“It would be so nice of you,” she said.
While they waited outside the stadium for Evan to fetch his car, Mrs. Whiteside found herself at a loss for words. She had the uncomfortable feeling that she was permitting something wrong to happen, although on the face of it Evan Dale was probably no worse than the men who drove taxis. She wondered if she should offer to pay him, and decided it would be only right.
Then Evan Dale came steering around the corner in a perfectly presentable ten-year-old Dodge. Mrs. Whiteside had halfway expected a pickup. The girls crowded into the back seat and Mrs. Whiteside had no choice but to sit beside them. That left Martha to inch her way into the front seat, alongside Evan Dale.
Afterward, Mrs. Whiteside would always say the ride passed in complete silence, other than when Martha had to give directions. There was a conversation she couldn’t hear.
When they got to Martha’s house, Mrs. Whiteside reached over the seat with a bunch of dollar bills, but Evan Dale brushed them aside. He jumped out and came around and opened Martha’s door, and she stepped down like a queen. Mrs. Whiteside scrambled out after the girls. As soon as they were in the front door, Evan Dale drove off, honking his horn lightly and looking back.
In the hall, Mrs. Whiteside folded her arms on her stomach and gave Martha a piece of her mind. “You better start looking for a decent man,” she said. “Ronny’s been gone three months and it looks like he’s not coming back.”
“I’m not looking for anybody,” Martha told her. “If they want me, they can come find me.”
About eight o’clock that same evening, Evan Dale’s Dodge pulled up to Martha’s front door. Mrs. Whiteside was on her patio picking dead leaves off her geraniums when the aerialist stepped out of the car. He was wearing ordinary-looking khaki pants and a white shirt, and he looked like an insurance salesman except for his hair, which was too blond and too long. He was carrying a large paper bag.
After a few minutes, Mrs. Whiteside saw Evan Dale and Martha come out the back door. They were carrying Ronny’s red toolbox, and Cissie was tagging along behind. Martha and the aerialist consulted together—Mrs. Whiteside was not close enough to hear what they said—and then Evan Dale went in the garage and came out with Ronny’s extension ladder. He set it up against the beech tree at the corner of the yard.
He climbed that ladder as quick, Mrs. Whiteside would always say, as any monkey, which is just what you would expect, although he was longer and less bent-up, she saw now, in his ordinary clothes, than a monkey, and somehow more human-looking than he’d been in his tights.
He climbed to the highest big branch on the beech, and Martha climbed up after him. They were so high Mrs. Whiteside felt dizzy looking at them, and Cissie, on the ground, started calling to her mother to come down.
Evan Dale balanced himself on the branch and opened his bag, and Mrs. Whiteside saw it contained a long, curled-up rope.
He squatted down and dropped one end over the limb and tied it with a quick knot, and then Martha handed him the other end and he hitched it in the same way. He tested both knots to see if they would hold, and then he said something to Martha and she started down the ladder.
Martha brought a board out from the garage—Mrs. Whiteside thought it might be the one she used to put under her houseplants—and Evan Dale fixed it in the loop of the rope. He pressed down with both hands to see if the seat was secure, and then he stood back and looked at Martha.
She backed herself up to the board and sat down.
By now the light was fading, and all Mrs. Whiteside could plainly see was Martha’s long white feet pointing toward the top of the tree. She had shuffled off her shoes.
Evan Dale gave her one hard push, and then watched her swing. Cissie stood and stared.
After a while, he folded the bag and put it under his arm and started out of the yard, leaving the ladder and Ronny’s toolbox where they lay. Mrs. Whiteside didn’t see him leave, but she heard the car start. Martha went on swinging.
After a while, Cissie went into the house and lights sprang on in the windows; later Judy came out and called her mother, but Martha went on swinging.
Mrs. Whiteside stood watching so long she could feel the stone floor of her patio coming up through the soles of her shoes. She strained to see through the darkness until finally it was no use and she had to go inside.
