“I don’t know what the hell it is. It’s European house leak or something.”
“European what?”
“Oh no, wait a second. It’s like house leak, only it’s pink instead of yellow. Yellow instead of pink. I thought you’d probably know all about it.”
“Whatever made you think that?” She came up close to squint at the plants, fingering one of their fleshy stems. “What’s it for? Didn’t she say?”
His mind was a blank. “Wait a second. It’s called beecham. Or wait—seecham. I’m pretty sure it’s seecham.” He licked his lips and changed his grip on the box. “It’s marvelous in acid soil. Does that ring a bell?”
The children were switching their hopeful eyes from one parent to the other, and Jennifer was beginning to look worried.
April ran her fingers into her hip pockets. “Marvelous for what? You mean you didn’t even ask her?”
The plants were quivering in his arms. “Look, could you kind of take it easy? I haven’t had any coffee yet, and I—”
“Oh, this is swell. What am I supposed to do with this stuff? What am I supposed to tell the woman the next time I see her?”
“Tell her any God damn thing you like,” he said. “Maybe you could tell her to mind her own God damn business for a change.”
“Don’t shout, Daddy.” Jennifer was bouncing up and down in her grass-stained sneakers, flapping her hands and starting to cry.
“I’m not shouting,” he told her, with all the indignation of the falsely accused. She held still then and put her thumb in her mouth, which seemed to make her eyes go out of focus, while Michael clutched at the fly of his pants and took two backward steps, solemn with embarrassment.
April sighed and raked back a lock of hair. “All right,” she said. “Take it down to the cellar, then. The least we can do is get it out of sight. Then you’d better get dressed. It’s time for lunch.”
He carried the box down the cellar stairs, dropped it on the floor with a rustling thud and kicked it into a corner, sending a sharp pain through the tendon of his big toe.
He spent the afternoon in an old pair of army pants and a torn shirt, working on his stone path. The idea was to lay a long, curving walk from the front door to the road, to divert visitors from coming in through the kitchen. It had seemed simple enough last weekend, when he’d started it, but now as the ground sloped off more sharply he found that flat stones wouldn’t work. He had to make steps, of stones nearly as thick as they were wide, stones that had to be dislodged from the steep woods behind the house and carried on tottering legs around to the front lawn. And he had to dig a pit for each step, in ground so rocky that it took ten minutes to get a foot below the surface. It was turning into mindless, unrewarding work, the kind of work that makes you clumsy with fatigue and petulant with lack of progress, and it looked as if it would take all summer.
Even so, once the first puffing and dizziness was over, he began to like the muscular pull and the sweat of it, and the smell of the earth. At least it was a man’s work. At least, squatting to rest on the wooded slope, he could look down and see his house the way a house ought to look on a fine spring day, safe on its carpet of green, the frail white sanctuary of a man’s love, a man’s wife and children. Lowering his eyes with the solemnity of this thought, he could take pleasure in the sight of his own flexed thigh, lean and straining under the old O.D., and of the heavily veined forearm that lay across it and the dirty hand that hung there—not to be compared with his father’s hand, maybe, but a serviceable, good-enough hand all the same—so that his temples ached in zeal and triumph as he heaved a rock up from the suck of its white-wormed socket and let it roll end over end down the shuddering leafmold, because he was a man. Following it down to the edge of the lawn, he squatted over it again, grunted, wrestled it up to his thighs and from there to his waist, cradling it in the tender flesh of his forearms; then he moved out, glassy-eyed and staggering on the soft grass, out around the white blur of the house and into the sun of the front lawn and all the way over to the path, where he dropped it and nearly fell in a heap on top of it.
“We’re helping you, aren’t we, Daddy?” Jennifer said. Both children had come to sit near him on the grass. The sun made perfect circles of yellow on their two blond heads and gave their T-shirts a dazzling whiteness.
“You sure are,” he said.
“Yes, because you like to have us keep you company, don’t you?”
