Even as he filled his lungs for shouting he knew it wasn't the idea itself that repelled him—the idea itself, God knew, was more than a little attractive—it was that she had done all this on her own, in secret, had sought out the girl and obtained the facts and bought the rubber syringe and rehearsed the speech; that if she'd thought about him at all it was only as a possible hitch in the scheme, a source of tiresome objections that would have to be cleared up and disposed of if the thing were to be carried out with maximum efficiency. That was the intolerable part of it; that was what enriched his voice with a tremor of outrage:
"Christ's
sake,
don't be an idiot. You want to kill yourself? I don't even want to hear about it."
She sighed patiently. "All right, Frank. In that case there's certainly no need for you to hear about it. I only told you because I thought you might be willing to help me in this thing. Obviously, I should have known better."
"Listen.
Listen
to me. You do this—you do this and I swear to God I'll—"
"Oh, you'll what? You'll leave me? What's that supposed to be—a threat or a promise?"
And the fight went on all night. It caused them to hiss and grapple and knock over a chair, it spilled outside and downstairs and into the street ("Get
away
from me! Get
away
from me!"); it washed them trembling up against the high wire fence of a waterfront junkyard, until a waterfront drunk came to stare at them and make them waver home, and he could feel the panic and the shame of it even now, leaning here against this tree with these gnats tickling his neck. All that saved him, all that enabled him now to crouch and lift a new stone from its socket and follow its rumbling fall with the steady and dignified tread of self-respect, was that the next day he had won. The next day, weeping in his arms, she had allowed herself to be dissuaded.
"Oh, I know, I know," she had whispered against his shirt, "I know you're right. I'm sorry. I love you. We'll name it Frank and we'll send it to college and everything. I promise, promise."
And it seemed to him now that no single moment of his life had ever contained a better proof of manhood than that, if any proof were needed: holding that tamed, submissive girl and saying, "Oh, my lovely; oh, my lovely," while she promised she would bear his child. Lurching and swayng under the weight of the stone in the sun, dropping it at last and wiping his sore hands, he picked up the shovel and went to work again, while the children's voices fluted and chirped around him, as insidiously torturing as the gnats.
And I didn't even
want
a baby, he thought to the rhythm of his digging. Isn't that the damnedest thing? I didn't want a baby any more than
she
did. Wasn't it true, then, that everything in his life from that point on had been a succession of things he hadn't really wanted to do? Taking a hopelessly dull job to prove he could be as responsible as any other family man, moving to an overpriced, genteel apartment to prove his mature belief in the fundamentals of orderliness and good health, having another child to prove that the first one hadn't been a mistake, buying a house in the country because that was the next logical step and he had to prove himself capable of taking it. Proving, proving; and for no other reason than that he was married to a woman who had somehow managed to put him forever on the defensive, who loved him when he was nice, who lived according to what she happened to feel like doing and who might at any time—this was the hell of it—who might at any time of day or night just happen to feel like leaving him. It was as ludicrous and as simple as that.
"Are you hitting rock again, Daddy?"
"Not this time," he said. "This is a root. I think it's too deep to matter, though. If you'll just get out of the way now, I'll try and fit the stone in."
Kneeling, he rolled the boulder into place, but it wouldn't settle. It wobbled, and it sat three inches too high.
"That's too high, Daddy."
"I know it, baby." He laboriously pried the stone out again and began hacking at the root, trying to cut it, using the shovel like a clumsy ax. It was as tough as cartilage.
"Sweetie, I said don't come so
close. Y
ou're kicking
dirt
in the hole."
"I'm
helping,
Daddy."
Jennifer looked hurt and surprised, and he thought she might be going to cry again. He tried to make his voice very low and gentle. "Look, everybody. Why don't you find something else to do? You've got the whole yard to play in. Come on, now. That's the idea. I'll call you if I need any help."
But in a minute they were back, sitting too close and talking quietly together. Dizzy with effort and blind with sweat, he was straddling the pit and holding the shovel vertically, like a pile driver, lifting it high and bringing it down with all his strength on the root. He had torn a ragged wound in it, laying open its moist white meat, but it wouldn't break, it wouldn't give, and it made the children laugh each time the shovel bounced and rang in his hands. The delicate noise of their laughter, the look of their tulip-soft skin and of their two sunny skulls, as fragile as eggshell, made a terrible contrast to the feel of biting steel and shuddering pulp, and it was his sense of this that made his eyes commit a distortion of truth. For a split second, in the act of bringing the shovel blade down, he thought he saw Michael's white sneaker slip into its path. Even as he swerved and threw the shovel away with a clang he knew it hadn't really happened—but it
could
have happened, that was the point—and his anger was so quick that the next thing he knew he had grabbed him by the belt and spun him around and hit him hard on the buttocks with the flat of his hand, twice, surprised at the stunning vigor of the blows and at the roar of his own voice: "Get
outa
here now! Get
outa
here!"
