Displeased with himself, he dropped the paper on the rug and lit a cigarette without noticing that another one, quite long, was smoldering in the ash tray beside him. Then, if only because the afternoon was bright and the children were quiet and the fight with April was now another day in the past, he went into the kitchen and took hold of both her elbows as she bent over a sinkful of suds.
“Listen,” he whispered. “I don’t care who’s right or who’s wrong or what this whole damn thing is all about. Couldn’t we just cut it out and start acting like human beings for a change?”
“Until the next time, you mean? Make everything all nice and comfy-cozy until the next time? I’m afraid not, thanks. I’m tired of playing that game.”
“Don’t you see how unfair you’re being? What do you want from me?”
“Two things, at the moment. I want you to take your hands off me and I want you to keep your voice down.”
“Will you tell me one thing? Will you tell me just what the hell you’re trying to do?”
“Certainly. I’m trying to wash the dishes.”
“Daddy?” Jennifer said when he went back to the living room.
“What?”
“Would you please read us the funnies?”
The shyness of this request, and the sight of their trusting eyes, made him want to weep. “You bet I will,” he said. “Let’s sit down over here, all three of us, and we’ll read the funnies.”
He found it hard to keep his voice from thickening into a sentimental husk as he began to read aloud, with their two heads pressed close to his ribs on either side and their thin legs lying straight out on the sofa cushions, warm against his own. They knew what forgiveness was; they were willing to take him for better or worse; they loved him. Why couldn’t April realize how simple and necessary it was to love? Why did she have to complicate everything?
The only trouble was that the funnies seemed to go on forever; the turning of each dense, muddled page of them brought the job no nearer to completion. Before long his voice had become a strained, hurrying monotone and his right knee had begun to jiggle in a little dance of irritation.
“Daddy, we skipped a funny.”
“No we didn’t, sweetie. That’s just an advertisement. You don’t want to read that.”
“Yes I do.”
“I do too.”
“But it isn’t a funny. It’s just made to look like one. It’s an advertisement for some kind of toothpaste.”
“Read us it anyway.”
He set his bite. All the nerves at the roots of his teeth seemed to have entwined with the nerves at the roots of his scalp in a tingling knot. “All right,” he said. “See, in the first picture this lady wants to dance with this man but he won’t ask her to, and here in the next picture she’s crying and her friend says maybe the reason he won’t dance with her is because her breath doesn’t smell too nice, and then in the next picture she’s talking to this dentist, and he says…”
He felt as if he were sinking helplessly into the cushions and the papers and the bodies of his children like a man in quicksand. When the funnies were finished at last he struggled to his feet, quietly gasping, and stood for several minutes in the middle of the carpet, making tight fists in his pockets to restrain himself from doing what suddenly seemed the only thing in the world he really and truly wanted to do: picking up a chair and throwing it through the picture window.
What the hell kind of a life was this? What in God’s name was the point or the meaning or the purpose of a life like this?
When evening came, heavy with beer, he began to look forward to the fact that the Campbells were coming over. Ordinarily it might have depressed him (“Why don’t we ever see anyone else? Do you realize they’re practically the only friends we have?”), but tonight it held a certain promise. At least she would have to laugh and talk in their company; at least she would have to smile at him from time to time and call him “darling.” Besides, it couldn’t be denied that the Campbells did seem to bring out the best in both of them.
“Hi!” They called to one another.
“Hi!…” “Hi!…”
This one glad syllable, borne up through the gathering twilight and redoubling back from the Wheelers’ kitchen door, was the traditional herald of an evening’s entertainment. Then came the handshakings, the stately puckered kissings, the sighs of amiable exhaustion—“Ah-h-h” “Who-o-o”—suggesting that miles of hot sand had been traveled for the finding of this oasis or that living breath itself had been held, painfully, against the promise of this release. In the living room, having sipped and grimaced at the first frosty brimming of their drinks, they pulled themselves together for a moment of mutual admiration; then they sank into various postures of controlled collapse.
