Generally she heard from Hank once a week, and once a week from Jim. Neither calls were very satisfactory. With Jim she had to walk a narrow line. She did not want to blow her cool, for if she did she fumed and stewed and felt bad inside for hours afterward. In order not to blow her cool she had to be careful. She asked as few questions as possible. She kept off the future, she kept off the past. She kept off them. She told him about Davey, and he told her about life in California. The result was that their conversations were so polite and superficial that they might as well have not talked at all. After such a conversation Jim seemed very remote to her; she could scarcely visualize him. Often, looking at Davey, it pained and puzzled her that the man who had fathered him could have become so remote, so without tangibility as a person.
And when the politeness did not work, when something was said that caused one or the other of them to blow their cool, it was just as bad. What she felt for him then was worse: resentment and bitterness that he could leave her so easily. She forgot the months of fighting; his departure seemed cheap and whimsical. And it seemed to her that cowardice kept him from coming back. It filled her with disgust. Remoteness was easier on her stomach than spleen, so their conversations became politer and politer and she thought of him less and less often and remembered him less and less well.
With Hank’s calls the opposite was true. Again there was a narrow line to be walked, but in his case what she had to try and do was keep from remembering him too well. If his voice struck a certain tone then all that she missed became vivid and she missed it more painfully. Sometimes then longing became irritability, and irritability anger, and she fought with him more bitterly than she fought with Jim. All their conversations were chancy, for the sense of missingness was apt to swell terribly after she hung up, and then there was nothing to do but wait for its slow going-away. Gradually she developed a workable middle tone, a style of banter that kept things more or less level.
What energy she had was spent mostly on Davey and on the house. The house absorbed hours of thought. She had very quickly become discontent with having Davey on the third floor, beautiful as the third floor was. It was a mistake. At night she worried about fires. What if one occurred while he was up there? And even in the purest practical sense it was awkward. He still had to be carried, but he had grown heavy, and it was a long carry from the kitchen to the third floor. After three weeks she moved him down a floor. When he got old enough to walk upstairs he could return to the third. Juanita breathed a sigh of relief; constant trips up two flights of stairs were breaking her health, she felt.
But better than the house was Davey himself. As he approached his first birthday and became—every week it seemed—a little less a baby, a little more a small boy, he entered upon a period of very active happiness. He didn’t miss his father, he didn’t miss anything. From the time he woke up, wanting his mother, wanting attention, wanting food, until after he and she had completed the various little bed games he liked to play, his days were a crude flow of activity, broken only by an afternoon nap. He was good-natured, laughed and babbled more than he cried, and he did not seem overly demanding. Yet, from early morning until evening it seemed that she or Juanita or both of them at once were in constant motion, getting him, cleaning up after him, keeping him out of things, finding toys for him when he was in bed or getting toys out of bed for him when he happened to be on the floor, feeding him, changing him, doing something with him. They could both tell from the tone of his wails whether a particular problem was serious trouble or a mere momentary frustration.
He was, it seemed to Patsy, exceptionally communicative. When he wanted her to know something he sought her out. She would be lying in a doze on the couch, still in her bathrobe, warmed by the fire, and would be awakened by Davey yanking on her hair. It was his method of announcing a message. Sometimes the sound of his crawling awakened her, for he crawled rapidly and it was easy to tell when he left the rug and struck the bare floor. For all that he was less than one, he gave the house a kind of masculine center. Patsy talked to him a lot, chattered at him, sang him songs, sat him on her stomach if she was lying down or on her lap if she was sitting up. She was thinking of getting him a dog, and she constantly read pet ads. He had her dark hair, and it was getting longer.
At times the rapport she had with Davey frightened her a little; she wondered if it was abnormal. She missed Hank whenever he called and reminded her of himself, and sometimes in lonely moods she missed Jim, but there were days when she missed neither of them, when Hank was as vague to her as Jim. Even Hank, who had been so tangible, was becoming intangible little by little. Davey was completely tangible, sitting on her stomach chewing on his rubber kitty or pulling her hair, or poking his fingers in her mouth, cheerfully gobbling food, drenching diapers, and kicking merrily while his behind was being powdered. Every night she brought him in from his bath wrapped in a huge towel and plopped him on her bed to be diapered and pajamaed. He quickly made a game of not liking to be diapered and would wiggle out of the towel and dart to the corners of the bed to elude her, naked and giggly, the ends of his hair still wet. Eventually Patsy would catch him by a foot and drag him to the center of the bed, dry his hair roughly, and roll him on his back. Once he had had his play out he generally assented to being dressed, though he really preferred being naked, and would chew on the rubber sleep-with kitty while she pinned the diapers. His little stomach bulged out of his unbuttoned pajamas and Patsy would rub it affectionately as she was buttoning him, or splutter on it while he grabbed her hair and exploded with giggles. She never rocked him at night, but often she rocked him in the afternoon, if he seemed reluctant to nap, and after a great deal of wiggling and looking up to see if she was still there he would go to sleep on her shoulder and she would put him in bed and stand a moment smoothing the long wavy black hair at his temples.
