In no time at all they were strolling the vacant lot together while he pointed out the landmarks of recent military action. Here was the clump of weeds where Harry Snyder had concealed his machine-gun emplacement; here was the trail down which Russell had led a phantom patrol, and the first burst of fire had caught him right across the chest.
To recapture the scene he reeled back in shock and crumpled to the dirt, lying still. “There’s nothing much you can do if you get it in the chest that way,” he explained as he got up to brush off his clothes. “But the worst thing is taking a grenade in the belly.” And that called for another performance of agony and dusty sprawling.
After the third time he died for her, she looked at him thoughtfully. “You really like the falling down part, don’t you,” she said.
“Huh?”
“Well, I mean the best part of it for you is getting killed, right?”
“No,” he said defensively, because her tone had implied something unwholesome in such a preference. “No, I just—I don’t know.”
That took the edge off the pleasure, though they remained on cordial terms as they walked back to the house; still, it couldn’t be denied that for a little while they had been companions.
And it was on the strength of that, during their lunch break from school the following day, that Russell came thumping in from the back porch with something important to tell her.
She had gotten home first; she was settled back in the cushions of the living-room sofa, gazing out a window wrapping a lock of her black hair around her index finger.
“Hey,” he said, “this is pretty funny. You know that real big guy in your class? Carl Shoemaker?”
“Sure,” she said. “I know him.”
“Well, I was coming out of school just now and Carl Shoemaker was there on the playground with these two other guys and he called me over. He said, ‘Hey, Towers, you gonna try out for the race?’
“I said, ‘What race?’
“He said, ‘The human race. But I better warn you, they don’t let sissies in.’
“I said, ‘So who’s the sissy?’
“And he said, ‘Aren’t you one? I heard you were. That’s why I’m warning you.’
“So I said, ‘Look, Shoemaker. Find somebody else to warn, okay?’ I said, ‘You want somebody to warn, you better keep looking.’”
It was a fairly accurate rendering of the dialogue, and Nancy seemed to have followed it with interest. But the last line of it now had an inconclusive ring, as if leaving open a chance that there might be further trouble when he went back to school. “So then after that,” he told her, “after that they just sort of smiled and walked away, Shoemaker and the two other guys. I don’t think they’ll mess with me anymore. But I mean the whole thing was, really kind of—kind of funny.”
He wondered now why he had told her about it at all, instead of finding other things to discuss. Watching her there on the sofa, in the noon light, he could see how she would probably look when she grew up and got pretty.
“Said he’d heard you were a sissy, uh?” she said.
‘Well, that’s what he said he’d heard, but I think I—”
And she gave him a long, infuriatingly sly look. ‘Well,” she said. “I wonder where he ever heard that.”
The thumbs came out of Russell’s belt as he backed slowly away from her across the rug, round-eyed, aghast at her betrayal. Just before he reached the doorway he saw the slyness in her face give way to fear, but it was too late: they both knew what he would do next, and there was no stopping him.
At the foot of the stairs he called, “Mom? Mom?”
‘What is it, dear?” Lucy Towers appeared on the landing, looking unsettled and wearing what she called her tea dress.
“Nancy told Carl Shoemaker I’m a sissy and he told a lot of other guys and now everybody’s saying it and it’s a lie. It’s a lie.”
In a stately manner appropriate to the tea dress, Lucy came downstairs. “Oh,” she said. “Well. This is something we can discuss at lunch.”
Elizabeth never came home for lunch and Alice ate in the junior-high-school cafeteria, so there were only the three of them at the table: Russell and his mother on one side, Nancy on the other. There was nobody to deflect the force of Lucy’s slow, impassioned, relentless voice.
“I’m surprised at what you did, Nancy, and I’m deeply troubled by it. People don’t do things like that. People don’t spread malicious gossip and lies about their friends behind their backs. It’s as bad as stealing, or cheating. It’s disgusting. Oh, I suppose there are people who behave that way, but they aren’t the kind of people I’d want to sit at a table with, or live in a house with, or ever have as friends of my own. Do you understand me, Nancy?”