Leaping and twisting, clutching the seat of his pants with both hands, Michael found his need to cry so sudden and so deep that for several seconds after the first shocked squeal no sound could break from him. His eyes wrinkled shut, his mouth opened and was locked in that position while his lungs fought for breath; then out it came, a long high wail of pain and humiliation. Jennifer watched him, round-eyed, and in the next breath her own face began to twitch and crumple and she was crying too.
"I kept telling you and telling you," he explained to them, waving his arms. "I
told
you there'd be trouble if you got too close. Didn't I? Didn't I? All right now, take off. Both of you."
They didn't need to be told. They were moving steadily away from him across the grass, crying, looking back at him with infinite reproachfulness. In another second he might have been running after them with apologies, he might have been crying too, if he hadn't forced himself to pick up the shovel and bang it at the root again; and as he worked he prepared an anxious, silent brief in his own defense. Well, damn it, I
did
keep telling them and telling them, he assured himself, and by now his mind had mercifully amended the facts. The kid put his foot right the hell in my
way,
for God's sake. If I hadn't swerved just in time he wouldn't
have
a foot, for God's sake. . . .
When he looked up again he saw that April had come out of the kitchen door and around the side of the house, and he saw that the children had run to her and hidden their faces in her trousers.
THEN IT WAS SUNDAY,
with the living room deep in the rustling torpor of Sunday newspapers, and no words had passed between Frank Wheeler and his wife for what seemed a year. She had gone alone to the second and final performance of
The Petrified Forest,
and afterwards had slept on the sofa again.
He was trying now to take his ease in an armchair, looking through the magazine section of the T
imes,
while the children played quietly in the corner and April washed the dishes in the kitchen. He had thumbed through the magazine more than once, put it down and picked it up again, and he kept returning to a full-page, dramatically lighted fashion photograph whose caption began "A frankly flattering, definitely feminine dress to go happily wherever you go . . ." and whose subject was a tall, proud girl with deeper breasts and hips than he'd thought fashion models were supposed to have. At first he thought she looked not unlike a girl in his office named Maureen Grube; then he decided this one was much better looking and probably more intelligent. Still, there was a distinct resemblance; and as he studied this frankly flattering, definitely feminine girl his mind slid away in a fuddled erotic reverie. At the last office Christmas party, not nearly as drunk as he was pretending to be, he had backed Maureen Grube up against a filing cabinet and kissed her long and hard on the mouth.
Displeased with himself, he dropped the paper on the rug and lit a cigarette without noticing that another one, quite long, was smoldering in the ash tray beside him. Then, if only because the afternoon was bright and the children were quiet and the fight with April was now another day in the past, he went into the kitchen and took hold of both her elbows as she bent over a sinkful of suds.
"Listen," he whispered. "I don't care who's right or who's wrong or what this whole damn thing is all about. Couldn't we just cut it out and start acting like human beings for a change?"
"Until the next time, you mean? Make everything all nice and comfy-cozy until the next time? I'm afraid not, thanks. I'm tired of playing that game."
"Don't you see how unfair you're being? What do you want from me?"
"Two things, at the moment. I want you to take your hands off me and I want you to keep your voice down."
"Will you tell me one thing? Will you tell me just what the hell you're trying to do?"
"Certainly. I'm trying to wash the dishes."
"Daddy?" Jennifer said when he went back to the living room.
"What?"
"Would you please read us the funnies?"
The shyness of this request, and the sight of their trusting eyes, made him want to weep. "You bet I will," he said. "Let's sit down over here, all three of us, and we'll read the funnies."
He found it hard to keep his voice from thickening into a sentimental husk as he began to read aloud, with their two heads pressed close to his ribs on either side and their thin legs lying straight out on the sofa cushions, warm against his own.
They
knew what forgiveness was;
they
were willing to take him for better or worse; they loved him. Why couldn't April realize how simple and necessary it was to love? Why did she have to complicate everything?
The only trouble was that the funnies seemed to go on forever; the turning of each dense, muddled page of them brought the job no nearer to completion. Before long his voice had become a strained, hurrying monotone and his right knee had begun to jiggle in a little dance of irritation.
