A Shade of Difference (93 page)

The time would come when he would recall that indelible scene out of the sadness that ultimately came upon them and think that everything had been said right then, and that they really need never have gone any further, for that said it all. Can I help you? No, thanks. Well, good luck. Better that they had believed each other and let it go at that; but of course they did not; nor was he entirely sure even now, as there came a clatter of silverware and glasses in the corridor and the breakfast cart arrived to service the now wide-awake and humming ward, that it would have been better. In spite of everything, it might have been much worse, for there had been, for a time, a happiness that seemed to promise a lasting serenity and peace. At least they had that, whatever came later.

It took a while for this to develop, however, even though that first night brought them together much faster than he had at first thought possible. The escort did not appear, and as it happened the table where she sat was not very far from the one reserved by his hostess, the AP regional reporter who covered West Virginia. As the evening progressed through the lavish meal, the introduction of distinguished guests, the jocular speech by Senator Munson, the Senate Majority Leader, the jocular rebuttal by his opposite number, Senator Strickland, the Minority Leader, and finally the good nights and the farewell flourishes from the orchestra as the guests returned to the bar before taking off to struggle with the white world outside, he found himself looking far oftener than he intended toward her table. More frequently than not he found her looking back. When their eyes met for the fourth time, he shook his head with a smile and, blushing but game, she smiled back. It was inevitable that they should meet once more at the bar—“He didn’t make it,” he said, and she said, “No, he lives in Virginia and had to start home early to beat the storm—now
I
need a drink!”—and that after a nightcap he should ask where she lived and suggest that he see her home.

Her apartment was far up Connecticut Avenue, almost to Silver Spring, Maryland, and as they started out, tired but exhilarated by the party and the snow still falling gently upon the silent and almost-deserted city, it became an adventure that cut through temerities and hesitations that would otherwise have taken weeks to overcome. Twice his car skidded off the street into high-piled drifts. It took him half an hour to extricate it the first time, almost forty-five minutes the second. On the gradually ascending hills that mounted gracefully tier by tier from the center of town toward Maryland, he proceeded at a cautious pace of not more than ten miles an hour. It was almost 3 a.m. when they finally reached her door. It had taken them nearly three hours to cover a distance that in clear weather required no more than fifteen minutes at the most.

Inevitably, as they both realized by the time the journey ended, they would never again be just two people who had happened to meet at a Congressional Night Party. The tension, the excitement, the jokes and confidences and humorous morale-boosting with which they had lightened their tedious progress through the storm had put them on a basis of intimacy that would never be eradicated even if they never saw each other again. And of course they knew by the time it was over that they would certainly see each other again.

He had begun by telling her with a casual politeness something of his background and had ended by telling her with a sudden urgency his most intimate dreams and ambitions. He learned in turn that she came from a family in Wisconsin in many ways as conventional, modest, and religious as his own; that she worked as receptionist and office manager for a news bureau that serviced several of the larger newspapers in the upper Midwest; that she was twenty-nine and had been in Washington five years; and that she possessed an idealism about public service that came close to his own. They told each other silently something else, too, which was that underneath the increasingly serious conversation with which they accomplished their journey there lay the potential for the sort of understanding that informs and illuminates a lifetime.

At her apartment she said, “I live alone, but I’m certainly not going to be guilty of any nonsense about turning you out at this hour in this storm. There’s a studio couch in the living room and you’re welcome to it.” She smiled. “I’ll even get you breakfast.”

For a second he had considered accepting, but it had seemed to him that this would have placed an essentially false emphasis upon a relationship that was, for all its storm-induced intimacies, only at its earliest stages. He felt it would be false to use the situation to seek further intimacies; it would also be false to feel that because of its forced nature further intimacies should not be sought—an involved masculine reaction that went through his mind in a flash and produced a grateful shake of the head.

“Thanks, but I’m staying at the University Club for the time being until I can find permanent diggings.” He smiled. “It’s only about two miles and five hours’ journey downtown again, so I’ll just run along, with thanks. But I will see you again?”

She nodded gravely.

“You will see me again.”

“Soon?”

“Soon. Call me tomorrow afternoon—this afternoon—at work.”

“Good … You know,” he said, putting on his hat and coat and pausing at the door with a sudden impulse to candor that surprised him, “I was almost beginning to think that maybe I would never—”

“So was I. Perhaps we were both wrong.”

“I hope so.”

“I, too. Thank you for the ride home.”

“Sleep well.”

“Yes. You, too.”

“Yes … Yes,” he said with a sudden conviction. “I know I will.”

But he did not, of course, for when he reached the club shortly after 5 a.m. and turned into bed exhausted, it took him another hour or so to drop off into a fitful sleep broken by the recurring thought, I won’t sleep well until I sleep with you, I won’t sleep well until I sleep with you, I won’t sleep well until I—

After that, things moved swiftly along their inevitable path, and now as another nurse came in to give him a shot of B-12 in preparation for the operation soon to come, he felt no surprise, in retrospect, that the evening should have culminated so soon in their engagement and marriage. They did not need any lengthy period to confirm the certainty of each other conferred upon them by the snow. Their relationship remained chaste until they were married, and circumstances did not arrange—nor did they seek—another situation such as the night of their meeting. Somehow they both felt they did not need it, for they would be married so soon, and why mar it by the memory of something furtive and contrary to the upbringing of both of them? Or so he was given to understand her reasons to be; and since he could appreciate them easily, he did not press it but waited with a reasonable patience until the ceremony that would bring it all about.

