"That's right, yes." She had even remembered that! But he covered his delight with the deprecating, side-of-themouth smile he had used for years in telling her about Knox, and said: "Big deal."
"Well," she said, "I imagine it
is
a pretty big deal; for them, anyway. What exactly do you think you'll be doing? Until they start sending you out on the trips, I mean. You never have told me much about it."
Was she kidding, or what? "Haven't I?" he said. "Well, of course I don't really know much yet myself; that's the thing. I guess it'll mostly be just a matter of what Pollock calls 'blocking out objectives'—sitting around letting him talk, I guess. Acting like we know something about computers. And of course the main reason for this whole thing, at least I
think
it's the main reason, is that Knox may be getting ready to buy up one of these really big computers, bigger than the '500.' Did I tell you about that?"
"No, I don't believe you did." And the remarkable thing was that she looked as though she'd like to hear about it.
"Well,
you
know—one of these monstrous great things like the Univac; the kind of machine they use to forecast the weather and predict elections and all that. And I mean those jobs
sell
for a couple of million dollars apiece, you see; if Knox went into production on one they'd have to organize a whole new promotion program around it. I think that may be what's going on."
He had the odd sensation that his lungs were growing deeper, or that the air was growing richer in oxygen. His shoulders, which had been tight and high, came gradually to rest against the back of the chair. Was this the way other men felt, telling their wives about their work?
". . . Basically it's just a terrifically big, terrifically fast adding machine," he was saying, in reply to her sober wish to know how a computer really worked. "Only instead of mechanical parts, you see, it's got thousands of little individual vacuum tubes . . ." And in a minute he was drawing for her, on a paper napkin, a diagram representing the passage of binary digit pulses through circuitry.
"Oh,
I
see," she said. "At least I think I see; yes. It's really sort of—interesting, isn't it?"
"Oh, well, I don't know, it's—yeah, I guess it
is
sort of interesting, in a way. Of course I don't really know much about it, beyond the basic idea of the thing."
"You always say that. I bet you really know a lot more about it than you think. You certainly do explain it well, anyway."
"Oh?" He felt his smiling cheeks get warm as he lowered his eyes and put the pencil back inside his crisp gabardine suit. "Well, thanks." He finished the last of his second cup of coffee and stood up. "Guess I'd better be getting started."
She stood up too, smoothing her skirt.
"Listen, though, April; this was really nice." The walls of his throat closed up. He felt he was about to cry, but he managed to hold it back. "I mean it was a swell breakfast," he said, blinking. "Really; I don't know when I've ever had a—a nicer breakfast."
"Thank you," she said. "I'm glad; I enjoyed it too."
And could he just walk out now? Without saying anything? Looking at her as they moved toward the door, he wondered if he ought to say "I can't tell you how awful I feel about yesterday," or "I do love you," or something like that; or would it be better not to risk starting things up again? He hesitated, turning to face her, and felt his mouth go into an awkward shape.
"Then you don't really—" he began. "You don't really hate me, or anything?"
Her eyes looked deep and serious; she seemed to be glad he had asked her that question, as if it were one of the few questions in the world she could answer with authority. She shook her head. "No; of course I don't." And she held the door open for him. "Have a good day."
"I will. You too." And then it was easy to decide what to do next: without touching her he began as slowly as any movie actor, to bend toward her lips.
Her face, as it came up close, betrayed an instant's surprise or hesitation, but then it softened; she half closed her eyes and made it clear that this, however brief, would be a mutually willing, mutally gentle kiss. Only after the kiss was completed did he touch her with his hand, on the arm. She was, after all, a damned good-looking girl.
"Okay, then," he said huskily. "So long."
APRIL JOHNSON WHEELER
watched her husband's face withdraw, she felt the light squeeze of his hand on her arm and heard his words, and smiled at him.
"So long," she answered.
