"Who'd you see there?" Earl Wheeler had demanded, looking ten years younger than he'd looked ten minutes before. "Ted who? Bandy? Don't believe I know him; course, I've forgotten a lot of the names. He knew me, though, I guess, didn't he?"
And "
Oh
yes," Frank had heard himself saying over a preposterous swelling in his throat. "
Oh
yes, certainly. He spoke very highly of you, Dad."
And it wasn't until they were on the train again, going back to New York, that he'd regained enough composure to pound his fist on his knee and say, "He beat me! Isn't that the damnedest thing? The old bastard beat me again."
"I knew it," Bart Pollock was saying now, his eyes twinkling and suffused with heart-warmth. "I'll tell you something, Frank: I'm seldom wrong in my hunches about people. Care for a little cordial or a little B and B or something with your dessert?"
"And do you mean to say you sat through the whole lunch," April might well ask tonight, "and told him your whole life story, and never even got around to telling him you're leaving the company in the fall? Whatever was the point of that?"
But Pollock was making it impossible, now, to get a word in edgewise. He was getting down, at last, to business. Who was going to nurse that baby? Who was going to build that bridge?
". . . Your public relations expert? Your electronics engineer? Your management consultant? Well, now, certainly, all of them are going to play important roles in the overall picture; each of them is going to offer very valuable specialized knowledge in their respective fields. But here's the point. No single one of them has the right background or the right qualifications for the job. Frank, I've talked to some of the top advertising and promotion men in the business. I've talked to some of the top technical men in the computer field and I've talked to some of the top business administration men in the country, and we've all of us pretty much come to this conclusion: it's a completely new kind of job, and we're going to have to develop a completely new kind of talent to do it.
"Now, the past six months or so I've been going around sounding men out, inside the company and outside too. So far I've got my eye on half a dozen young men with various backgrounds, and I hope to line up half a dozen more. You see what I'm doing? I'm recruiting myself a team. Now let me"—he held up a thick hand to ward off any interruptions—"let me be more specific. These little pieces you're doing for us now are only the beginning. I want you to finish that series the way we mapped it out the other day in Ted's office; that's fine; but what I'm driving at now goes way beyond that. As I say, this whole project's still taking shape, nothing's definite yet, but this'll show you the direction of my thinking. I've got a hunch you're the kind of a fella I could send out to groups of people all over the country—civic groups, business seminars, groups of our own field sales people as well as customers and prospects, and all you'd do is stand up in front of those groups and talk. You'd talk computers, chapter and verse; you'd answer questions; you'd put the electronic data processing story over in the kind of language a businessman can understand. Frank, maybe it's the old-time salesman in me, but I've always had one conviction, and that's this: when you're trying to sell an idea, I don't care how complicated or what it may be, you'll never find a more effective instrument of persuasion than the living human voice."
"Well, Bart, before you go any further, there's something I—" He felt tight in the chest and short of breath. "I mean I couldn't very well say this in Ted's office the other day because I haven't told him about it yet, but the thing is I'm planning to leave the company in the fall. I guess I should've made that clear earlier; now I feel sort of— I mean I really am sorry if this conflicts with your—"
"You mean to say you
apologized
to him?" April might ask. "As if you had to ask his permission to leave, or something?"
"No!" he would insist. "Of course I didn't apologize to him. Will you give me a chance? I
told
him, that's all. Naturally it was a little awkward; it was bound to be awkward after the way he'd been talking; can't you see that?"
"Well, now I
am
sore at Bandy," Pollock was saying. "Let a man of your caliber go to waste for seven years and then lose you to another outfit." He shook his head.
"Oh, it's not to another
outfit
—I mean
you
know; it's not anything else in the business machine field."
"Well, I'm glad of that, anyway. Frank, you've been aboveboard with me and I appreciate it; now I'll be aboveboard with you. I don't want to pry into things that're none of my business, but can you tell me this? Can you tell me how definite a commitment you've made on this other thing?"
