A Shade of Difference (94 page)

They had been getting ready to go to the last social engagement they would attend before the baby came, a cocktail party given by nearby friends, and presently, dressed and starting on their way, they had locked the door and stood for a moment on the steps of the little house in Georgetown where they lived. There had been a freezing rain in the night, the steps were slick in a few places, and again a sudden wild look of fear had come into her face.

“I don’t want to go. I’ll fall.”

“No, you won’t,” he said impatiently. “It’s only a block and we’ll be very careful. In fact,” he added with an attempt at reminiscent humor, “we’ll take three hours, if you like.” But the attempt had failed, for there was no response as she stood there clinging to the iron railing, apparently stiff with fear.

“I can’t,” she whispered. “I can’t, I just can’t. Please don’t make me! Oh, please don’t!”

And suddenly she had begun to cry, making no attempt to stop the tears, letting them flow down her face as he stood there helplessly looking up at her, while across the street a bearded Georgetown type, clad in sport shirt and walking shorts despite the freezing weather, paused with his poodle to give them a curious glance.

“Very well,” he said after a moment. “We can’t stand here making a spectacle of ourselves. Let’s go back in.”

Impatiently he took her arm with a grip tighter than he intended, impatiently swung her around more quickly than he intended. She gave a gasp and half-stumbled, half-fell against the doorjamb where the railing joined it. The railing held and she swayed against it with an agonized little scream that terrified them both and brought a startled movement toward them from the watcher across the street.

“We’re all right thank you,” Hal called, fumbling desperately to find his key. “It’s just the ice. We’re going in again.”

The watcher looked relieved and nodded. Hal found his key, got the door open with a trembling hand, and took his wife inside. Half walking, half sagging as he supported her, she reached a chair and sat down, turning toward him eyes filled with terror that he realized hardly saw him at all.

“You’ve hurt him,” she whispered. “You’ve hurt me. Oh, you’ve killed us both!”

“I haven’t killed you,” he said harshly. “For God’s sake, snap out of it. It was only a little bump.”

“You’ve killed us,” she repeated, holding herself and rocking back and forth. “You’ve killed us!”

Later after the doctor had come and gone, given her a sedative and assured him that it was only nerves and that nothing had been damaged, he had sat downstairs alone for a long time wondering bleakly whether anything at all could be salvaged from the wreck of their lost affections. Out of his unhappy reverie there had come finally the conclusion that little could, that this portion of his life must be written off with as few regrets as possible or it would destroy him, and that henceforth he must concentrate on the child and devote to him the love, the care, and the hope that he might otherwise have shared with them both. His wife he would continue to love, in some sort of hopeless, distant corner of his mind where lost hopes lived, but aside from the necessary courtesies to keep the household together, he would withdraw the gift of his heart, which for reasons he would never really understand had not been received in the generous spirit in which it had been offered, and give it to his son.

Three weeks later the baby came, vigorous and healthy and holding promise of everything he had missed up to now. Only one thing marred the birth, which was difficult: the doctor, whose abilities he had regarded with considerable skepticism right along, but whom Kay had insisted upon on the recommendation of a friend of hers, had used forceps far more brutally than seemed necessary. The baby’s skull at first was badly misshapen. But in a month it had filled out to a handsome normalcy, and with this initial worry gone and her son in her arms, Kay too seemed truly happy for the first time. Once again, so naive and desperately ever-hopeful is the heart, he felt that the shadows had vanished and that once more there had come the chance that everything could still be all right.

At this point, too, the wider world impinged, for it would soon be time to reach a decision about running for the Senate. In the mood of pleasure with everything that came with his son’s birth, obstacles sank into insignificance—they were not actually very many, so well thought of had he become by now in West Virginia—and the road seemed clear ahead. He called a press conference in his office in the Old House Office Building, announced his plans, and formally opened his campaign. Within a week a majority of the party’s leaders in the state had endorsed him and he had received enough pledges of financial support to make the project economically possible. For the rest he intended to rely on the handshaking technique that had worked so well in his home district, a decision that consumed time but proved wise.