She expected to see Martha out there swinging barefooted every evening that summer, but she never went near the swing again. She stayed indoors, as usual, shut up with the hum of the air conditioners except when she took the girls somewhere in her car.
The girls argued over the swing at first—Mrs. Whiteside heard them, over the fence—but before long they too lost interest. The grass grew back under the swing, and the tall weeds Martha had brushed with her bare feet stood up straight again.
Just after Labor Day, Martha married a man named McHenry and got ready to move to Cincinnati.
When she heard the news, Mrs. Whiteside took over a pan of her brownies as a goodbye present. The living room was full of boxes, and the curtains had been taken down from the windows. Martha was on her knees, wrapping china in newspaper, and she thanked Mrs. Whiteside and told her to put the brownies in the kitchen. The girls were still at school.
“I wish you the best of luck,” Mrs. Whiteside said, and then she asked what was going to happen to the swing.
Martha looked up from the plates. “Why, I guess it’ll stay right here,” she said.
The people who bought Martha’s house took the swing down first thing. Mrs. Whiteside thought they must have distrusted those knots. They looked like the knots magicians put in handkerchiefs, big and showy and liable to come undone.
A New Life
On the third day after the baby was born, the air conditioner in Mina’s hospital room began to sing. “Over the seas,” it crooned in a rich female voice. “Over the seas, over the seas to Ireland.” Frightened, Mina stared at the thing, clamped between the jaws of the plate-glass windows. Then she got up to look at herself in the mirror and was shocked to see how ugly she had become; her face peered out like a starved tiger’s from the tangles of her reddish hair. Do something about yourself, the fierce lecture began. Don’t just stand there! Have them come and cut your hair or brush it yourself, at least. The voice was her mother’s, but her mother had never spoken to her so savagely. Gentle, a little timid, she had seldom done more than glance, weightily, over the barrier between the front and back seats when they were being driven interminably somewhere.
“Over the seas,” the air conditioner droned like a bee engrossed in a flower. Mina doubted that the song existed, but she knew she was responsible for it because it had aroused the other voice, the voice of the lecturer, and that had always been hers.
She had waked early that morning, before the streetlamps were turned off outside her windows. Raising the shade, she’d looked out at the green shoulders of the park trees, which she had passed so often, blindly. A million small new leaves were fluttering in the morning breeze, and she’d felt surrounded by lightly clapping hands. A little later, she heard her baby cry as he was wheeled to her down the hall, and the new milk had tingled in her breasts, spilling out in two small cloudy drops. For the first time, there were no choices: the baby was hungry, and she was there to feed him. She’d spent most of her life picking and sorting, trying in anguish to decide what was important, what was at least worthwhile. She had always been told that the serious things, the work, must be put first, yet she felt that she was losing everything in the process. With the baby, work was play, the searching, deadly play of his mouth on her nipple. There had been no need to sort and pick, and she dozed while he fed. The air conditioner’s song died down and she heard the voice strike through. Sleeping night and day, it said. You’ve done nothing but sleep.
That’s not true, she answered. I didn’t sleep at all. I wouldn’t even let them give me Pentothal.
Arguing with the voice never got any further than that: a stat
ement and an answer. Her conviction wilted in the silence that followed. She was not sorry to find herself fading into agreement. After all, she’d grown up with the voice; they had lived together in more or less perfect harmony while the slow scenery of her childhood passed. On the silence of the country house, on the silence that lay between her parents, the voice had struck blow after blow, forging maxims that had seemed both discreet and comforting: work, learn, be honorable, watch your weight, avoid the fond whims of the flesh; scorn the vicious purple lipstick and the low ideals of the people you find around you. When she went away to college, she’d heard, for the first time, the strange clang of it; people there spoke to each other while she spoke in asides, against the clatter in her head. Fortunately, she had met Stephen that first fall, and they had spent most of their evenings and all of their weekends together. She didn’t need to tell him about the voice because he too had the shining look of someone who is directed from within. Looking back, Mina saw them straight as a pair of candles in the midst of the jangling confusion, the dirt and disorder of their friends. A week after graduation, they married.