One night when she was absently rubbing his stomach and he just as absently chewing the rubber kitty, Patsy caught herself with a start; she was stroking her son with the same sort of pure tactile enjoyment that she might get from stroking a man. At least it had reminded her of men. She didn’t feel depraved, exactly, just thoughtful, and after a time buttoned Davey’s pajamas over his stomach and put him to bed.
In a few weeks, when she got over her flu and felt well again, she noticed that she was not unhappy. Lonely at times, but not unhappy. She was becoming cheerful again, cheerful in a way that she had not been for a year. There was a stretch of fine weather in February and she began to delight in the three big trees in the back yard, to plan the back yard, and to look for yard furniture. Shopping and chatting with store people became fun again, and her laundry man told her she was beautiful. At home, Davey kept her and Juanita giggling half the time. At night, when she was low, or thought about it, she wondered about herself—wondered if she was one of those women who didn’t need a mate, only a child. She wondered if she would become some kind of cannibal mother, devouring Davey, absorbing him and being absorbed by him in too intense a way. She didn’t want to, she didn’t mean to, but as the spring approached she found herself being happier and more self-sufficient every day, with no man around but him.
One day she wandered into the Russian section of the library and decided she ought to read a Russian novel. She practically never had, except Crime and Punishment, which she hadn’t much liked. She decided she would read a Tolstoy, a Dostoevsky, and a Turgenev, and so brought home Anna Karenina, The Idiot, and Fathers and Sons.
The only one of the three she read was Anna. She remembered having tried it in high school; she had stopped after a hundred pages and had never gone on. This time she went on, hurriedly and a little irritably. Kitty and Levin she skipped whenever she could. Their innocence merely annoyed her; it was stupid and there was nothing absorbing in it. She wanted to read about Anna, though it was painful to do so. Anna was so exposed that reading about her was embarrassing; Patsy read page after page with a pinched frown and yet went on, as if it were a medicine she m
ust take, and at the end, when she closed the book with Anna dead, she felt more depressed than she had at any time since Hank and Jim went away.
The depression lasted two days and then lifted as suddenly as it had come. Some discrepancy between the novel and her own life discouraged her terribly. Her own sins had been so small-time; her marriage, and her affair as well, so weak and short-term. She hadn’t sustained anything for years against all sorts of obstacles, as Anna had done. She wasn’t dead, nor even ruined, and neither were her husband and her lover. Even the dull psychiatrist hadn’t been very interested in a problem as ordinary as hers. She was not even meat for a good case history, much less a novel. It had all been trivial, and probably in the end amounted to nothing more than that she had run into someone she liked sex with better than she liked it with her husband. Society didn’t care what she did—not really. She wasn’t being persecuted, or insulted at operas; she wouldn’t lose her child; she had money and friends and looks and not even any reason to feel overwhelmingly guilty, since so far as she could tell, her husband was going to be happier in his new life than he had ever been with her. It was too near to nothing, all of it, and she didn’t know why it had seemed so intense and so crucial and so much the end of everything when it had been all the time such an ordinary episode. She had scorned Jim for calling it tragic, yet there were times when she herself assumed it must be: tragic that they could not make a harmony out of their feelings, tragic that they could not be what they ought to be. But when she finished Anna she felt bruised by a sense of the triviality of her marriage, the timidity of her affair. The worst of it was that her memory was so bad. The passion Anna had felt for Vronsky was more easily remembered than anything she had felt for Hank. She could barely remember the good parts of her marriage or her affair. Her thoughts took her in circles, and in small ordinary circles, at that. In her depression she felt drab and worthless, just a shallow young woman who had managed to screw up two men, one of them her husband.
But when finally the depression lifted, it occurred to her that it was silly to go around moping because she wasn’t Anna Karenina. It was sillier than any of the other things she had done. She took Davey with her to Mr. Plum’s and let him try a piece of chewing gum. A blue piece. He swallowed it, but not before a dribble of blue coloring had run out his mouth, down his chin, and onto his white sweater. “I keep the gum there to make business for myself,” Mr. Plum said. She took Davey into the park and sat on the jungle gym while he moved around and around it below, squinting up at her. Emma was driving by on her way home from taking Flap to Rice, and she stopped to yak awhile. She was looking peaked and feeling peaked and their moods clashed a little, for Patsy was just back to delighting in everything after two days of moping because her life lacked scale. She overresponded when Emma told her she had turned up pregnant.
“I’m envious,” she said, and she was.
But Emma was in no mood to be envied. “Don’t envy me if you want to remain my friend,” she said glumly. “I wish I weren’t so forgetful. I’ve got all the kids I need.”
“Come on,” Patsy said. “You couldn’t not like a baby.”
Emma sat down on a bench and sighed. “I can’t not like a baby but I can damn well not like the idea of one. We’ll only have been in Iowa City three months when it comes.”