Four months later he had won the primary over the opposition of two of his fellow Congressmen and a former Governor, and in the general election that followed he won by a comfortable margin that sent him to the Senate secure in the support of his people at home, secure in the respect of his colleagues on the Hill, and secure, as it now seemed, in his own home.

There followed, while Jimmy grew steadily into an alert and beautiful child and domestic unease remained at a minimum in the light of his cheerfully bubbling presence, four years in which everything seemed to move onto an upland of great fulfillment and reward. He was well received in the Senate and within a short time had won a place of acceptance that gave promise of bigger honors and influence to come. He was not, as he himself recognized, one of the giants of the Senate, such as Orrin Knox or Seab Cooley; he did not possess the nature of the instinctive middleman of ideas and human interchange that had brought Bob Munson almost inevitably to the leadership; but he had a function to perform. He was one of what Stanley Danta once referred to as “the Young Reliables,” the diligent, hardworking, straightforward, substantial men who brought to public service the devotion and the dedication, the balance and integrity without which the legislative processes of a free government cannot function.

As such, his road led upward. He was appointed to the Banking and Currency Committee and to Labor and Public Welfare, and began to apply himself to the problems that came before those two bodies. Because the problems were so intimately involved with the economic welfare of the country, and because he was so faithful in his devotion to them, it was not long before the Administration was using him to present its point of view and introduce its remedies. Some of these he questioned, and it was a tribute to his steadily strengthening position that he should have been called to the White House, that his views should have been carefully examined by its shrewd and forceful occupant, and that certain modifications which he suggested should then have been worked into the legislation bearing his name. He had early made clear that he would not give his name unless this were done, and his position was respected. The result was better and more workable legislation in several fields of vital economic import to the country. Toward the end of his first term, this had given him sufficient stature with his colleagues so that he was appointed to fill a vacancy on the committee on which Senators like to serve above all others, Foreign Relations.

So went his public career, on a rising arc, and few even of his closest friends suspected that at home the arc, after too brief a period of happiness, was going down again.

He could not at this moment, while two interns stopped by to question him on how he was feeling as the operation approached, put his finger on the exact point when the decline had begun. There was too much grayness over that period for him to single out any one instant and say: This was it. It was a general thing, the gradual awareness that Jimmy wasn’t talking as quickly or as well as he should—though this was soon forgotten when he did begin, for then he chirped like a bright little cricket all day long and the ear could ignore an occasional oddly slurred word … the growing uneasiness that Jimmy was bumping into things a little too much and wasn’t co-ordinating physically quite the way he should—though this too could be ignored in the obvious high intelligence of his mind and the quick perception of his mischievously laughing eyes … the occasional alarmed puzzlement when Jimmy had sudden little sleepy spells, for no apparent reason, and would sometimes come out of them “swallowing up,” as he put it—but this did not happen more than once a month, and it too could be put aside in the doctor’s comfortable assurance that it was “just some little virus, probably, and nothing to worry about.”

Yet these things were not normal, and the pretense that they were could not be kept up forever. Before they knew it, he and Kay were meeting each other’s eyes uneasily across the busy little blond head whose owner played unheeding at their feet. In both their minds worry came to live and tension and irritation began to develop from it and they headed toward some crisis on the subject whose nature and cause they did not know but could only await with silent and unexpressed foreboding.

To all outward appearances, and for 90 per cent of the time, their son was as cute and bright and handsome and lovable as any child they had ever seen. He was, in fact, precocious far beyond his years, and something of a tease as well, so that there were occasions when his parents could see that they might be faced before long with a real disciplinary problem if they did not exercise sufficiently firm control while they could. His way of doing it was to be pleasant, man-to-man, reasonably lenient, with a swat on the bottom when things threatened to get out of hand. Hers was a method of verbal injunction and threat, which called on powers that deeply disturbed her husband and caused more than one sharp argument.