She followed him outside to stand on the kitchen steps and watch, hugging her arms against the morning chill, while he started up the station car and brought it rumbling out into the sunshine. His flushed profile, thrust out and facing the rear as the car moved past, revealed nothing but the sobriety of a man with a pardonable pride in knowing how to back a car efficiently down a hill. She walked out to a sunny place in front of the carport to see him off, watching the crumpled shape of the old Ford get smaller and smaller. At the end of the driveway, as he backed it out and around into the road, a gleam of sun on the windshield eclipsed his face. She held up her hand and waved anyway, in case he was looking, and when he came into view again as the car straightened out it was clear that he'd seen her. He was bending and grinning up at her, neat and happy in his gabardine suit, his blazing white shirt and dark tie, answering her wave with a small, jaunty wave of his own; then he was gone.
Her smile continued until she was back in the kitchen, clearing away the breakfast dishes into a steaming sinkful of suds; she was still smiling, in fact, when she saw the paper napkin with the diagram of the computer on it, and even then her smile didn't fade: it simply spread and trembled and locked itself into a stiff grimace while the spasms worked at her aching throat, again and again, and the tears broke and ran down her cheeks as fast as she could wipe them away.
She got some music on the radio, to steady her nerves, and by the time she'd finished washing the dishes she was all right again. Her gums were sore from too many cigarettes during the night, her hands were inclined to shake and she was more aware of her heartbeats than usual; otherwise she felt fine. It was a shock, though, when the radio announcer said "Eight forty-five"; it seemed like noon, or early afternoon. She washed her face in cold water and took several deep breaths, trying to slow her heart down; then she lit a cigarette and composed herself at the telephone.
"Hello, Milly? . . . Hi. Everything all right? . . . My voice sounds what? . . . Oh. Well, no, actually, I'm
not
feeling any better; that's really why I called. . . . Are you sure you don't mind? I mean it may not be for the whole night again; maybe Frank'll want to come over and get them this evening, depending how things work out; but I guess we'd better leave it open, just in case. . . . Well, that's really wonderful of you, Milly, I do appreciate it. . . . Oh no, I'm sure it's nothing serious; it's just—you know, one of those things. . . . All right, then. Give them a kiss for me, and tell them one or the other of us'll be stopping by to pick them up, either tonight or tomorrow. . . . What? . . . Oh, well— no, not if they're outdoors playing. Don't call them in." The cigarette broke and shredded in her fingers; she let it drop into the ash tray and used both hands to grip the telephone. "Just give them—you know; give them each a kiss for me, and give them my love, and tell them—
you
know. . . . All right, Milly. Thanks."
And she barely managed to get the phone back in its cradle before she was crying again. To control herself she lit another cigarette, but it gagged her and she had to go to the bathroom and stand there for a long time, retching dryly even after she'd lost what little breakfast she'd managed to eat. Afterwards, she washed her face again and brushed her teeth, and then it was time to get busy.
"Have you thought it through, April?" Aunt Claire used to say, holding up one stout, arthritic forefinger. "Never undertake to do a thing until you've thought it through; then do the best you can."
The first thing to do was to straighten up the house, and in particular to straighten up the desk, where the hours and hours of her trying to think it through, last night, had left a mess of remnants. The heaped-up ash tray was there, and the opened bottle of ink surrounded by spilled ashes, and the coffee cup containing a dried brown ring. She had only to sit down at the desk and switch on its lamp to bring back the harsh, desolate flavor of the small hours.
In the wastebasket, lumped and crumpled, lay all the failures of the letter she had tried to write. She picked one of them out and opened it and spread it flat, but at first she couldn't read it: she could only marvel at how cramped and black and angry the handwriting looked, like row on row of precisely swatted mosquitos. Then part of it, halfway down the page, came into focus:
. . . your cowardly self-delusions about "love" when you know as well as
I do that there's never been anything between us but contempt and distrust and a terrible sickly dependence on each other's weakness—that's
why. That's why I couldn't stop laughing today when you said thatabout the Inability to Love, and that's why I can't stand to let you touch
me, and that's why I'll never again believe in anything you think, let alone in anything you say . . .