The maid came in with their plates—there would be small portions of veal, mashed potatoes and peas today—and she lingered to give Lucy a look of veiled reproach before going back to the kitchen. She had never worked in a house like this before, and didn’t want to again. A nice lady, a crazy lady, and three sad-looking kids: what kind of a house was that? Well, it would most likely be over soon—she had already put the agency on the lookout for a new job—but meanwhile, somebody ought to shut that crazy lady’s mouth before she scolded that little girl to death.
“Russell is your friend, Nancy,” Lucy Towers was saying, “and he’s a person you share your home with. When you spread vicious lies about him at school, behind his back, you’re inflicting great damage. Oh, I’m sure you know that; you’ve known it from the start. But I wonder if you ever stopped to think of me. Because do you want to know something, Nancy? I found this house. I asked your mother to join me in it, so we could all live together. I was the one who kept hoping and hoping there’d be a little peace and harmony in our lives here—yes, and I went on hoping even after I knew there wouldn’t be. So you see it isn’t only Russell you’ve hurt, Nancy; it’s me. It’s me. You’ve hurt me terribly, Nancy. . . .”
There was more, and it came to an end exactly as Russell knew it would. All through the upbraiding Nancy had sat silent, with a rigid face and downcast eyes—she had even managed to eat a little, as if to show she was above all this—but eventually her mouth began to fall apart. There were telltale twitches of the lips, increasingly difficult to control; then it came open and was locked in a shape of despair around two partly chewed green peas, and she was crying wretchedly but making no sound.
They were both late for school that afternoon, though Nancy had a head start of at least a hundred yards. Walking out between the borders of other people’s lawns and through the broken fence and then along the gently curving lane, Russell could catch only an occasional glimpse of her far ahead, a tall, slim girl with a way of walking that suggested she was older than nine. She would grow up and get pretty; she would get married and have boys and girls of her own; so it was probably a dumb and even a sissy thing to be afraid she would always remember what Russell Towers had done to her today. Still, there would now be no way of knowing, ever, if she would forget it.
“Well, I don’t see any point in prolonging this,” Elizabeth said the next day, setting two packed suitcases on the living-room floor. “Nancy and I’ll go up to White Plains and stay in a hotel for a few days; then when we’re settled somewhere I’ll send back for the rest of our stuff.”
“You’re putting me in a very awkward position,” Lucy said solemnly.
“Oh, come on; I don’t see that at all. Here, look, I’ll leave you an extra month’s rent, okay?” She sat briefly at her old worktable with her checkbook, and scribbled on it. “There,” she said when it was done. “That ought to take care of the suffering.” And she and Nancy carried their bags out to the Model A.
None of the Towers family went to the front windows to wave goodbye, but it didn’t matter because neither of the Bakers looked back.
“Know something?” Elizabeth said when she and Nancy were heading north on the Post Road. “I couldn’t really afford to write that check. It won’t bounce, but
it’s going to give us a tight month. Still, maybe there are times when you have to buy your way out of something whether you can afford it or not.”
After another mile or so she glanced from the road to Nancy’s serious profile and said, “Well, Jesus, can’t we even have a couple of laughs in this car? Why don’t you sing me Gilbert and Sullivan or something?”
And Nancy gave her a brief, shy smile before turning away again. Slowly, Elizabeth removed the driving glove from her right hand. She reached across her daughter’s lap, clasped the outer thigh and brought her sliding over, careful to keep her small knees clear of the shuddering gear shift. She held the child’s thighs pressed fast against her own for a long time; then, in a voice so soft it could scarcely be heard over the sound of the car, she said, “Listen, it’ll be all right, sweetheart. It’ll be all right.”