Patsy was tired of the song and dance of cheering Emma up with the possible virtues of Iowa City, so she didn’t try. She told her she had been depressed by reading Anna. Emma thought she probably would be too, and soon hurried on. Patsy lingered with Davey in the park, thinking of Emma having another baby. The thought led back to herself. When would she have another? When would Davey get brothers and sisters? And who would their father be? It was a shivery thing to think about, and she felt too good to dwell on it, so she put Davey in his carriage and wheeled him briskly home. It was a warm February morning, and she found it difficult not to believe that something good would happen. What, when, with whom, she didn’t know, but she could not feel downhearted on such a bright day. She had a fine son and a very pleasant house in which to wait.
14
WITHIN A WEEK something did happen, but instead of a new man coming into her life, an old man went out of it. She was feeding Davey spinach and making a mess of it, one day at lunch, when Roger Wagonner’s sister called to tell her Roger was dead. His sister was older than he had been and had a dry cracked voice and the accents of West Texas.
“How did you know to call me” Patsy asked, stunned. She had scarcely taken in the details, which were that Roger had had a stroke and had been dead two days when the mailman found him.
“Well, Roger wrote us about you, honey, when he decided to leave his property to you.”
“I’m sorry,” Patsy said. “I just can’t think. What can I do?”
“Not much more to be done,” the old lady said. “You know how thoughtful Roger was. He paid the funeral home two years ago, they told us. All we have to pay is the increase in price.”
“Oh, dear. When will the funeral be?”
Tomorrow, she was told, and the old lady rambled on in her twangy small-town schoolteacher’s tone about how good Roger had been, how methodical, how he had arranged with a neighbor to take care of his animals in such an event. Patsy numbly agreed, though she had never thought of him as methodical and couldn’t, any more than she could immediately think of him as dead. Even in her numbness, though, she felt a certain embarrassment, and a fear that his sister would resent her because of the land. But before she could say anything the old lady relieved her mind.
“Honey, don’t you be worried about us wanting that land,” she said kindly. “We ain’t got long to live ourselves and of course I guess he told you about us losing our boy, so don’t you worry about it. If Billy had lived we would have wanted him to have it, but me and my husband can’t hardly take care of what we’ve got in Wilbarger County, much less Roger’s old place. We told him ourselves he ought to leave it to somebody young—somebody who could enjoy it.”
“Oh, thank you,” Patsy said, though she did not believe that she would ever enjoy it. The kindliness of the voice on the wire was so akin in tone to that of the man who was dead that it was causing her to cry. Her inclination was not to go to the funeral, or near the ranch at all for many months until her memories had worn smooth again, but then she recalled that Roger had driven all the way to Houston because she had had a child. The least she could do was go to his funeral, since he had died. She said she would be there and hung up.
She lay down on her couch to weep, but then got up and immediately began packing, still crying. She didn’t want to give herself any time to think. In an hour and a half she, Juanita, and Davey were in the Ford and on the way to Dallas. Davey was cheerful and excited, bouncing on his car seat, patting Patsy’s shoulder, and occasionally grabbing her hair. Juanita was worried about proprieties. She would be staying in Dallas to help Jeanette with Davey, and she had had to pack in such a hurry that she was sure she had come off without something that might be socially essential. Her weeks in Dallas while Jim had been recuperating had not intimidated her, exactly, but they had informed her. She knew Jeanette expected of her what one should expect of a maid, while Patsy’s expectations were lighter and, she could not help feeling, somewhat erratic and eccentric. She loved Patsy dearly but she had always been a little worried about her behavior. Every few miles she bethought herself of something she might have left, and turned and rummaged in her handbag to see if it was there.
It was a bright cold March day, with a few small high clouds and a keen wind that caused the Ford some strain; it had not been on the open road in months and ran peculiarly, Patsy thought. Had she been able to keep her mind on it, she would have worried, but the state of the car she was driving was the last thing on her mind. It was as if Roger’s death had caused all the silt and sediments of uncertainty to sift out of her emotions; they were a pure water as she drove. For the long hundred-mile stretch of the freeway that cut through th
e pine forests from Houston to Madisonville she was happy in the drive, the sun and blue sky and bright green of the trees all pleasing to her. Occasionally she tilted her head to the side and let her hair tickle Davey, who giggled and shoved her away. But mostly she just drove, and she scarcely looked around when he grew fretful with his car seat and Juanita took him out. He wailed deafeningly for ten miles and then went to sleep. She drove, untouched by Davey’s wails or Juanita’s worries. It was pleasant to drive and her destination and her reason for going were not in her mind, either.
But when she left the freeway and drove through the opening country Roger did come to her mind. That he was dead came to her mind—the country brought the fact in now and then. Some horses standing on a hill, a gray farmhouse standing in isolation far off the road, the pickups parked at a country store at a little crossroads community—such things reminded her. After three hours, when she was beyond the heavy forests, the loosening and spreading of the land itself as it began its long roll westward toward the plains, that too reminded her. She would cross a roll of land and see farther than she had seen in months, see the land spreading away for thirty miles under the gathering afternoon clouds, colder land than the forests and covered still with winter grass. When she thought of Roger her eyes filled—not really from pain, but from a kind of sorrow, sorrow that she had not gone to see him again, sorrow that she would not talk with him again. Of all the people she missed in life there was suddenly one that she must miss forever. No more words would pass between them. It was an awful thought.
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