"Well—pretty definite, I'm afraid, Bart. It's kind of hard to—well, yes. Quite definite."
"Because here's my point. If it's a question of money, there's certainly no reason why we can't get together on a satisfactory . . ."
"No. I mean I appreciate your saying that, but it's not really a question of money at all. It's more of a personal thing."
And that seemed to settle it. Pollock began to nod slowly and steadily, to show his infinite understanding of personal things.
"I mean it won't affect the series I'm working on now," Frank told him. "I'll have plenty of time to finish that; it's just that anything beyond that is—
you
know, pretty much out of the question." Sleep on it a while; talk it over with your wife—and that's always the main thing, isn't it? Talking it over with your wife? Where the hell would any of us be without 'em? And I'd like you to feel free to come to me at any time and say, 'Bart, let's have another chat.' Will you do that? Can we leave it that way? Fine. And remember, this thing I'm talking about would amount to a brand-new job for you. Something that could turn into a very challenging, very satisfying career for any man. Now I'm sure this other thing looks very desirable to you right now"—he winked—"you'll never catch me knocking a competitor; and of course it's entirely your decision. But Frank, in all sincerity, if you do decide for Knox I believe it'll be a thing you'll never regret. And I believe something else, too. I believe—" He lowered his voice. "I believe it'd be a fine memorial and tribute to your dad."
And how could he ever tell April that these abysmally sentimental words had sent an instantaneous rush of blood to the walls of his throat? How could he ever explain, without bringing down her everlasting scorn, that for a minute he was afraid he might weep into his melting chocolate ice cream?
Fortunately, there was no chance to tell her anything that night. She had spent the day at a kind of work she had always hated and lately allowed herself to neglect: cleaning the parts of the house that didn't show. Breathing dust and spitting cobwebs, she had hauled and bumped the screaming vacuum cleaner into all the corners of all the rooms and crawled with it under all the beds; she had cleaned each tile and fixture in the bathroom with a scouring powder whose scent gave her a headache, and she had thrust herself head and shoulders into the oven to swab with ammonia at its clinging black scum. She had torn up a loose flap of linoleum near the stove to reveal what looked like a long brown stain until it came alive—a swarm of ants that seemed still to be crawling inside her clothes for hours afterwards—and she'd even tried to straighten up the dripping disorder of the cellar, where a wet corrugated-paper box of rubbish fell apart in her hands as she lifted it out of a puddle, releasing all its mildewed contents in a splash from which an orange-spotted lizard emerged and sped away across her shoe. By the time Frank came home she was too tired to feel like talking.
She didn't feel like talking the next night, either. Instead they watched a television drama which he found wholly absorbing and she declared was trash.
And it was the next night, or the next—he could never afterwards remember which—that he found her pacing the kitchen in the same tense, high-shouldered way she had paced the stage in the second act of
The Petrified Forest.
From the living room came the muffled strains of horn and xylophone, interspersed with the shrieks of midget voices; the children were watching an animated cartoon on television.
"What's the matter?"
"Nothing."
"I don't believe you. Did something happen today, or what?"
"No." Then the perfection of her curtain-call smile began to blur and moisten into a wrinkled grimace of despair and her breathing became as loud as the boiling vegetables on the stove. "Nothing happened today that I haven't known about for days and days—and oh God, Frank, please don't look so dense; do you really mean you haven't known it too, or guessed it or anything? I'm pregnant, that's all."
"Jesus." His face obediently paled and gaped into the look of a man stunned by bad news, but he knew he wouldn't be able to keep it that way for long: an exultant smile was already struggling up for freedom from his chest; he had to take hold of his mouth to stop it. "Wow," he said quietly through his fingers. "Are you sure?"
"Yes." And she came heavily into his arms as if the act of telling him had taken all her strength away. "Frank, I didn't want to clobber you with it before you've even had a drink or anything; I meant to wait until after dinner but I just— the thing is, I've really been pretty sure all week and today I finally saw the doctor and now I can't even
pretend
it's not true any more."