“I sure do, baby. Don’t get too close now, you’ll kick dirt in the hole.” And he fell to work with the long-handled shovel to deepen the hollow he had dug, enjoying the rhythmic rasp and grip of the blade against a loosening edge of buried rock.
“Daddy?” Michael inquired. “Why does the shovel make sparks?”
“Because it’s hitting rock. When you hit rock with steel, you get a spark.”
“Why don’t you take the rock out?”
“That’s what I’m trying to do. Don’t get so close now, you might get hurt.”
The piece of rock came free at last; he lifted it out and knelt to claw at the sliding tan pebbles of the pit until the depth and the shape of it looked right. Then he heaved and rolled the boulder into place and packed it tight, and another step was completed. A light swarm of gnats had come to hover around his head, tickling and barely visible as they hung and flicked past his eyes.
“Daddy?” Jennifer said. “How come Mommy slept on the sofa?”
“I don’t know. Just happened to feel like it, I guess. You wait here, now, while I go and get another stone.”
And the more he thought about it, as he plodded back up through the trees behind the house, the more he realized that this was the best answer he could have given, from the standpoint of simple honesty as well as tact. She just happened to feel like it. Wasn’t that, after all, the only reason there was? Had she ever had a less selfish, more complicated reason for doing anything in her life?
“I love you when you’re nice,” she’d told him once, before they were married, and it had made him furious.
“Don’t say that. Christ’s sake, you don’t ‘love’ people when they’re ‘nice.’ Don’t you see that’s the same as saying ‘What’s in it for me?’ Look.” (They were standing on Sixth Avenue in the middle of the night, and he was holding her at arm’s length, his hands placed firmly on either side of the warm rib cage inside her polo coat.) “Look. You either love me or you don’t, and you’re going to have to make up your mind.”
Oh, she’d made up her mind, all right. It had been easy to decide in favor of love on Bethune Street, in favor of walking proud and naked on the grass rug of an apartment that caught the morning sun among its makeshift chairs, its French travel posters and its bookcase made of packing-crate slats—an apartment where half the fun of having an affair was that it was just like being married, and where later, after a trip to City Hall and back, after a ceremonial collecting of the other two keys from the other two men, half the fun of being married was that it was just like having an affair. She’d decided in favor of that, all right. And why not? Wasn’t it the first love of any kind she’d ever known? Even on the level of practical advantage it must have held an undeniable appeal: it freed her from the gritty round of disappointment she would otherwise have faced as an only mildly talented, mildly enthusiastic graduate of dramatic school; it let her languish attractively through a part-time office job (“just until my husband finds the kind of work he really wants to do”) while saving her best energies for animated discussions of books and pictures and the shortcomings of other people’s personalities, for trying new ways of fixing her hair and new kinds of inexpensive clothes (“Do you really like the sandals, or are they too Villagey?”) and for hours of unhurried dalliance deep in their double bed. But even in those days she’d held herself poised for immediate flight; she had always been ready to take off the minute she happened to feel like it (“Don’t talk to me that way, Frank, or I’m leaving. I mean it”) or the minute anything went wrong.
>
And one big thing went wrong right away. According to their plan, which called for an eventual family of four, her first pregnancy came seven years too soon. That was the trouble, and if he’d known her better then he might have guessed how she would take it and what she would happen to feel like doing about it. At the time, though, coming home from the doctor’s office in a steaming crosstown bus, he was wholly in the dark. She refused to look at him as they rode; she carried her head high in a state of shock or disbelief or anger or blame—it could have been any or all or none of these things, for all he knew. Pressed close and sweating beside her with his jaw set numbly in a brave smile, trying to think of things to say, he knew only that everything was out of kilter. Whatever you felt on hearing the news of conception, even if it was chagrin instead of joy, wasn’t it supposed to be something the two of you shared? Your wife wasn’t supposed to turn away from you, was she? You weren’t supposed to have to work and wheedle to win her back, with little jokes and hand-holdings, as if you were afraid she might evaporate at the very moment of this first authentic involvement of your lives—that couldn’t be right. Then what the hell was the matter?
