"Listen," he said. "Just what the hell do you think you're going to do with this?"
She was backing away through the vegetable steam, not in retreat but in defiant readiness, her hands sliding tensely up and down her hips. "And what do you think
you're
going to do?" she said. "Do you think you're going to stop me?"
OUR ABILITY TO MEASURE
and apportion time affords an almost endless source of comfort.
"Synchronize watches at oh six hundred," says the infantry captain, and each of his huddled lieutenants finds a respite from fear in the act of bringing two tiny pointers into jeweled alignment while tons of heavy artillery go fluttering overhead: the prosaic, civilian-looking dial of the watch has restored, however briefly, an illusion of personal control. Good, it counsels, looking tidily up from the hairs and veins of each terribly vulnerable wrist; fine: so far, everything's happening right on time.
"I'm afraid I'm booked solid through the end of the month," says the executive, voluptuously nestling the phone at his cheek as he thumbs the leaves of his appointment calendar, and his mouth and eyes at that moment betray a sense of deep security. The crisp, plentiful, day-sized pages before him prove that nothing unforseen, no calamity of chance or fate can overtake him between now and the end of the month. Ruin and pestilence have been held at bay, and death itself will have to wait; he is booked solid.
"Oh, let me see now," says the ancient man, tilting his withered head to wince and blink at the sun in bewildered reminiscence, "my first wife passed away in the spring of—" and for a moment he is touched with terror. The spring of what? Past? Future? What is any spring but a mindless rearrangement of cells in the crust of the spinning earth as it floats in endless circuit of its sun? What is the sun itself but one of a billion insensible stars forever going nowhere into nothingness? Infinity! But soon the merciful valves and switches of his brain begin to do their tired work, and "The spring of Nineteen-Ought-Six," he is able to say. "Or no, wait—" and his blood runs cold again as the galaxies revolve. "Wait! Nineteen-Ought—Four." Now he is sure of it, and a restorative flood of well-being brings his hand involuntarily up to slap his thigh in satisfaction. He may have forgotten the shape of his first wife's smile and the sound of her voice in tears, but by imposing a set of numerals on her death he has imposed coherence on his own life, and on life itself. Now all the other years can fall obediently into place, each with its orderly contribution to the whole. Nineteen-Ten, Nineteen-Twenty—Why, of course he remembers!—Nineteen-Thirty, Nineteen-Forty, right on up to the well-deserved peace of his present and on into the gentle promise of his future. The earth can safely resume its benevolent stillness—Smell that new grass!—and it's the same grand old sun that has hung there smiling on him all these years. "Yes sir," he can say with authority, "NineteenOught-Four," and the stars tonight will please him as tokens of his ultimate heavenly rest. He has brought order out of chaos.
. . .
The early summer of 1955 might well have been intolerable for both the Wheelers, and might in the end have turned out very differently, if it hadn't been for the calendar that hung on their kitchen wall. A New Year's gift of A. J. Stolper and Sons, Hardware and Home Furnishings, illustrated with scenes of Rural New England, it was the kind of calendar whose page for each month displays two smaller charts as well, last month and next, so that a quarter of the year can be comprehended in a single searching glance.
The Wheelers were able to fix their date of conception in the latter part of the first week in May—the week after his birthday when they could both remember his whispering, "It feels sort of loose," and her whispering, "Oh no, I'm sure it's all right; don't stop . . ." (she had bought a new diaphragm the following week, just to be sure), and this placed the first week in August, more than four weeks away and clear over on the next page, as the mysterious time "right at the end of the third month" when the school friend, long ago, had said it would be safe to apply the rubber syringe.
Panic had sent her straight to the drugstore the minute she was free of the doctor's office that afternoon; panic had driven him down the hall to confront her with the thing the minute he found it in the closet that evening, and it was panic that held them locked and staring at each other in the vegetable steam, brutally silent, while the cartoon music floated in from the next room. But much later that same night, after each of them furtively and in turn had made studies of the calendar, their panic was drowned in the discovery that row on row of logical, orderly days lay waiting for intelligent use between now and the deadline. There was plenty of time for coming to the right decision on this thing, for working this thing out.
