“Did that
bother
you!” Charlie had said to his son. “Well, boy, you sure have a lot to learn—get rid of those silly kid feelings. Happens all the time, boy, happens all the time.”
“I suppose it happens all the time”—John did not realize that Virginia caught the sound of quotes—“and I shouldn’t have mentioned it, but I know he was out of sorts with me for the rest of the day. That’s why I thought——”
Virginia was livid with anger; and only Walter’s admonition not to gloss over matters kept her from bolting from the room.
“It doesn’t ‘happen all the time,’ John! I take it you are fairly well informed on matters of sex, but don’t apologize for being shocked at some aspects of it. And if your father isn’t a decent human being, if he is careless and irresponsible, it is something you are going to have to face—squarely and fearlessly. I’m sorry, John, I’m deeply sorry. You’ve had an image, a dream that—well, really nobody could have lived up to—but I’m sorry it’s had to be shattered this violently.”
She watched him, his brown hands gripping the blanket, swallowing hard, beating his dream to death. It gave a last gasp, a last try at survival. “Do you mean—I mean—you don’t seem surprised or anything—isn’t this, well, kind of a set of unusual——”
“Unusual circumstances? Let’s say ‘particular’ inasmuch as nothing
exactly
like it happened before.”
Some of the suffering disappeared from his face and he looked thoughtful, the way he looked when he was studying, Virginia noticed—he had left his pain rather than the pain leaving him. “You know, John, I believe there’s some strawberry ice cream in the refrigerator. Would you like some?”
It was a pale imitation of the usual star-spangled response. “Yes, thank you, Aunt Virginia—sounds real good.”
“Coming up. Want some cookies?”
“I don’t think so—my throat’s kinda sore.” Tight and sore from swallowing tears.
In the kitchen, Virginia handed the bowl of ice cream with a spoon and a napkin to Gregg, saying, “Take over, will you? I’m not holding up very well. I’m so disgusted and ashamed that I haven’t any bedside manner left in me.”
When Gregg went in, John was lying with his face toward the windows, which were wet with fog. He turned quickly. “Hi, Gregg! Oh boy, that looks good!”
“How are you doing?” said Gregg.
“Oh, fine,” replied John with exaggerated cheerfulness, and fell to, hungrily. He wanted no more painful discussions, Gregg could see, so he discreetly led the conversation into the merits of ice cream for a cold, the merits of ice cream, period; and then told him stories of his own childhood, sticking to episodes that were light and amusing. Soon John was laughing genuinely, relaxed, and Gregg said, “Hey, you’ve got to get some sleep, you know! Strict instructions from Aunt V.”
“Gregg?”
“H’m?”
“I think I’d better write M’ma tomorrow, like you said I should. I suppose I’ll be in bed, anyway, and I might as well fill in the time some way.”
“Fine!”
John put the empty bowl, scraped clean, onto the table beside the bed. Thoughtfully he said, “I think maybe it’d be a good idea—for the Christmas holidays—if I went home.”
“Well—hasn’t that always been the idea, John? Or are you homesick? Would you like to go back—now?”
John shook his head slowly. “No—no, I’m not homesick. But you know, Grand-mère is getting so old. Oh—shucks, that’s not it!” He brought a fist down on the blankets in exasperation.
“I think,” Gregg said carefully, “I think that you want another look at your mother. I think you understand some things about her that you didn’t before. Is that close?”
John nodded, with a look of surprise. “Yeah, that’s it.”
“Well, when you write to her, I’d do better than the usual ‘I’m fine. How are you?’ If you can, tell her what happened, how you feel about it.”
“Oh, I don’t think I could do that. I don’t know whether she’d be interested.” That was his old reaction, John realized, the old resentment at her blank, uncaring face. “But maybe she would, you know——” The complexities were too much for him, and Gregg saw him becoming confused.
He said, “Well, at least try to get in one phrase, one that I know she’ll be interested in: ‘I love you very much—’ ”
John grinned his embarrassment, and then at Gregg’s serious face, said, “Okay, okay!”
Turning out the lamp, Gregg said, “Get some sleep now, and if you want anything—sing out. I’ll leave my door open.”
John replied, with a noisy yawn, “But will you please shut mine?”
“You sure?”