Liars in Love
WHEN WARREN MATHEWS came to live in London, with his wife and their two-year-old daughter, he was afraid people might wonder at his apparent idleness. It didn’t help much to say he was “on a Fulbright” because only a few other Americans knew what that meant; most of the English would look blank or smile helpfully until he explained it, and even then they didn’t understand.
“Why tell them anything at all?” his wife would say. “Is it any of their business? What about all the Americans living here on private incomes?” And she’d go back to work at the stove, or the sink, or the ironing board, or at the rhythmic and graceful task of brushing her long brown hair.
She was a sharp-featured, pretty girl named Carol, married at an age she often said had been much too young, and it didn’t take her long to discover that she hated London. It was big and drab and unwelcoming; you could walk or ride a bus for miles without seeing anything nice, and the coming of winter brought an evil-smelling sulphurous fog that stained everything yellow, that seeped through closed windows and doors to hang in your rooms and afflict your wincing, weeping eyes.
Besides, she and Warren hadn’t been getting along well for a long time. They may both have hoped the adventure of moving to England might help set things right, but now it was hard to remember whether they’d hoped that or not. They didn’t quarrel much—quarreling had belonged to an earlier phase of their marriage—but they hardly ever enjoyed each other’s company, and there were whole days when they seemed unable to do anything at all in their small, tidy basement flat without getting in each other’s way. “Oh, sorry,” they would mutter after each clumsy little bump or jostle. “Sorry . . .”
The basement flat had been their single stroke of luck: it cost them only a token rent because it belonged to Carol’s English aunt, Judith, an elegant widow of seventy who lived alone in the apartment upstairs and who often told them, fondly, how “charming” they were. She was very charming too. The only inconvenience, carefully discussed in advance, was that Judith required the use of their bathtub because there wasn’t one in her own place. She would knock shyly at their door in the mornings and come in, all smiles and apologies, wrapped in a regal floor-length robe. Later, emerging from her bath in billows of steam with her handsome old face as pink and fresh as a child’s, she would make her way slowly into the front room. Sometimes she’d linger there to talk for a while, sometimes not. Once, pausing with her hand on the knob of the hallway door, she said, “Do you know, when we first made this living arrangement, when I agreed to sublet this floor, I remember thinking, Oh, but what if I don’t like them? And now it’s all so marvelous, because I do like you both so very much.”
They managed to make pleased and affectionate replies; then, after she’d gone, Warren said, “That was nice, wasn’t it.”
“Yes; very nice.” Carol was seated on the rug, struggling to sink their daughter’s heel into a red rubber boot. “Hold still, now, baby,” she said. “Give Mommy a break, okay?”
The little girl, Cathy, attended a local nursery school called The Peter Pan Club every weekday. The original idea of this had been that it would free Carol to find work in London, to supplement the Fulbright income; then it turned out there was a law forbidding British employers to hire foreigners unless it could be established that the foreigner offered skills unavailable among British applicants, and Carol couldn’t hope to establish anything like that. But they’d kept Cathy enrolled in the nursery school anyway because she seemed to like it, and also—though neither parent quite put it into words—because it was good to have her out of the house all day.
And on this particular morning Carol was especially glad of the prospect of the time alone with her husband: she had made up her mind last night that this was the day she would announce her decision to leave him. He must surely have come to agree, by now, that things weren’t right. She would take the baby home to New York; once they were settled there she would get a job—secretary or receptionist or something—and make a life of her own. They would keep in touch by mail, of course, and when his Fulbright year was done they could—well, they could both think it over and discuss it then.
All the way to The Peter Pan Club with Cathy chattering and clinging to her hand, and all the way back, walking alone and faster, Carol tried to rehearse her lines just under her breath; but when the time came it proved to be a much less difficult scene than she’d feared. Warren didn’t even seem very surprised—not, at least, in ways that might have challenged or undermined her argument.
“Okay,” he kept saying gloomily, without quite looking at her. “Okay . . .” Then after awhile he asked a troubling question. “What’ll we tell Judith?”