This came three months after their meeting, on a day when the first intimations of Washington’s lovely spring whipped scudding white clouds through the bright-blue air and the trees were misty with the first faint flushes of green. Many of his colleagues in the Congress attended, the newspapers both in the capital and in West Virginia gave it major play,
Life
and
Look
ran photographs, it was one of the big social events of the session. His parents, Betty, and two of his brothers were able to come on from West Virginia, Kay’s parents and brother also made the trip from Wisconsin, and a week’s honeymoon in Bermuda put the final seal on what appeared to be a thoroughly happy union.

And so, he thought now as his tired and frightened mind proved unable to keep away the haunting echoes of the past, it evidently was for a year or so. If there was a certain reticence, a certain holding-back, a certain withdrawal into some region where he could not follow, he put it down to background and upbringing rather than to basic character. If there accompanied it an already too-nervous insistence upon the outward form of things, an already too-harsh application of rigid standards of judgment to people and events, that too he thought could be traced to early training rather than any innate defect. He was a patient and loving man, and he told himself often in moments of puzzlement that it would just take a little time, a little understanding, a little extra generosity, and everything would be all right and as relaxed and comfortable as he had always hoped his marriage, if it came, would be.

That patience and understanding might be interpreted as a lack of interest and a lack of really genuine caring on his part never occurred to him. He would have been horrified and miserably unhappy to know that what he could not always recognize as reachings-out for comfort felt themselves rebuffed and thwarted by his calmly tolerant responses. The physical consummations which seemed awkward and unsatisfying in the days of their honeymoon got no better as he tried to understand and adapt himself to what was desired of him. But what was it? He could not be sure. Obviously not experimentation, for the slightest indication of it was always rejected with what seemed to be something close to terror; and not even the most conventional, for even his earnest attempts—which of course soon became too earnest and too self-conscious to be fair to either of them—seemed to produce only an empty half-satisfaction that was in many ways worse than no satisfaction at all.

“You know what?” he said finally, trying to be humorous and outgoing, but finding it, by then, a little difficult and strained. “I think we’re both trying too hard, about everything. Maybe if we could just relax with each other, everything would go along all right.”

She smiled.

“Maybe we need another snowstorm,” she said, and he thought, with the ravaging unanswerable pain that comes when something is gone forever. If we had one, I wouldn’t go home. That was my mistake. It would all be different if I hadn’t gone home.

But even of that he was not sure, as the months went by and he began to conclude that it had been his fortune to marry a personality locked away in some impregnable fortress where he could not follow. She was so afraid of things—that was it, essentially, he decided. She was so afraid, and it was nothing he could really help her with, since it apparently grew from a childhood and character whose pattern had been frozen for life before he met her.

So he resigned himself, as many do, to doing as best he could with what he had. As far as the world knew she was pretty, attractive, intelligent, accomplished—a perfect partner and hostess for a rising young member of Congress, one of those wives, so often found in Washington, whose lives apparently are blended into, but actually only happen to run parallel with, those of their famous husbands. She was well-liked by other Congressional wives, saw to it that they received and returned the proper invitations, was very popular in West Virginia—what more, really, could a man want, save a truly loving and committed heart?

He decided that the best thing for him to do was concentrate on his career—he had become the dedicated bachelor public servant after all, he told himself wryly, if not quite in the sense he had earlier envisaged—and try not to think about what might have been. A Senatorship was opening up, he was by this time strong enough across the state to attempt it, and it began to seem that by devoting his thought and his energies to that he might block out the grinding ache of unhappiness that sometimes seemed to fill him so he could hardly breathe. The heart dies in many ways, some of them quieter than others, and he thought that if he could persuade his own to be concerned about other matters, its decease might not hurt him quite so much. He was well embarked upon this when she called him one morning at the Capitol to tell him that she had just been to the doctor and they were going to have a child.

This hope, too, he had almost abandoned in the three years of their marriage, and it took several minutes after she hung up for the knowledge to really penetrate. When it did, it was amazing how fast his heart came to life again. In ten minutes’ time it was as though the dull ache and the grinding pain had never been. Now they could start over again in the light of the miracle of this new life; now everything would be all right once more; now the bad beginning could be forgotten and things could move on as wonderfully as he used to hope and expect. He went home happier than he had been since the early weeks of their marriage, determined to pour out such love and affection as would drive away the dark shadows that sometimes seemed to threaten, and never let them gather again.

For a little time it seemed to work. An old ease, an old friendliness, seemed to return to them in the early months of her pregnancy; the world once more was full of hope. His own enthusiasm for his son—for such he was convinced the baby would be—communicated itself to her, and she joined in excited, half-humorous plans that soon had the boy following him into the Senate and ultimately into the White House, with a show of amusement that persuaded him for a while that she was as eager and happy about the new arrival as he. He was shocked as he had rarely been when one day, in the midst of their joking, a shadow raced across her face and she suddenly said in a small, lost voice, “I am so frightened.”

“But you mustn’t be frightened,” he had protested, fear instantly claiming his heart, too. “It’s something so happy and wonderful for us both. It will make everything all right again. You’ll see,” he promised fervently, as though words could work miracles where facts could not. “You’ll see.”

But she did not see; and from that moment his own happiness and confidence began to wane, strive desperately though he did to keep them at original pitch. Once having admitted her fears, she began to show an exaggerated, obsessive carefulness, a passion for self-protection that she said was for the baby but which he gradually became uneasily convinced was for herself alone. Try as he did to remain patient, this inevitably began to produce a growing irritation on his part, which showed itself in an exaggerated courtesy that he tried to keep humorous but which sometimes revealed the sharp edge of his anxiety underneath. Finally one day about three weeks before their child arrived this produced an unnecessary little incident that greatly frightened them both, though at the time it appeared that it did no real harm. Nor did it, he was often to think later, except as it contributed to the outward journey of a mind that he came to believe eventually must already have been well on its way.