For a while then, Mina lived in a peaceful gabble of lists and compliments. Eventually that chorus too died down and she heard her old voice again, ranting on a sharper note. When Stephen came home at night, he found her standing with something in her hand, a potholder or a book, as though he had interrupted her; she had not dared to tell him that sometimes she’d been standing like that for half an hour, listening to the lecturer. She was afraid that he would be disappointed with her, for, like her parents, he loved her liveliness and efficiency.
When she became pregnant—passing on, by plan, to the next important task—the voice took on a new tone, conspiratorial and wary, as though to guide her through a perilous swamp. She felt the danger too; she’d been nearly overwhelmed by appetite and energy. Once she sat down in front of a loaf of bread and ate it, slice by slice, from one end to the other, and all the time, the baby had lunged in her stomach as though it rejoiced. Afterward she rushed to the scale, but it failed to register the pound of pleasure. At that moment it seemed unlikely that she would ever be thin or well-disciplined again.
As the baby was born, she’d seen the top of his head, dark and wet, in the mirror over the delivery table. “I’m glad!” she said, or nearly shouted. Her words splashed on the white masks around her. Shameless, she turned back the sheet to admire her body. Stark again, it retained the look of the labor it had accomplished, like a tractor parked beside a plowed field. She had been so proud that she had not even noticed the sullen silence inside her head. “Seas, seas,” the air conditioner crooned, and she leaned forward to listen and heard instead the other: Everyone feels this way, everyone. It’s called postpartum … The tune rose, sliding over the rest.
Determined to avoid another harangue, she got out of bed and went to the door of her room. She’d never opened it before, and she was surprised to find that it was very heavy. She crept out and looked up and down. There was no one in sight, and so she began to walk, following the arrows to the nursery and keeping close to the rank of closed doors.
The broad glass windows of the nursery flashed with light and she hesitated, wondering who might look out at her from behind the babies. At last she crept forward and peered in. Their boxes stood in a row against the window, each topped with a card of typed facts; she read those before looking at the babies. Two had been born on the same day as her own child and she was amazed by that, as though she might share something with those women—a lifelong link, buried in the flesh.
Her own baby lay propped on his side, one mittened fist beating the air. She hated those mittens; when he was first brought to nurse, she toyed with them tentatively, tracing his fingers inside. Her own mittens had been canvas, tied on at night with stout pink laces. Years after she had stopped sucking her thumb, she’d seen them hanging from a hook in her closet, like a pair of small chained hands. The baby’s mittens were made of flannel, close and soft.
As she watched, he began to cry, his mouth shaping sounds she could not hear. She pressed closer to the glass. A nurse sat on the other side, marking sheets of paper, and for a wild moment, Mina imagined rapping on the glass. Then she noticed that most of the babies were crying while the others lay asleep among them, undisturbed. It seemed the order of things that some should sleep, and some should cry while the nurse sat marking her papers. Mina’s concern withered, and she went back to her room. Closing the door, she was startled by the silence. The air conditioner had halted its song.
She sat on the edge of her bed, waiting for the voice to start up again; she expected it to take advantage of the silence. After a while, she began to wonder if the voice and the song had fused so that one could not break out without the other. Leaning back, she heard, for the first time, the dim scurry of traffic outside her window, and then the lunch cart rattling down the hall. All around her, women were sitting up in bed, smiling, pushing back their hair.
When the nurse brought her tray, Mina thanked her profusely and saw a glint of recognition, a submerged smile, in the woman’s eyes. Immediately, Mina was ashamed of her misplaced emotion. She ate a leaf of lettuce and two slices of tomato, cold and grainy with salt. After a while, the quiet dark-eyed nurse, her favorite, came to take the tray away, and Mina closed her eyes so that she would not have to talk.