"Wow." He gave up trying to control his face, which now hung aching with joy over her shoulder as he pressed and stroked her with both hands, muttering mindless words into her hair. "Oh, listen, it doesn't mean we can't go; listen, it just means we'll have to figure out some other
way
of going, is all."
The pressure was off; life had come mercifully back to normal.
"There isn't any other way," she said. "Do you think I've thought about anything else all week? There
isn't
any other way. The whole
point
of going was to give you a chance to find yourself, and now it's ruined. And it's my fault! My own dumb, careless . . ."
"No, listen to me; nothing's ruined. You're all upset. At the very worst it only means waiting a little while until we can work out some—"
"A little
while
! Two years? Three years? Four? How long do you think it'll
be
before I can take a full-time job? Darling,
think
about it a minute. It's hopeless."
"No, it's not. Listen."
"Not now; don't let's try to talk about it now, okay? Let's at least wait'll the kids are asleep." And she turned back to the stove, wiping the inside of her wrist against one dribbling eye in a childish gesture of shame at being seen in tears.
"Okay."
In the living room, hugging their knees, the children were staring blankly at a cartoon bulldog who brandished a spiked club as he chased a cartoon cat through the wreckage of a cartoon house. "Hi," Frank said, and made his way past them to the bathroom to wash up for dinner, allowing his mind to fill with the rhythm and the song of all the things he would say as soon as he and April were alone. "Listen," he would begin. "Suppose it does take time. Look at it this way . . ." And he would begin to draw the picture of a new life. If there was indeed a two- or three-year span of waiting to be done, wouldn't it be made more endurable by the money from Pollock's job? "Oh, of course it'll be a nothing-job, but the money! Think of the money!" They could get a better house—or better still, if they continued to find the suburbs intolerable, they could move back to town. Oh, not to the dark, roach-infested, subway-rumbling city of the old days, but to a brisk, stimulating, new New York that only money could discover. Who knew how much broader and more interesting their lives might become? And besides . . . besides . . .
He was washing his hands, breathing the good smell of soap and the aromatic fumes of April's scouring powder, noticing that his face in the mirror looked ruddier and better than he'd seen it look in months—he was thus engaged when the full implication, the full meaning of his "besides" clause broke over him. Besides: why
think
of accepting Pollock's money as a mere compromise solution, an enforced making-the-best-of-things until the renewal of her ability to support him in Paris? Didn't it have the weight and dignity of a plan in its own right? It might lead to almost anything—new people, new places—why, it might even take them to Europe in due time. Wasn't there a good chance that Knox, through Knox International, might soon be expanding its promotion of computers abroad? ("You and Mrs. Wheeler are so very unlike one's preconceived idea of American business people," a Henry James sort of Venetian countess might say as they leaned attractively on a balustrade above the Grand Canal, sipping sweet vermouth . . .)
"Well, but what about you?" April would say. "How are you
ever
going to find yourself now?" But as he firmly shut off the hot-water faucet he knew he would have the answer for her:
"Suppose we let that be my business."
And there was a new maturity and manliness in the kindly, resolute face that nodded back at him in the mirror.
When he reached for a towel be found she had forgotten to put one on the rack, and when he went to the linen closet to get one he saw, on the top shelf, a small square package freshly wrapped in drugstore paper. Its newness and the incongruity of its being there among the folded sheets and towels gave it a potent, secret look, like that of a hidden Christmas gift, and it was this as much as his unaccountable, rising fear that made him take it down and open it. Inside the wrapping was a blue cardboard box bearing the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, and inside the box was the dark pink bulb of a rubber syringe.
Without giving himself time to think, without even wondering if it mightn't be better to wait till after dinner, he carried the package back through the living room, swiftly past the place where the children watched their cartoon (the cat had turned now and was chasing the dog over acres of cartoon countryside), and into the kitchen. And the way her startled face began to harden when she looked at it, and then up into his eyes, left no doubt at all of her intentions.