"Daddy, we skipped a funny."
"No we didn't, sweetie. That's just an advertisement. You don't want to read that."
"Yes I do."
"I do too."
"But it isn't a
funny.
It's just made to look like one. It's an advertisement for some kind of toothpaste."
"Read us it anyway."
He set his bite. All the nerves at the roots of his teeth seemed to have entwined with the nerves at the roots of his scalp in a tingling knot. "All right," he said. "See, in the first picture this lady wants to dance with this man but he won't ask her to, and here in the next picture she's crying and her friend says maybe the reason he won't dance with her is because her breath doesn't smell too nice, and then in the next picture she's talking to this dentist, and he says . . ."
He felt as if he were sinking helplessly into the cushions and the papers and the bodies of his children like a man in quicksand. When the funnies were finished at last he struggled to his feet, quietly gasping, and stood for several minutes in the middle of the carpet, making tight fists in his pockets to restrain himself from doing what suddenly seemed the only thing in the world he really and truly wanted to do: picking up a chair and throwing it through the picture window.
What the hell kind of a life was this? What in God's name was the point or the meaning or the purpose of a life like this?
When evening came, heavy with beer, he began to look forward to the fact that the Campbells were coming over. Ordinarily it might have depressed him ("Why don't we ever see anyone else? Do you realize they're practically the only friends we have?"), but tonight it held a certain promise. At least she would have to laugh and talk in their company; at least she would have to smile at him from time to time and call him "darling." Besides, it couldn't be denied that the Campbells did seem to bring out the best in both of them.
"Hi!" They called to one another.
"Hi! . . ." "Hi! . . ."
This one glad syllable, borne up through the gathering twilight and redoubling back from the Wheelers' kitchen door, was the traditional herald of an evening's entertainment. Then came the handshakings, the stately puckered kissings, the sighs of amiable exhaustion—"Ah-h-h"; "Whoo-o"—suggesting that miles of hot sand had been traveled for the finding of this oasis or that living breath itself had been held, painfully, against the promise of this release. In the living room, having sipped and grimaced at the first frosty brimming of their drinks, they pulled themselves together for a moment of mutual admiration; then they sank into various postures of controlled collapse.
Milly Campbell dropped her shoes and squirmed deep into the sofa cushions, her ankles snug beneath her buttocks and her uplifted face crinkling into a good sport's smile—not the prettiest girl in the world, maybe, but cute and quick and fun to have around.
Beside her, Frank slid down on the nape of his spine until his cocked leg was as high as his head. His eyes were already alert for conversational openings and his thin mouth already moving in the curly shape of wit, as if he were rolling a small, bitter lozenge on his tongue.
Shep, massive and dependable, a steadying influence on the group, set his meaty knees wide apart and worked his tie loose with muscular fingers to free his throat for gusts of laughter.
And finally, the last to settle, April arranged herself with careless elegance in the sling chair, her head thrown back on the canvas to blow sad, aristocratic spires of cigarette smoke at the ceiling. They were ready to begin.
At first it seemed, to everyone's surprise and relief, that the delicate topic of the Laurel Players could be rapidly disposed of. A brief exchange of words and a few deprecating, head-shaking chuckles seemed to take care of it. Milly insisted that the second performance had really beenmuch better than the first—"I mean at least the audience did seem more—well, more appreciative, I thought. Didn't you, sweetie?" Shep said that he personally was glad to have the damn thing over with; and April, to whom all their anxious glances now turned, put them at ease with a smile.
"To coin a phrase," she said, "it was a lot of fun anyway. Wasn't it awful how many people were saying that last night? I must've heard those same words fifty times."
Within a minute the talk had turned to children and disease (the Campbells' eldest boy was underweight and Milly wondered if he might be suffering from an obscure blood ailment, until Shep said that whatever he was suffering from it sure hadn't weakened his throwing arm), and from there to an agreement that the elementary school was really doing a fine job, considering the reactionary board it was saddled with, and from there to the fact that prices had been unaccountably high in the supermarket. It was only then, during a dissertation by Milly on lamb chops, that an almost palpable discomfort settled over the room. They shifted in their seats, they filled awkward pauses with elaborate courtesies about the freshening of drinks, they avoided one another's eyes and did their best to avoid the alarming, indisputable knowledge that they had nothing to talk about. It was a new experience.