"Darling, I didn't mean to be so awful about it; I wouldn't have been if you hadn't come
at
me with it like that, before either of us had a chance to discuss it in any kind of a rational way."
"I know; I know." And he patted her softly weeping shoulder. These tears didn't mean she was capitulating; he knew that. At best they meant what he'd hopefully suspected from the start, that she halfway wanted to be talked out of it; at worst they meant only that she didn't want to antagonize him, that in drawing her own kind of reassurance from the calendar she had seen the four weeks as a generous opportunity for gradually winning him over. But either way, and this was what filled him with gratitude as he held and stroked her, either way it meant she was considering him; she cared about him. For the time being, that was all that mattered.
"Because I mean we've got to be together in this thing, haven't we?" she asked, drawing back a little in his grip. "Otherwise nothing's going to make any sense. Isn't that right?"
"Of course it is. Can we talk a little now? Because I do have a few things to say."
"Yes. I want to talk too. Only let's both promise not to fight, all right? It's just not a thing we can afford to fight about."
"I know. Listen . . ."
And so the way was cleared for the quiet, controlled, dead-serious debate with which they began to fill one after another of the calendar's days, a debate that kept them both in a fine-drawn state of nerves that was not at all unpleasant. It was very like a courtship.
Like a courtship too it took place in a skillfully arranged variety of settings; Frank saw to that. Their numberless hundreds of thousands of words were spoken indoors and out, on long drives through the hills at night, in expensive country restaurants, and in New York. They had as many evenings-out in two weeks as they'd had in the whole previous year, and one of the ways he began to suspect he was winning, early in the second week, was that she didn't object to spending so much money; she almost certainly would have done so if she'd still been wholly committed to Europe in the fall.
But by then he was in little need of such minor indications. Almost from the start he had seized the initiative, and he was reasonably confident of victory. The idea he had to sell, after all, was clearly on the side of the angels. It was unselfish, mature, and (though he tried to avoid moralizing) morally unassailable. The other idea, however she might try to romanticize its bravery, was repugnant.
"But Frank, don't you see I only want to
do
it for your sake? Won't you please believe that, or try to believe it?"
And he would smile sadly down at her from his fortress of conviction. "How can it be for my sake," he would ask, "when the very thought of it makes my stomach turn over? Just think a little, April. Please."
His main tactical problem, in this initial phase of the campaign, was to find ways of making his position attractive, as well as commendable. The visits to town and country restaurants were helpful in this connection; she had only to glance around her in such places to discover a world of handsome, graceful, unquestionably worthwhile men and women who had somehow managed to transcend their environment—people who had turned dull jobs to their own advantage, who had exploited the system without knuckling under to it, who would certainly tend, if they knew the facts of the Wheelers' case, to agree with him.
"All right," she would say after hearing him out. "Supposing all this does happen. Supposing a couple of years from now we're both terribly sleek and stimulated and all that, and we have loads of fascinating friends and long vacations in Europe every summer. Do you really think you'd be any happier? Wouldn't you still be wasting the prime of your manhood in a completely empty, meaningless kind of—"
And so she would play straight into his snare:
"Suppose we let that be my business." How much, he would ask her, would his prime of manhood be worth if it had to be made conditional on allowing her to commit a criminal mutilation of herself? "Because that's what you'd be doing, April; there's no getting around it. You'd be committing a crime against your own substance. And mine."
Sometimes, gently, she would charge him with overdramatizing the whole thing. It was a thing women did every day in perfect safety; the girl at school had done it twice at least. Oh, doing it after the third month would be a different story, she granted him that—"I mean it certainly
would
be legitimate to worry, if that were the case. This way, though, being able to time it so closely and everything, it's the safest thing in the world."
But at her every mention of how safe it was he would puff out his cheeks and blow, frowning and shaking his head, as if he'd been asked to agree that an ethical justification could be found for genocide. No. He wouldn't buy it.