She didn't want to read the rest because she knew it wasn't worth reading. It was weak with hate, like all the other abortive letters on all the other crumpled papers; all of them would have to be burned.
It wasn't until five this morning—and could that really have been only four hours ago?—that she'd finally stopped trying to write the letter. She had forced herself up from the desk then, aching with tiredness, and gone in to take a deep, warm bath, lying very still under the still water for a long time, like a patient in therapy. Afterwards, feeling absent-minded and greatly calmed, she had gone into the bedroom to get dressed; and there he was, on his back.
The sight of him, in the early blue light, sprawled out and twisted in his wrinkled Sunday sports clothes, had been as much of a shock as if she'd found a stranger in the bed. When she sat down in the reek of whiskey to get a closer look at his flushed, sleeping face, she began to understand the real cause of her shock: it was much more than the knowledge that she didn't love him. It was that she didn't, she couldn't possibly hate him. How could anyone hate him? He was—well, he was
Frank.
Then he'd made a little snoring moan and his lips had begun to work as he groped for her hand. "Oh, baby. Oh, my baby, don't go away . . ."
"Sh-sh-sh. It's all right. It's all right, Frank. Go to sleep."
And that was when she'd thought it through.
So it hadn't been wrong or dishonest of her to say no this morning, when he asked if she hated him, any more than it had been wrong or dishonest to serve him the elaborate breakfast and to show the elaborate interest in his work, and to kiss him goodbye. The kiss, for that matter, had been exactly right—a perfectly fair, friendly kiss, a kiss for a boy you'd just met at a party, a boy who'd danced with you and made you laugh and walked you home afterwards, talking about himself all the way.
The only real mistake, the only wrong and dishonest thing, was ever to have seen him as anything more than that. Oh, for a month or two, just for fun, it might be all right to play a game like that with a boy; but all these years! And all because, in a sentimentally lonely time long ago, she had found it easy and agreeable to believe whatever this one particular boy felt like saying, and to repay him for that pleasure by telling easy, agreeable lies of her own, until each was saying what the other most wanted to hear—until he was saying "I love you" and she was saying "Really, I mean it; you're the most interesting person I've ever met."
What a subtle, treacherous thing it was to let yourself go that way! Because once you'd started it was terribly difficult to stop; soon you were saying "I'm sorry, of course you're right," and "Whatever you think is best," and "You're the most wonderful and valuable thing in the world," and the next thing you knew all honesty, all truth, was as far away and glimmering, as hopelessly unattainable as the world of the golden people. Then you discovered you were working at life the way the Laurel Players worked at
The Petrified Forest,
or the way Steve Kovick worked at his drums—earnest and sloppy and full of pretension and all wrong; you found you were saying yes when you meant no, and "We've got to be together in this thing" when you meant the very opposite; then you were breathing gasoline as if it were flowers and abandoning yourself to a delirium of love under the weight of a clumsy, grunting, red-faced man you didn't even like—Shep Campbell!—and then you were face to face, in total darkness, with the knowledge that you didn't know who you were.
And how could anyone else be blamed for that?
When she'd straightened up the desk and made Frank's bed, with fresh sheets, she carried the wastebasket outdoors and around to the back yard. It was an autumnal day, warm but with a light sharp breeze that scudded stray leaves over the grass and reminded her of all the brave beginnings of childhood, of the apples and pencils and new woolen clothes of the last few days before school.
She took the wastebasket out across the lawn to the incinerator drum, dumped the papers in it and set a match to them. Then she sat down on the edge of the sun-warmed stone wall to wait for their burning, watching the all but invisible flame crawl slowly and then more rapidly up and around them, sending out little waves of heat that shimmered the landscape. The sounds of bird song and rustling trees were faintly mingled with the faraway cries of children at play; she listened carefully but couldn't make out which were Jennifer's and Michael's voices and which were the Campbell boys'—or even, with certainty, whether the voices were coming from the Campbells' part of the Hill.