As soon as the nurse had gone, the air conditioner picked up its song, quickly, in the middle of a line: “To Ireland.” Under it, the other voice marched; hysterical, hysterical, it said. Mina put her fingers in her ears and heard the voice, without the song, stamping in her brain.
She snatched her fingers out. The tune ran over the voice, melting its ferocity. She fixed her attention on the tune; it was essential to find or forge a permanent connection. Ireland. She had been there once on a summer jaunt with her parents; the memory was vague. It had been only one of many carefully planned trips. She did remember that the hotel in Dublin was something of a fraud, for in spite of its grandeur, it was built over the railroad station. No one had remarked on the constant noise of trains, and Mina had not opened her bedroom curtains to see what lay outside. Finally, one night, feeling stifled, she had snatched the curtains back. An iron network of tracks spread below her, leading away as though she were the lode —a long arrangement, precise yet ecstatic where the double lines dissected, curved, and shot off. A small engine was marching there. She dropped the curtain quickly, feeling the coal soot fret her hand.
The next afternoon, in a tearoom, she disagreed with her parents over whether they should order scones or save the calories for dinner and suddenly, passionately, declared that she wanted to go home. Her father had already ordered the scones and pushed them gently toward her. Her mother reached across the table to pat her fiery hand. They seemed to understand why she was so angry, but she herself hadn’t understood at all. Afterward, she hadn’t been able to mention the scene in order to apologize because the anger stuck in her throat like a splinter of glass.
The air conditioner dozed off into silence and she was left alone for the rest of the afternoon. At five, a nurse brought in a large bunch of pink roses, and tears came suddenly into Mina’s eyes. She hadn’t been expecting flowers, and she begged the nurse to take them away: “They’ll just make a mess for you, shedding their petals in here.” But the nurse told her that good money had been spent on the roses. “And what if your friends visit and don’t see them!” Mina could not remember the faces of the couple who’d sent the roses and was ashamed of her vagueness and ingratitude. She got up to wash her face and comb her hair before the baby was brought. She did not want him to find her slovenly.
He took the breast eagerly, without opening his eyes. Mina lay waiting for him to finish. Her nipples were sore, and his strong tug hurt her; she looked down at his avid face and he did not relent, a whole and complete male who would use her for one thing or another the rest of her life. He was wearing his mittens, and the sight of his blind fist flapping against
her arm made her weep. When the nurse came to take him away, Mina asked for a sedative and saw for the second time a gleam of recognition, a shaming in the woman’s eyes.
The pill came in a little plastic cup; she licked it up surreptitiously. Then it was time to prepare herself for Stephen. She dreaded visiting hours; all the doors were open, and voices disrupted the silence of the hall. The men sounded fierce and excitable as they wove their ways between their wives’ rooms and the nursery. They came bearing books, flowers, fresh nightgowns, all inessential, yet after they had left, Mina could feel the depression, thick as wax, sealing the women in their separate rooms.
Stephen burst in exactly at seven, tired, smiling, trailing the hot smells of the city day. He whirled toward her with kisses, the newspaper—white hopes extended. She was ready for him. “Don’t you think it’s warm in here?”
“A little. I’ll turn this thing up.” He moved toward the air conditioner.
“Yes, please.” She waited while he turned the knob; the rush of air increased but the song did not begin. “It’s been singing at me all day,” she told him gaily.
“What does it sing?” He was used to her whimsy.
“Oh, some foolishness.” She was suddenly uneasy about telling him. “Over the seas to Ireland, something like that.”
“Did you ask the nurse to give you something?”
“Yes, and she gave me a pill as though she expected it.” She was overcome by disparagement and began to cry.
He walked over and held her solemnly, aware, she thought, of the increased weight of his responsibilities. She wondered if he had felt chained and weighted when he stood beside her in the labor room. “Did you want all this to happen?” she asked.
“Of course!”
“But doesn’t it occur to you, even if we didn’t want it, even if we changed our minds … I can’t remember when I wanted it!”
Treason Page 2