It wasn’t until a week later that he came home to find her stalking the apartment with folded arms, her eyes remote and her face fixed in the special look that meant she had made up her mind about something and would stand for no nonsense.
“Frank, listen. Try not to start talking until I finish, and just listen.” And in an oddly stifled voice, as if she’d rehearsed her speech several times without allowing for the fact that she’d have to breathe while delivering it, she told him of a girl in dramatic school who knew, from first-hand experience, an absolutely infallible way to induce a miscarriage. It was simplicity itself: you waited until just the right time, the end of the third month; then you took a sterilized rubber syringe and a little bit of sterilized water, and you very carefully…
Even as he filled his lungs for shouting he knew it wasn’t the idea itself that repelled him—the idea itself, God knew, was more than a little attractive—it was that she had done all this on her own, in secret, had sought out the girl and obtained the facts and bought the rubber syringe and rehearsed the speech; that if she’d thought about him at all it was only as a possible hitch in the scheme, a source of tiresome objections that would have to be cleared up and disposed of if the thing were to be carried out with maximum efficiency. That was the intolerable part of it; that was what enriched his voice with a tremor of outrage:
“Christ’s sake, don’t be an idiot. You want to kill yourself? I don’t even want to hear about it.”
She sighed patiently. “All right, Frank. In that case there’s certainly no need for you to hear about it. I only told you because I thought you might be willing to help me in this thing. Obviously, I should have known better.”
“Listen. Listen to me. You do this—you do this and I swear to God I’ll—”
“Oh, you’ll what? You’ll leave me? What’s that supposed to be—a threat or a promise?”
And the fight went on all night. It caused them to hiss and grapple and knock over a chair, it spilled outside and downstairs and into the street (“Get away from me! Get away from me!”); it washed them trembling up against the high wire fence of a waterfront junkyard, until a waterfront drunk came to stare at them and make them waver home, and he could feel the panic and the shame of it even now, leaning here against this tree with these gnats tickling his neck. All that saved him, all that enabled him now to crouch and lift a new stone from its socket and follow its rumbling fall with the steady and dignified tread of self-respect, was that the next day he had won. The next day, weeping in his arms, she had allowed herself to be dissuaded.
“Oh, I know, I know,” she had whispered against his shirt, “I know you’re right. I’m sorry. I love you. We’ll name it Frank and we’ll send it to college and everything. I promise, promise.”
And it seemed to him now that no single moment of his life had ever contained a better proof of manhood than that, if any proof were needed: holding that tamed, submissive girl and saying, “Oh, my lovely; oh, my lovely,” while she promised she would bear his child. Lurching and swaying under the weight of the stone in the sun, dropping it at last and wiping his sore hands, he picked up the shovel and went to work again, while the children’s voices fluted and chirped around him, as insidiously torturing as the gnats.
And I didn’t even want a baby, he thought to the rhythm of his digging. Isn’t that the damnedest thing? I didn’t want a baby any more than she did. Wasn’t it true, then, that everything in his life from that point on had been a succession of things he hadn’t really wanted to do? Taking a hopelessly dull job to prove he could be as responsible as any other family man, moving to an overpriced, genteel apartment to prove his mature belief in the fundamentals of orderliness and good health, having another child to prove that the first one hadn’t been a mistake, buying a house in the country because that was the next logical step and he had to prove himself capable of taking it. Proving, proving; and for no other reason than that he was married to a woman who had somehow managed to put him forever on the defensive, who loved him when he was nice, who lived according to what she happened to feel like doing and who might at any time—this was the hell of it—who might at any time of day or night just happen to feel like leaving him. It was as ludicrous and as simple as that.
“Are you hitting rock again, Daddy?”
“Not this time,” he said. “This is a root. I think it’s too deep to matter, though. If you’ll just get out of the way now, I’ll try and fit the stone in.”
Kneeling, he rolled the boulder into place, but it wouldn’t settle. It wobbled, and it sat three inches too high.
“That’s too high, Daddy.”