Soon there began to be a slight embarrassed hesitation in her voice and a distinct averting of her eyes whenever she spoke of the abortion as "doing this thing," even in the context of a heartfelt statement on how absolutely essential it was that the thing be done, as if the presence of his loving, troubled face had put the matter beyond the limits of conversational decency. Soon too—and this was the most encouraging sign of all—he began to be aware at odd moments that she was covertly watching him through a mist of romantic admiration.
These moments were not always quite spontaneous; as often as not they followed a subtle effort of vanity on his part, a form of masculine flirtation that was as skillful as any girl's. Walking toward or away from her across a restaurant floor, for example, he remembered always to do it in the old "terrifically sexy" way, and when they walked together he fell into another old habit of holding his head unnaturally erect and carrying his inside shoulder an inch or two higher than the other, to give himself more loftiness from where she clung at his arm. When he lit a cigarette in the dark he was careful to arrange his features in a virile frown before striking and cupping the flame (he knew, from having practiced this at the mirror of a blacked-out bathroom years ago, that it made a swift, intensely dramatic portrait), and he paid scrupulous attention to endless details: keeping his voice low and resonant, keeping his hair brushed and his bitten fingernails out of sight; being always the first one athletically up and out of bed in the morning, so that she might never see his face lying swollen and helpless in sleep.
Sometimes after a particularly conscious display of this kind, as when he found he had made all his molars ache by holding them clamped too long for an effect of grim-jawed determination by candlelight, he would feel a certain distaste with himself for having to resort to such methods— and, very obscurely, with her as well, for being so easily swayed by them. What kind of kid stuff was this? But these attacks of conscience were quickly allayed: all was fair in love and war; and besides, wasn't she all too capable of playing the same game? Hadn't she pulled out everything in her own bag of tricks last month, to seduce him into the Europe plan? All right, then. Maybe it was sort of ludicrous; maybe it wasn't the healthiest way for grown people to behave, but that was a question they could take up later. There was too much at stake to worry about such things now.
And so he freed himself to concentrate on the refinements of his role. He was particularly careful never to mention his day at the office or confess to being tired after the train, he assumed a quiet, almost Continental air of mastery in dealing with waiters and gas station attendants, he salted his after-theater critiques with obscure literary references— all to demonstrate that a man condemned to a life at Knox could still be interesting ("You're the most interesting person I've ever met"); he enthusiastically romped with the children, disdainfully mowed the lawn in record time and once spent the whole of a midnight's drive in an impersonation of Eddie Cantor singing "That's the Kind of a Baby for Me" because it made her laugh—all to demonstrate that a man confronted with this bleakest and most unnatural of conjugal problems, a wife unwilling to bear his child, could still be nice ("I love you when you're nice").
His campaign might have been quickly and easily won if he could have arranged for all the hours of the four weeks to be lived at the same pitch of intensity; the trouble was that ordinary life still had to go on.
It was still necessary for him to kill most of each day at the office, where Jack Ordway kept congratulating him on the niftiness of his flying the coop, and for her to spend it imprisoned in the reality of their home.
It was also necessary to deal with Mrs. Givings, who lately had found one excuse after another for calling up and dropping in. Her ostensible purpose was business, which in itself was very trying—there were many details to discuss about putting the house on the market, to which the Wheelers had to listen poker-faced—but her talk kept coming back to John and to "the lovely time we all had that day." Almost before they knew it, they had agreed to a tentative program of future Sunday afternoons "whenever it's convenient, whatever Sundays you're not too busy, between now and the time you leave."
It was necessary to deal with the Campbells, too. One whole Saturday was consumed that way, a picnic and outing at the beach undertaken at the Campbells' insistence—a day of hot dogs and children's tears, of sand and sweat and dazzling confusion—and it left them on the brink of hysteria that night. It was that night, in fact, that the courtship, or the sales campaign, or whatever it was, passed abruptly into its second, nonromantic phase.