Two years or even a year ago it could never have happened, for then if nothing else there had always been a topic in the outrageous state of the nation. "How do you
like
this Oppenheimer business?" one of them would demand, and the others would fight for the floor with revolutionary zeal. The cancerous growth of Senator McCarthy had poisoned the United States, and with the pouring of second or third drinks they could begin to see themselves as members of an embattled, dwindling intellectual underground. Clippings from the
Observer
or the
Manchester Guardian
would be produced and read aloud, to slow and respectful nods; Frank might talk wistfully of Europe—"God, I wish we'd taken off and gone there when we had the chance"—and this might lead to a quick general lust for expatriation: "Let's
all
go!" (Once it went as far as a practical discussion of how much they'd need for boat fare and rent and schools, until Shep, after a sobering round of coffee, explained what he'd read about the difficulty of getting jobs in foreign countries.)
And even after politics had palled there had still been the elusive but endlessly absorbing subject of Conformity, or The Suburbs, or Madison Avenue, or American Society Today. "Oh Jesus," Shep might begin, "you know this character next door to us? Donaldson? The one that's always out fooling with his power mower and talking about the rat race and the soft sell? Well, listen: did I tell you what he said about his barbecue pit?" And there would follow an anecdote of extreme suburban smugness that left them weak with laughter.
"Oh, I don't believe it," April would insist. "Do they really talk that way?"
And Frank would develop the theme. "The point is it wouldn't be so bad if it weren't so typical. It isn't only the Donaldsons—it's the Cramers too, and the whaddyacallits, the Wingates, and a million others. It's all the idiots I ride with on the train every day. It's a disease. Nobody thinks or feels or cares any more; nobody gets excited or believes in anything except their own comfortable little God damn mediocrity."
Milly Campbell would writhe in pleasure. "Oh, that's so true. Isn't that true, darling?
They would all agree, and the happy implication was that they alone, the four of them, were painfully alive in a drugged and dying culture. It was in the face of this defiance, and in tentative reply to this loneliness, that the idea of the Laurel Players had made its first appeal. Milly had brought the news: some people she'd met from the other side of the Hill were trying to organize a theater group. They planned to hire a New York director and to produce serious plays, if only they could arouse enough community interest. Oh, it probably wouldn't amount to much—Milly knew that—but she wondered, shyly, if it might not be fun. April had been disdainful at first: "Oh, God, I know these damn little artsy-craftsy things. There'll be a woman with blue hair and wooden beads who met Max Reinhardt once, and there'll be two or three slightly homosexual young men and seven girls with bad complexions." But then a tasteful advertisement began to appear in the local paper ("We are looking for actors . . ."); then the Wheelers met the people too, at an otherwise boring party, and had to admit that they were what April called "genuine." At Christmastime they met the director himself and agreed with Shep that he did seem like a man who knew what he was doing, and within a month they were all committed. Even Frank, while refusing to try out for a part ("I'd be lousy"), helped write some of the promotional material and got it multigraphed at his office, and it was Frank who talked most hopefully about the larger social and philosophical possibilities of the thing. If a really good, really serious community theater could be established here, wouldn't it be a step in the right direction? God knew they would probably never inspire the Donaldsons—and who cared?—but at least they might give the Donaldsons pause; they might show the Donaldsons a way of life beyond the commuting train and the Republican Party and the barbecue pit. Besides, what did they have to lose?
Whatever it was, they had lost it now. Blame for the failure of the Laurel Players could hardly be fobbed off on Conformity or The Suburbs or American Society Today. How could new jokes be told about their neighbors when these very neighbors had sat and sweated in their audience? Donaldsons, Cramers, Wingates and all, they had come to
The Petrified Forest
with a surprisingly generous openness of mind, and had been let down.
Milly was talking about gardening now, about the difficulty of raising a healthy lawn on Revolutionary Hill, and her eyes were taking on a glaze of panic. Her voice had been the only sound in the room for ten minutes or more, and it had been continuous. She seemed keenly aware of this, but aware too that if she allowed herself to stop the house would fill with a silence as thick as water, an impossibly deep, wide pool in which she would flounder and drown.
It was Frank who came to her rescue. "Oh, hey listen, Milly. I meant to ask you. Do you know what seecham is? Or beecham? A kind of plant?"
"Seecham," she repeated, pretending to think, while a blush of gratitude suffused her softening face. "Offhand I'm afraid I don't know, Frank. I can certainly look it
up
for you, though. We have this book at home."
"Doesn't really matter, I guess," he said. "It's just that Mrs. Givings came barrel-assing over here yesterday with a big box of this crazy—"