Milly Campbell dropped her shoes and squirmed deep into the sofa cushions, her ankles snug beneath her buttocks and her uplifted face crinkling into a good sport’s smile—not the prettiest girl in the world, maybe, but cute and quick and fun to have around.
Beside her, Frank slid down on the nape of his spine until his cocked leg was as high as his head. His eyes were already alert for conversational openings and his thin mouth already moving in the curly shape of wit, as if he were rolling a small, bitter lozenge on his tongue.
Shep, massive and dependable, a steadying influence on the group, set his meaty knees wide apart and worked his tie loose with muscular fingers to free his throat for gusts of laughter.
And finally, the last to settle, April arranged herself with careless elegance in the sling chair, her head thrown back on the canvas to blow sad, aristocratic spires of cigarette smoke at the ceiling. They were ready to begin.
At first it seemed, to everyone’s surprise and relief, that the delicate topic of the Laurel Players could be rapidly disposed of. A brief exchange of words and a few deprecating, head-shaking chuckles seemed to take care of it. Milly insisted that the second performance had really been much better than the first—“I mean at least the audience did seem more—well, more appreciative, I thought. Didn’t you, sweetie?” Shep said that he personally was glad to have the damn thing over with; and April, to whom all their anxious glances now turned, put them at ease with a smile.
“To coin a phrase,” she said, “it was a lot of fun anyway. Wasn’t it awful how many people were saying that last night? I must’ve heard those same words fifty times.”
Within a minute the talk had turned to children and disease (the Campbells’ eldest boy was underweight and Milly wondered if he might be suffering from an obscure blood ailment, until Shep said that whatever he was suffering from it sure hadn’t weakened his throwing arm), and from there to an agreement that the elementary school was really doing a fine job, considering the reactionary board it was saddled with, and from there to the fact that prices had been unaccountably high in the supermarket. It was only then, during a dissertation by Milly on lamb chops, that an almost palpable discomfort settled over the room. They shifted in their seats, they filled awkward pauses with elaborate courtesies about the freshening of drinks, they avoided one another’s eyes and did their best to avoid the alarming, indisputable knowledge that they had nothing to talk about. It was a new experience.
Two years or even a year ago it could never have happened, for then if nothing else there had always been a topic in the outrageous state of the nation. “How do you like this Oppenheimer business?” one of them would demand, and the others would fight for the floor with revolutionary zeal. The cancerous growth of Senator McCarthy had poisoned the United States, and with the pouring of second or third drinks they could begin to see themselves as members of an embattled, dwindling intellectual underground. Clippings from the Observer or the Manchester Guardian would be produced and read aloud, to slow and respectful nods; Frank might talk wistfully of Europe—“God, I wish we’d taken off and gone there when we had the chance”—and this might lead to a quick general lust for expatriation: “Let’s all go!” (Once it went as far as a practical d
iscussion of how much they’d need for boat fare and rent and schools, until Shep, after a sobering round of coffee, explained what he’d read about the difficulty of getting jobs in foreign countries.)
And even after politics had palled there had still been the elusive but endlessly absorbing subject of Conformity, or The Suburbs, or Madison Avenue, or American Society Today. “Oh Jesus,” Shep might begin, “you know this character next door to us? Donaldson? The one that’s always out fooling with his power mower and talking about the rat race and the soft sell? Well, listen: did I tell you what he said about his barbecue pit?” And there would follow an anecdote of extreme suburban smugness that left them weak with laughter.
“Oh, I don’t believe it,” April would insist. “Do they really talk that way?”
And Frank would develop the theme. “The point is it wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t so typical. It isn’t only the Donaldsons—it’s the Cramers too, and the whaddyacallits, the Wingates, and a million others. It’s all the idiots I ride with on the train every day. It’s a disease. Nobody thinks or feels or cares any more; nobody gets excited or believes in anything except their own comfortable little God damn mediocrity.”