“Well, yes, I’ve thought of that too,” she said, “and it would be awkward to tell her the truth. Do you think we could just say there’s an illness in my family, and that’s why I have to go home?”
“Well, but your family is her family.”
“Oh, that’s silly. My father was her brother, but he’s dead. She’s never even met my mother, and anyway they’d been divorced for God knows how many years. And there aren’t any other lines of—you know—lines of communication, or anything. She’ll never find out.”
Warren thought about it. “Okay,” he said at last, “but I don’t want to be the one to tell her. You tell her, okay?”
“Sure. Of course I’ll tell her, if it’s all right with you.”
And that seemed to settle it—what to tell Judith, as well as the larger matter of their separation. But late that night, after Warren had sat staring for a long time into the hot blue-and-pink glow of the clay filaments in their gas fireplace, he said “Hey, Carol?”
“What?” She was flapping and spreading clean sheets on the couch, where she planned to sleep alone.
“What do you suppose he’ll be like, this man of yours?”
“What do you mean? What man of mine?”
“You know. The guy you’re hoping to find in New York. Oh, I know he’ll be better than me in about thirteen ways, and he’ll certainly be an awful lot richer, but I mean what’ll he be like? What’ll he look like?”
“I’m not listening to any of this.”
“Well, okay, but tell me. What’ll he look like?”
“I don’t know,” she said impatiently. “A dollar bill, I guess.”
Less than a week before Carol’s ship was scheduled to sail, The Peter Pan Club held a party in honor of Cathy’s third birthday. It was a fine occasion of ice cream and cake for “tea,” as well as the usual fare of bread and meat paste, bread and jam, and cups of a bright fluid that was the English equivalent of Kool-Aid. Warren and Carol stood together on the sidelines, smiling at their happy daughter as if to promise her that one way or another they would always be her parents.
“So you’ll be here alone with us for a while, Mr. Mathews,” said Marjorie Blaine, who ran the nursery school. She was a trim, chain-smoking woman of forty or so, long divorced, and Warren had noticed a few times that she wasn’t bad. “You must come round to our pub,” she said. “Do you know Finch’s, in the Fulham Road? It’s rather a scruffy little pub, actually, but all so
rts of nice people go there.”
And he told her he would be sure to drop by.
Then it was the day of the sailing, and Warren accompanied his wife and child as far as the railroad station and the gate to the boat train.
“Isn’t Daddy coming?” Cathy asked, looking frightened.
“It’s all right, dear,” Carol told her. “We have to leave Daddy here for now, but you’ll see him again very soon.” And they walked quickly away into the enclosing crowd.
One of the presents given to Cathy at the party was a cardboard music box with a jolly yellow duck and a birthday-card message on the front, and with a little crank on one side: when you turned the crank it played a tinny rendition of “Happy Birthday to You.” And when Warren came back to the flat that night he found it, among several other cheap, forgotten toys, on the floor beneath Cathy’s stripped bed. He played it once or twice as he sat drinking whiskey over the strewn books and papers on his desk; then, with a child’s sense of pointless experiment, he turned the crank the other way and played it backwards, slowly. And once he’d begun doing that he found he couldn’t stop, or didn’t want to, because the dim, rude little melody it made suggested all the loss and loneliness in the world.
Dum dee dum da da-da
Dum dee dum da da-da . . .
He was tall and very thin and always aware of how ungainly he must look, even when nobody was there to see—even when the whole of his life had come down to sitting alone and fooling with a cardboard toy, three thousand miles from home. It was March of 1953, and he was twenty-seven years old.
“Oh, you poor man,” Judith said when she came down for her bath in the morning. “It’s so sad to find you all alone here. You must miss them terribly.”
“Yeah, well, it’ll only be a few months.”
“Well, but that’s awful. Isn’t there someone who could sort of look after you? Didn’t you and Carol meet any young people who might be company for you?”
“Oh, sure, we met a few people,” he said, “but nobody I’d want to—you know, nobody I’d especially want to have around or anything.”