeling of—you know, love, and security and everything.”
“She didn’t, though. The only real fun I ever had was when one of my parents came for a visit. They were the ones I loved.”
“But they hardly ever came for visits. I mean you couldn’t have had much sense of their being your parents, in a deal like that; you didn’t even know them. How could you love them?”
“I did, that’s all.” And she began picking up and putting away again, in her jewelry box, the souvenirs she had spread before him on the bed: snapshots of herself at various ages, on various lawns, standing with one or the other parent; a miniature painting of her mother’s pretty head; a yellowed, leather-framed photograph showing both parents, tall and elegantly dressed beside a palm tree, with the inscription Cannes, 1925; her mother’s wedding ring; an ancient brooch containing a lock of her maternal grandmother’s hair; a tiny white plastic horse, the size of a watch charm, which had a net value of two or three cents and had been saved for years because “my father gave it to me.”
“Oh, all right, sure,” he conceded. “Maybe they did seem romantic and everything; they probably seemed very dazzling and glamorous and all that. The point is, I don’t mean that. I mean love.”
“So do I. I did love them.” Her grave silence following this statement, as she fastened the clasp of the jewelry box, was so prolonged that he thought she had finished with the subject. He decided he was finished with it anyway, at least for the time being. It was too hot a night to have an argument. But it turned out that she was only thinking it over, preparing her next words with great care to make sure they would say exactly what she meant. When she began to speak at last she looked so much like the little girl in the photographs that he was ashamed of himself. “I loved their clothes,” she said. “I loved the way they talked. I loved to hear them tell about their lives.”
And there was nothing for him to do but take her in his arms, full of pity for the meagerness of her treasure and full of a reverent, silent promise, soon to be broken, that he would never again disparage it.
A small stain of drying milk and cereal on the table was all that remained of the children’s breakfast; the rest of the kitchen gleamed to an industrial perfection of cleanliness. He planned, as soon as he’d had some coffee, to get dressed and go out and take the lawnmower away from her, by force if necessary, in order to restore as much balance to the morning as possible. But he was still in his bathrobe, unshaven and fumbling at the knobs of the electric stove, when Mrs. Givings’s station wagon came crackling up the driveway. For a second he thought of hiding, but it was too late. She had already seen him through the screen door, and April, trudging along the far border of the back yard, had already escaped her with a wave across the wide expanse of grass and gone on mowing. He was caught. He had to open the door and stand there in an attitude of welcome. Why did this woman keep bothering them all the time?
“I can’t stay a minute!” she cried, staggering toward him under the weight of a damp cardboard box full of earth and wobbling vegetation. “I just wanted to bring over this sedum for the rocky place at the foot of your drive. My, don’t you look comfy.”
He bent into an ungainly pose, trying to hold the door open with one trailing foot while he took the box from her arms. “Well,” he said, smiling very close to her tense, powdery face. Mrs. Givings’s cosmetics seemed always to have been applied in a frenzy of haste, of impatience to get the whole silly business over and done with, and she was constantly in motion, a trim, leather-skinned woman in her fifties whose eyes expressed a religious belief in the importance of keeping busy. Even when she stood still there was kinetic energy in the set of her shoulders and the hang of her loose, angrily buttoned-up clothes; when sitting was inevitable she always chose straight chairs and used them sparingly, and it was hard to imagine her ever lying down. Nor was it easy to picture her face asleep, free from the tension of its false smiles, its little bursts of social laughter and its talk.
“I really think this is just what’s called for down there, don’t you?” she was saying. “Have you worked with this type of sedum before? You’ll find it’s the most marvelous ground cover, even in this acid soil.”
“Well,” he said again. “That’s fine. Thanks a lot, Mrs. Givings.” Nearly two years ago she had asked them to call her Helen, a name his tongue seemed all but unable to pronounce. Usually he solved the problem by calling her nothing, covering the lack with friendly nods and smiles, and she had taken to calling him nothing either. Now, as her small eyes seemed to take in for the first time the fact that his wife was cutting the grass while he lounged around the kitchen in a bathrobe, they stood smiling at each other with uncommon brilliance. He let the screen clap shut behind him and adjusted his grip on the box, which wobbled in his arms and sent a fine stream of sand down his naked ankle.