Milly Campbell would writhe in pleasure. “Oh, that’s so true. Isn’t that true, darling?”
They would all agree, and the happy implication was that they alone, the four of them, were painfully alive in a drugged and dying culture. It was in the face of this defiance, and in tentative reply to this loneliness, that the idea of the Laurel Players had made its first appeal. Milly had brought the news: some people she’d met from the other side of the Hill were trying to organize a theater group. They planned to hire a New York director and to produce serious plays, if only they could arouse enough community interest. Oh, it probably wouldn’t amount to much—Milly knew that—but she wondered, shyly, if it might not be fun. April had been disdainful at first: “Oh, God, I know these damn little artsy-craftsy things. There’ll be a woman with blue hair and wooden beads who met Max Reinhardt once, and there’ll be two or three slightly homosexual young men and seven girls with bad complexions.” But then a tasteful advertisement began to appear in the local paper (“We are looking for actors…”); then the Wheelers met the people too, at an otherwise boring party, and had to admit that they were what April called “genuine.” At Christmastime they met the director himself and agreed with Shep that he did seem like a man who knew what he was doing, and within a month they were all committed. Even Frank, while refusing to try out for a part (“I’d be lousy”), helped write some of the promotional material and got it multigraphed at his office, and it was Frank who talked most hopefully about the larger social and philosophical possibilities of the thing. If a really good, really serious community theater could be established here, wouldn’t it be a step in the right direction? God knew they would probably never inspire the Donaldsons—and who cared?—but at least they might give the Donaldsons pause; they might show the Donaldsons a way of life beyond the commuting train and the Republican Party and the barbecue pit. Besides, what did they have to lose?
Whatever it was, they had lost it now. Blame for the failure of the Laurel Players could hardly be fobbed off on Conformity or The Suburbs or American Society Today. How could new jokes be told about their neighbors when these very neighbors had sat and sweated in their audience? Donaldsons, Cramers, Wingates and all, they had come to The Petrified Forest with a surprisingly generous openness of mind, and had been let down.
Milly was talking about gardening now, about the difficulty of raising a healthy lawn on Revolutionary Hill, and her eyes were taking on a glaze of panic. Her voice had been the only sound in the room for ten minutes or more, and it had been continuous. She seemed keenly aware of this, but aware too that if she allowed herself to stop the house would fill with a silence as thick as water, an impossibly deep, wide pool in which she would flounder and drown.
It was Frank who came to her rescue. “Oh, hey listen, Milly. I meant to ask you. Do you know what seecham is? Or beecham? A kind of plant?”
“Seecham,” she repeated, pretending to think, while a blush of gratitude suffused her softening face. “Offhand I’m afraid I don’t know, Frank. I can certainly look it up for you, though. We have this book at home.”
“Doesn’t really matter, I guess,” he said. “It’s just that Mrs. Givings came barrel-assing over here yesterday with a big box of this crazy—”
“Mrs. Givings!” Milly cried in a sudden ecstasy of remembrance and relief. “Oh my goodness, I haven’t even told you people about that! I guess I haven’t even told Shep yet, have I, sweetie? About their son? It’s fantastic.”
She was off again, but this was a wholly different kind of monologue: everyone was listening. The urgency of her voice and the eager way she leaned forward to tug her skirt down over her wrinkled knees had galvanized them all with the promise of a new theme, and Milly savored the capture of her audience, wanting to let the revelation come out as slowly as possible. First of all, did the Wheelers know the Givingses had a son?
Certainly they did; and Milly sat nodding wisely, allowing herself to be interrupted, while they reminded each other of the thin sailor whose photograph had grinned from the Givingses’ mantelpiece the one time they had gone there for dinner; they remembered Mrs. Givings explaining that this was John, who had loathed the navy, had done marvelously well at M.I.T. and now was doing marvelously well as an instructor of mathematics at some Western university.