“Yeah,” he laughed, “I’m always waiting for it to blow shut and bang and wake me up, so I can’t get to sleep.”
Gregg closed the door behind him softly. He felt relieved and secure in the knowledge that the resilience of the very young was one of the things that was most dependable about them.
He was sure that in later years John would understand better why “nobody told me.” Charlie had to
happen
to a person, he thought. You couldn’t isolate him and say anything about him to anyone that would be sufficient warning. John had had his firsthand shock and would recover. It was up to him and Virginia to see to it that he learned from the experience—to be wary and on guard. For if he recovered with the idea that he had simply expected too much of his father, that his boy’s idealizing of another human being was the thing that was at fault, and not Charlie himself . . . Gregg rubbed the back of his neck, realizing he was full of tensions. He started upstairs to his room. It had been a long day, and he wanted a bath and solitude, he was behind on his work—worst of all, his feelings for Virginia were becoming intolerable.
It had begun secretly, silently, and somewhat shamefully the day after Jeff’s and Alma’s funeral. He had been so absorbed in his concern for Virginia—she had been so tense and still and white through it all. And his own inner rage with Charlie had almost completely masked a feeling that was demanding attention. When it finally surfaced, he was overwhelmed at the realization. There was no impediment, nothing to bar him from loving her openly, and he could
begin
to wait.
It was John who had brought them unexpectedly closer in their relationship. He seemed like a child they might have had. His care was divided between them, and they were bonded to protect him. In the brief time he had been at Nelson he had become a part of them, and automatically it was Gregg to whom he looked for discipline and Virginia for a Band-aid. It was Virginia whom he hugged good night, it was Gregg whom he consulted about the gear chain on his bike. They sought each other’s faces when he accomplished something, and together they commended him. They suffered together in his short absence, and when he was safely home, for the first time, Virginia had impulsively thrown her arms around Gregg, burying her face on his shoulder in relief. For a long moment he had held her quietly, feeling her hair against his lips, feeling her body against his, and suddenly his arms locked around her, and just as suddenly he let her go before there was a possibility that she might protest.
Sometimes he hated himself for his caution, his distrust of spontaneous expression. The men of his platoon in the Army had thought of him as a cold fish, he knew. All his life he had been the spectator, the listener; learning and absorbing and weighing. It was the basis of his friendship with Walter, because he understood Walter’s hesitancy and delicacy about participating too deeply in the lives of others. It was not a lack of warmth, as some thought, it was a regard for the rights and differences and opinions of others which so many people stereotyped as the “cold New England type.”
Occasionally he entertained romantic notions of leaving Nelson, of wrapping Virginia up in possessive isolation from all memories of Jeff, from the family home, from her constant concern and fear of Charlie, even from John. It was foolishness of course. It was just as foolish to think of himself in any way as not “part of the family.” Even in the lonely years before the war, living in New York, teaching at a private school, he had never completely lost contact. Walter and Beatrice had always welcomed him affectionately when he went to stay for a week or so during vacations. In New York he often dropped in for an evening of good talk with Virginia and Jeff—and he kept Charlie constantly in a corner of his eye. And Nelson had been a haven of peace and comfort after the war. A place to work quietly, and to achieve no small measure of accomplishment; his analysis and commentaries on world affairs were seriously read and quoted, and Walter’s pride and esteem and understanding of his achievements were deeply gratifying.
But it was the years-old role of the family friend that was the real basis of his caution. He was afraid to jar it in any way; it was safe and familiar and comfortable. He was afraid if he revealed himself to Virginia, revealed his emotions and need for her, she would recoil as from a stranger. It was a battle, the outcome of which he could not predict. In the meantime, his nerves were making it difficult to live with the situation, and he thought as he stood in the doorway of his room that perhaps it might be a good thing if he went away for a while after John was safely installed in school in September. There was a job in Washington . . .
Suddenly he remembered that Virginia must be waiting for him. He must tell her that John had been in a better frame of mind when he left. He shook his head, wondering at the train of his thoughts, nervous, defensive thinking, which he was unused to, and which made him as uncomfortable as if a spotlight had suddenly been turned onto himself.
He found her in the library, alone. There was a small fire going in the fireplace, the logs singing their dampness. Occasionally through the dense mist outside came the doleful note of a foghorn.
Virginia looked up from her book, slipping her reading glasses up above the peak of her hairline.