“What should we—you know, do with it?” he asked her. “I mean, you know, to make it grow and everything.”
“Well, nothing really. All it wants is just a tiny dollop of water the first few days, and then you’ll find it absolutely thrives. It’s rather like the European houseleek, you see, except of course that has the lovely pink flower and this has the yellow.”
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “House leak.” She told him a good many other things about the plants, while he nodded and watched her and wished she would go away, listening to the whir and whine of the lawnmower. “Well,” he said when her voice stopped. “That’s swell, thanks a lot. Can I—offer you a cup of coffee?”
“Oh, no, thanks ever so much—” She skittered four or five feet away, retreating, as if he had offered her a soiled handkerchief to blow her nose in. Then, from the safety of her new position, she displayed all her long teeth in an elaborate smile. “Do tell April we loved the play last night—or wait, I’ll tell her myself.” She craned and squinted into the sun, judging the distance her voice would have to travel, and then she let it loose:
“April! April! I just wanted to tell you we loved the play!” Her strained, shouting face could have been the picture of a woman in agony.
After a second the sound of the lawnmower stopped and April’s distant voice said, “What’s that?”
“I say, we LOVED, the PLAY!”
And at last, on hearing April’s faint “Oh—thanks, Helen,” she was able to slacken her features. She turned back to Frank, who was still clumsily holding the box. “You really do have a very gifted wife. I can’t tell you how much Howard and I enjoyed it.”
“Good,” he said. “Actually, I think the general consensus is that it wasn’t too great. I mean I think most people seemed to feel that way.”
“Oh, no, it was charming. I did think your nice friend up on the Hill was rather unfortunately cast—Mr. Crandall?—but otherwise—”
“Campbell, yes. Actually, I don’t think he was any worse than some of the others; and of course he did have a difficult part.” He always felt it necessary to defend the Campbells to Mrs. Givings, whose view seemed to be that anyone who lived in the Revolutionary Hill Estates deserved at best a tactful condescension.
“I suppose that’s true. I was surprised not to see Mrs. Crandall in the group—or Campbell, is it? Still, I don’t expect she’d have the time, with all those children.”
“She worked backstage.” He was trying to shift the bo
x so that the sand would stop trickling, or trickle somewhere else. “She was quite active in the whole thing, as a matter of fact.”
“Oh, good. I’m sure she would be; such a friendly, willing little soul. All right, then—” She began sidling toward her car. “I won’t keep you.” This was the moment for her saying “Oh, one other thing, while I think of it.” She nearly always did that, and the other thing would turn out to be the thing she had really come for in the first place. Now she hesitated, visibly wondering whether to say it or not; then her face showed her decision not to, under the circumstances. Whatever it was would have to wait. “Fine, then. I simply love the stone path you’ve started down the front lawn.”
“Oh,” he said. “Thanks. I haven’t hardly started it yet.”
“Oh, I know,” she assured him. “It is hard work.” Then she trilled a gracious little two-note song of goodbye and twitched into her station wagon, which rolled slowly away.
“Mommy, look what Daddy’s got,” Jennifer was calling. “Mrs. Givings brought it.”
And Michael, the four-year-old, said, “It’s flowers. Is it flowers, or what?”
They were hurrying toward him over the cropped grass, while April slowly and heavily brought up the rear, pulling the lawnmower behind her, blowing damp strands of hair away from her eyes with a stuck-out lower lip. Everything about her seemed determined to prove, with a new, flatfooted emphasis, that a sensible middle-class housewife was all she had ever wanted to be and that all she had ever wanted of love was a husband who would get out and cut the grass once in a while, instead of sleeping all day.
“It’s leaking, Daddy,” Jennifer said.
“I know it’s leaking. Quiet a minute. Listen,” he said to his wife, without quite looking at her. “Would you mind telling me what I’m supposed to do with this stuff?”
“How should I know? What is it?”