“Well,” Milly said. “He isn’t teaching any mathematics now, and he isn’t out West either. You know where he is? You know where he’s been for the past two months? He’s over here in Greenacres. You know,” she added, when they all looked blank. “The State hospital. The insane asylum.”
They all began chattering at once, drawing close and tense together in the fog of cigarette smoke; it was almost like old times. Wasn’t this the damnedest, weirdest, saddest thing? Was Milly absolutely certain of her facts?
Oh yes, oh yes, she was certain. “And what’s more,” she went on, “he didn’t just go to Greenacres. He was taken in and put there, by the State Police.”
A Mrs. Macready, who worked for the Givingses as a part-time cleaning woman, had told Milly the whole story only yesterday, at the shopping center, unable to believe she hadn’t heard it long before. “She said she thought everybody’d heard it by now. Anyway, it seems he’s been—you know, mentally disturbed for a long time. She said they practically went broke trying to pay for this private sanatorium out in California; he’d go in there for months at a time and then come out—that’s when he’d teach, I guess—and then go back again. Then he seemed all right for a long time, until he suddenly quit his job out there and disappeared. Then he turned up here, without any warning, and came storming into the house and sort of held them captive there for about three days.” She giggled uneasily at this, aware that a phrase like “held them captive” might sound too melodramatic to be true. “That’s what Mrs. Macready called it anyway. I mean he probably didn’t have a gun or a knife or anything, but he must’ve scared them half to death. Especially with Mr. Givings being so old and all, and his heart trouble. What he did was, he locked them in and cut the telephone wires and said he wasn’t going to leave until they gave him what he’d come for, only he wouldn’t say what it was he’d come for. One time he said it was his birth certificate, and they looked through all their old papers and stuff until they found it and gave it to him, and he tore it up. The rest of the time he just walked around talking and talking—raving, I guess—and breaking things. Furniture, pictures off the wall, dishes—everything. And in the middle of it all Mrs. Macready came over to go to work and he locked her in too—that’s how she found out, you see—and I guess she was there for about ten hours before she got out through the garage. Then she called the State Troopers, and they came and took him to Greenacres.”
“God,” April said. “The State Troopers. How awful.” And they all shook their h
eads in solemn agreement.
Shep was inclined to doubt the cleaning woman’s veracity—“After all, the whole thing’s just hearsay”—but the others talked him down. Hearsay or not, it had the unmistakable ring of truth to it.
April pointed out how significant it now seemed that Mrs. Givings had been dropping in so often lately for seemingly aimless little visits: “It’s the funniest thing, I’ve always had the feeling she wanted something here, or wanted to tell us something and couldn’t quite get the words out—haven’t you felt that?” (Here she turned to her husband, but without quite meeting his eyes and without adding the “darling” or even the “Frank” that would have filled his heart with hope. He muttered that he guessed he had.) “God, isn’t that sad,” April said. “She’s probably been dying to talk about it, or to find out how much we know, or something.”
Milly, happily relaxing, wanted to explore the thing from the woman’s angle. What would a mother feel on learning that her only child was mentally deranged? Shep hitched his chair up close to Frank, excluding the girls, bent on a plain, hard-headed discussion of the practical aspects. What was the deal? Could a man be forcibly committed to the nuthouse just like that? Didn’t it sound fishy somehow, from a legal standpoint?
Frank began to see that if he allowed things to go on this way the excitement of the topic would soon be dispelled; without it, the evening might then degenerate into the dreariest kind of suburban time filler, the very kind of evening he had always imagined the Donaldsons and the Wingates and the Cramers having, in which women consulted with women about recipes and clothes, while men settled down with men to talk of jobs and cars. In a minute Shep might even say, “How’s the job going, Frank?” in dead earnest, just as if Frank hadn’t made it clear, time and again, that his job was the very least important part of his life, never to be mentioned except in irony. It was time to act.