“I’ll turn out the light in the bathroom if you don’t keep quiet,” she would call after the third request for a glass of water, “and then the goblins will get you.” Or, “If you run outside when I’m not looking, there’s a big black dog out there with green teeth and red eyes who will eat you up.” And quite frequently, calling upon some dark memory of a churchgoing childhood in a tone of chilling severity that disturbed Hal most of all, “You’ll have to be a good boy, now, or God will get mad at you.”

It was this last that she used most often, and it was this that finally provoked a major blowup between them.

“What kind of God did you have in your house when you were growing up?” he demanded one day after Jimmy had been sent to his room with this admonition. “An Old Testament Jehovah? The one we had was a God of love who didn’t hurt people; he helped them. And that’s the kind I want in my home, not something to scare little boys with.”

“He has to learn,” she said defiantly.

“He has to learn, all right. But not like that. I don’t want him afraid of God, or thinking he has to have a guilt complex about things, or something.”

“He has to learn,” she repeated stubbornly; and then, quite suddenly, she had begun to cry. “Anyway,” she said in a bleak tone that frightened him badly, “I think God
is
mad at him—or mad at us—or mad at me—I don’t know.
Why
isn’t he like other children? Why does he have spells? Something’s wrong with him, I know it is. He isn’t right, Hal. He just—isn’t—right!”

Because this brought into the open at last his own terror, he answered with a desperate anger that overwhelmed her arguments and drove her into a sobbing silence.

“I don’t want you to threaten him with God again, do you hear me?” he had shouted at the end of it. “My son is going to be all right, and I don’t want you to make him scared of God.”

But they both knew that he was not all right, that Hal’s use of “going to be” instead of “is” was tacit recognition of the fear that lived with them both, and that they were themselves scared of God and what He might have in store for them. Hal knew before six months had passed that she had been unable to break away from her obsession with it in her dealings with their son, for there came in due course the horrible afternoon when the boy went without warning into convulsions and, when Hal hurried into the house from the Hill, white-faced and terrified, returned to sentience long enough to look up wistfully and ask, “Daddy, why is God mad at me?” All but the formal shell of a marriage died forever in the look that passed between his parents at that moment, but there was no time then to talk about it.

The doctor came, an ambulance came, there were four days of recurring convulsions, increasingly heavy sedation, tests and studies and more tests and more studies, a black miasma of terror in which two strangers automatically went home together from Georgetown Hospital, automatically slept, automatically woke, got up and went back to Georgetown Hospital for another hopeless day, hardly speaking, hardly looking at one another, hardly conscious of each other’s existence at all.

At the end of it, their son had lost twelve pounds and the power of speech; the bright, perceptive light was gone from eyes that no longer knew them or responded to the stimuli devised by patient but increasingly less hopeful doctors; and in a haunted house in Georgetown a bright little chirping cricket chirped no more.

Of this the doctor responsible for it said with an airily unctuous self-exculpation that the only thing he could think of was that the mother must have suffered some unusual blow or jar prior to birth. Other doctors said that it was more likely caused by scar tissue in the brain brought about by unnecessarily harsh use of forceps. But no one knew for sure, nor could anyone promise that it would ever be possible to restore Jimmy to what he had been before that afternoon. All they could do, they said, was try. For several more years, they did.

What happened then in the Georgetown house could perhaps have been easily predicted by the doctors, though they tried to impress upon both parents, together and separately, that they must not blame one another, that they must come together in love and helpfulness and give their child all the love they could in the hope that in some mysterious way unclear to doctors this might bring him back to them whole and laughing and complete. It had in some cases, they said, and it might in this: there were areas medicine did not know much about, and sometimes it happened that way. The important thing, they said to two people who sometimes seemed to have forgotten they had ever felt it for one another, was love.