“I know it, baby.” He laboriously pried the stone out again and began hacking at the root, trying to cut it, using the shovel like a clumsy ax. It was as tough as cartilage.
“Sweetie, I said don’t come so close. You’re kicking dirt in the hole.”
“I’m helping, Daddy.”
Jennifer looked hurt and surprised, and he thought she might be going to cry again. He tried to make his voice very low and gentle. “Look, everybody. Why don’t you find something else to do? You’ve got the whole yard to play in. Come on, now. That’s the idea. I’ll call you if I need any help.”
But in a minute they were back, sitting too close and talking quietly together. Dizzy with effort and blind with sweat, he was straddling the pit and holding the shovel vertically, like a pile driver, lifting it high and bringing it down with all his strength on the root. He had torn a ragged wound in it, laying open its moist white meat, but it wouldn’t break, it wouldn’t give, and it made the children laugh each time the shovel bounced and rang in his hands. The delicate noise of their laughter, the look of their tulip-soft skin and of their two sunny skulls, as fragile as eggshell, made a terrible contrast to the feel of biting steel and shuddering pulp, and it was his sense of this that made his eyes commit a distortion of truth. For a split second, in the act of bringing the shovel blade down, he thought he saw Michael’s white sneaker slip into its path. Even as he swerved and threw the shovel away with a clang he knew it hadn’t really happened—but it could have happened, that was the point—and his anger was so quick that the next thing he knew he had grabbed him by the belt and spun him around and hit him hard on the buttocks with the flat of his hand, twice, surprised at the stunning vigor of the blows and at the roar of his own voice: “Get outa here now! Get outa here!”
Leaping and twisting, clutching the seat of his pants with both hands, Michael found his need to cry so sudden and so deep that for several seconds after the first shocked squeal no sound could break from him. His eyes wrinkled shut, his mouth opened and was locked in that position while his lungs fought for breath; then out it came, a long high wail of pain and humiliation. Jennifer watched him, round-eyed, and in the next breath her own face began to twitch and crumpl
e and she was crying too.
“I kept telling you and telling you,” he explained to them, waving his arms. “I told you there’d be trouble if you got too close. Didn’t I? Didn’t I? All right now, take off. Both of you.”
They didn’t need to be told. They were moving steadily away from him across the grass, crying, looking back at him with infinite reproachfulness. In another second he might have been running after them with apologies, he might have been crying too, if he hadn’t forced himself to pick up the shovel and bang it at the root again; and as he worked he prepared an anxious, silent brief in his own defense. Well, damn it, I did keep telling them and telling them, he assured himself, and by now his mind had mercifully amended the facts. The kid put his foot right the hell in my way, for God’s sake. If I hadn’t swerved just in time he wouldn’t have a foot, for God’s sake….
When he looked up again he saw that April had come out of the kitchen door and around the side of the house, and he saw that the children had run to her and hidden their faces in her trousers.
FOUR
THEN IT WAS SUNDAY, with the living room deep in the rustling torpor of Sunday newspapers, and no words had passed between Frank Wheeler and his wife for what seemed a year. She had gone alone to the second and final performance of The Petrified Forest, and afterwards had slept on the sofa again.
He was trying now to take his ease in an armchair, looking through the magazine section of the Times, while the children played quietly in the corner and April washed the dishes in the kitchen. He had thumbed through the magazine more than once, put it down and picked it up again, and he kept returning to a full-page, dramatically lighted fashion photograph whose caption began “A frankly flattering, definitely feminine dress to go happily wherever you go…” and whose subject was a tall, proud girl with deeper breasts and hips than he’d thought fashion models were supposed to have. At first he thought she looked not unlike a girl in his office named Maureen Grube; then he decided this one was much better looking and probably more intelligent. Still, there was a distinct resemblance; and as he studied this frankly flattering, definitely feminine girl his mind slid away in a fuddled erotic reverie. At the last office Christmas party, not nearly as drunk as he was pretending to be, he had backed Maureen Grube up against a filing cabinet and kissed her long and hard on the mouth.