“Well, that was a long time—is he all right?”
Gregg let himself down into the wing chair opposite her, sighing in fatigue. “Yes, he’s fine. I told him long boring stories of my own childhood—enough to put anybody to sleep. Walter gone up to bed?”
“Yes, he said that Charlie, as usual, had put him in a filthy mood. I tried to talk to him about other things, but it was no use. Poor Dad!”
Gregg watched the simmering logs while he filled a pipe in silence. He was exasperated with the fact that his own thoughts had taken up every corner of his mind; his own problems had pushed everything else aside so completely that he felt not only indifferent but irritated that other matters might have a call on his attention.
Virginia thumbed a few pages of her novel and then tossed it over to the leather couch in disgust. “Really, I must be getting very old!”
“How so?” Gregg asked around his pipe.
She flipped her fingers at the book, which had slipped from its bright dust jacket and landed face down on its rumpled pages. “Because I remember when they used to use asterisks.”
“Asterisks?” Gregg frowned.
“Yes, and so do you—remember, I mean. When the lovers were in each other’s arms, an author
might
take them into the bedroom, but then he’d put down a row of asterisks and his next word about the subject would be ‘Afterward——’ It seems nowadays that every popular novel contains a detailed description of the sexual act at least once every ten pages.”
Gregg chuckled. “It’s what’s called the realistic approach. You don’t care for it?” He felt a dull burning warmth rising to his face. He thought, “Oh, God, let’s not talk about sex—even about sex in books——”
“Well, to me,” Virginia said in answer to his question, “it’s like this: you might write that your character took a delicious mouthful of steak, ‘chewing it hungrily.’ But I doubt if you’d go on and tell how it slipped down the esophagus and joined other partially digested matter in the stomach, and finally in pulsating rhythms,” she began to intone, “all the fibers, the residue, that which was unwanted, unloved, unneeded, found its way into the transverse colon, where it lay exhausted until the more vigorous bulk of a portion of celery nudged and cajoled and pushed it onward into the darkness!”
Gregg had squinted his eyes from the smoke, watching her with a gentle smile of amusement. “How discreetly the years are treating her,” he thought. “How beautiful she is!”
“Not funny?” Virginia shook her head at him, her eyebrows raised. “No, I suppose not.” She shrugged, and lifting her glasses from her hair, she folded them, and sighing a little, leaned her head back against the chair, watching the fire.
“Has the idea of sex become something merely functional to you?” asked Gregg. “Damn,” he thought, “I’m becoming compulsive.”
“No. I just don’t like to see it, the act itself, all spread out in print, I guess. Sex is something so—so wordless, something that only the finest writers can achieve—abstractly, evocatively.”
She looked at him with a pleasant, flat, impersonal expression; quite aware of the growing electricity. She was startled by her own response to it. Gregg! Of all people. Dear, sweet, dull—no, not dull, she amended. That was the description most people applied to him, only because he didn’t talk very much. She had merely picked it up, imitatively.
She glanced back to the fireplace as a log slipped and began to burn brightly, realizing that the movement had not distracted Gregg. She was aware that he was watching her through the swirl of his tobacco smoke, and she felt a wash of caressing warmth pour over her, then automatically it stopped and she shivered a little. The conditioning of years of denial was not to be undone in a moment.
She rose and stood over him, tall, serene. His face was unmasked completely, tears stood in his eyes. She cupped his chin in her palm tenderly and, stooping, kissed him quietly.
“Not yet. Not yet—please?” she said gently. And as she left the library, she closed the door and whispered to herself, “Not—ever, I’m afraid.”
As though he had heard, Gregg, still sitting motionlessly, still feeling her kiss, groaned a little, thinking, “I know, I know—probably not ever!”
“But, darling, how
dull!
” screamed Kay Orcutt, sympathetically. She usually screamed. She had to, to be heard over the clamor and clank of the small fortune in bangles and charms and golden chains which hung from her arms; and over the yapping of Too-too, a large exquisite black male poodle, equally bedecked with sound effects: a tiny cluster of East Indian bells fastened to his coifed topknot, and around his shining throat a collar studded with rhinestones—and more bells. They were devoted to each other, rarely separated, and never more than momentarily unaware of one another’s whereabouts in the combination apartment-shop.