From a distance, all children's voices sound the same. "And listen! Listen!—you know what else she brought me, Margie?
Listen!
I'm trying to
tell
you something."
"
Wha
-ut?"
Margie Rothenberg and her little brother George and Mary Jane Crawford and Edna Slater were there, fooling around at the place by the hedge where all the grass was worn away, the place with the little cave and the flat rock where they kept their collection of Dixie Cup lids.
"I said you know what else she brought me? My mother? She brought me this beautiful blue cashmere sweater, for school, and socks that match, and this beautiful little perfume atomizer? This little bottle with a thing that you squeeze? With real perfume in it? Oh, and we drove into White plains with Mr. Minton, that's my mother's friend, and we went to the movies and had ice cream and everything, and I stayed up till ten minutes after eleven."
"How come she was only here two days?" Margie Rothenberg inquired. "You said she was staying a week. George, you
quit
that now!"
"I did not; I said she
might
stay a week. Next time she probably will, or maybe I'll go and stay a week with her, and if I do that—"
"George! The very next time you pick your nose and eat it I'm gonna tell! I mean it!"
"—and if I do that, you know what? If I do that I won't have to go to school or anything for a whole week; ha, ha. Hey Margie? You want to come home and see my sweater and stuff?"
"I can't. I have to get home in time for 'Don Winslow.' "
"We can hear 'Don Winslow' in my house. Come on."
"I can't. I have to get home. Come on, Georgie."
"Hey Edna? Hey Mary Jane? Know what my mother brought me? She brought me this beautiful—Hey, listen Edna. Listen . . ." There was the sound of an upstairs window rattling open, and she knew that if she turned around she would see the dim shape of Aunt Claire peering out through the copper screen.
"
Aay
-prul!"
"She brought me this beautiful blue sweater, it's cashmere, and this beautiful—"
"
Aay
-prul!"
"What? I'm over here."
"Why didn't you
an
swer, then? I want you to come in this instant and get washed and changed. Your father just called. He's driving out and he'll be here in fifteen minutes."
And she ran for the house so fast that her sneakers seemed hardly to touch the ground. Nothing like this had ever, ever happened before: two whole days with her mother, and then, now, the very next day . . .
She took the stairs two at a time and flew to her room and began to undress in such haste that she popped a button off her blouse, saying, "When did he call? What did he say? How long is he staying?"
"I don't know, dear; he said he's on his way up to Boston. You certainly don't need to tear your clothes. There's plenty of time."
Then she was out on the front porch in her party dress, watching down the street for the first glimpse of his long, high-wheeled, beautiful touring car. When it did come into sight, two blocks away, she forced herself not to start running down the path; she waited until it pulled up and stopped in front of the house, so she could watch him get out.
And oh, how tall, how wonderfully slender and straight he was! How golden the sunlight shone on his hair and his laughing face—"Daddy!"—and then she was running, and then she was in his arms.
"How's my sweetheart?" He smelled of linen and whiskey and tobacco; the short hairs at the back of his neck were bristly to the touch and his jaw was like a warm pumice stone. But his voice was the best of all: as deep and thrilling as blowing across the mouth of an earthen jug. "Do you know you've grown about three feet? I don't know if I can
handle
a girl as big as you. Can't carry you, anyway; I know that much. Let's go on in and see your Aunt Claire. How's everything? How're all your boy friends?"
In the living room, talking with Aunt Claire, he was marvelous. His slim ankles, beneath trouser cuffs that had been raised to just the right height, were clad in taut socks of fluted black wool; his dark brown shoes were so shapely and so gracefully arranged on the carpet, one a little forward and one back, that she felt she ought to study them for a long time, to commit them to memory as the way a man's feet ought to look. But her gaze kept straying upward to his princely knees, to his close-fitting vest with its fine little drape of watch chain, to the way he held himself in his chair and to his white-cuffed wrists and hands, one holding a highball glass and the other making slow, easy gestures in the air, and to his brilliant face. There was too much of him for the eye to behold all at once.