An April Afternoon

by Philip Wylie

  "Why?"

  "I don't know. I feel scared."

  So did I--and I tried not to show it. Of course, Virginia wasn't very ill. Connie could add nothing to her care in any case. But Connie was her mother--and she had run away.

  CHAPTER VIII

  It was one of those June days so beautiful that you could wake up into it with closed eyes and describe it without looking--the number of clouds, density of haze, strength of sun, temperature, everything down to the fact that the new white roses have at last opened. I wanted to be out in it more than anything on earth, but I had to work. It is my sometimes onerous and often ineffectual chore to write a daily verse for a newspaper syndicate. Letters come from the manager telling me from time to time how many million potential readers I have, and his word "potential" always gives me pause.

  This day I had more than one to write, because I'd fallen behind. It was no day for deliberate composition, and besides, the perfection of the weather only heightened a feeling of things impending, of laughs too loud, of failures to laugh, which had become the constant background of affairs at Fort Sheffield. Nothing had happened--nothing at all--but I plugged along against that tentative incubus without much effect. A quasi-sonnet about ants was my third trespass on art. Something for those who find too many morals--those who are always "going to the root of the matter" and then forgetting the foliage and the flowers above. A thought for the day--heaven forbid!--called "Sonnet Against Ants." It is one of a thousand such on my conscience: When I survey the toiling of the ant--

  His single-minded energy and zeal--

  And when I hear my fellow-men appeal

  To those who take it easy, to recant

  And ape the striving insect, I will grant

  No other earthly creature makes one feel

  A greater sluggard--more a ne'er-do-weel,

  But, as for heeding such advice--I shan't.

  What brooks it any man to spend his life

  In dull mechanics of communal strife

  Unless some nobler culture is achieved

  Or some distress eternally relieved?

  What wise-guy's paradise consists of scenes

  Where men at last have made themselves machines?

  All that sort of thing could produce would be a letter from a lady in Syracuse or Baton Rouge who had a sweet, elderly mother to whom she read my poems every day and it did so brighten their lives, and my mood about that was--the hell with it. There are days for thinking of sweet old ladies and there are days when the unknown relatives of others seem a shade insipid.

  It was at about that point in my travail and meditation that Virginia ran upstairs.

  Her face was so white that I was out of my seat before she spoke.

  "Bill's come," she said flatly. "What shall I do?"

  So I had been right about the deceptive quality of the day--for me, anyway.

  "Turn in the fire alarm," I suggested. "Get up a game of duckie-on-the rock. Bake a cake! What the deuce!"

  Those bum jokes brought her down a bit and she laughed. "Come and meet him, will you? Everybody's out."

  "Sure, I'll meet him. And I'll probably like him, which is worse."

  We went down to the hall. He was standing there--alternating feet. Not as old as I'd expected--perhaps thirty-two or three. And not a matinee idol, but a dandy jaw and blistering gray eyes. A big guy who could take it--and had--and who looked as if he could dish it out, in the event of physical hazard or debate. America makes a lot of them--

  England, too, I guess--and all human history hasn't anything superior to show.

  Viriginia said, "This is Frankie--Bill. I've got to go and see about lunch for a minute--Anne'll take your bag--"

  She went.

  Bill took a long look at me. Then he said, "Virginia didn't have to see about lunch any more than she had to launch a battleship."

  "No. She wanted us to be alone for a moment."

  He nodded and grinned and so did I. We dived simultaneously for cigarettes and offered them to each other. We started to refuse each other's brands--and then thought that might be rude--so he took one of mine and I took one of his. That's what we did--and yet they say that women are more sensitive than men.

  "She told me," Bill then said, "that she'd told you."

  "Up to a point."

  He nodded. "Exactly. The point of indecision. I shouldn't have come here. I wasn't strong enough not to. She invited me--had her mother postscript the note. Here I am."

  He was pitching, I thought, over the plate. "Well," I said, "we Sheffields only have one hour a week for worrying--this isn't it--and we've got better places to stand than the hall."

  He turned red. "I'm sorry," he said.

  So I had to tell the poor devil it was meant as a joke and I could stand as long as a sentry without discomfort, and we went out on the sun porch and played boys till Virginia came back. We were getting along fine--we'd struck trout fishing in the first two minutes, and realized that there was plenty more for both of us when dry and wet flies ran out. I'd known it. I liked him. He could have slipped into the Sheffield ménage without displacing anybody at all.

  Virginia was looking at me as she returned. It was asking a lot after ten or fifteen minutes--but I said "thumbs up" with my eyes.

  So she coagulated.

  "Connie's playing golf," she said, "and Larry's sailing his boat. John seldom gets home before dinner. Frankie has been writing poetry. Even if I hadn't seen you doing it, I'd know." She was ogling me.

  I began polishing my brow with a handkerchief. When I write, it's my personal eccentricity to draw little ovals on my forehead with my pencil. I've started for luncheons and dances and garden parties with a First Grade penmanship exercises neatly tattooed from temple to temple. Can't break the habit. I tried to once by using ink-and that was disastrous.

  "How about we should swim?"

  Bill said, "Swell!"

  I said I'd be down after finishing my work. And Virginia told me not to be long which wouldn't have been necessary, except that by so telling me, she meant I wasn't to hurry. I think that even if she had been my true sister and I hadn't been in love with her, that sort of casual evidence of ties going, old familiarity lost--would have seemed sad.

  Half an hour later I was still lying on my bed, and my work was untouched. I hadn't even attempted to sit down at my desk. I'd spent part of that half hour hating my room. Things like that come over people suddenly and they are not always very conscious moods. I suppose it is part and parcel of the same emotional system that makes some people who have stubbed their toes, break them by kicking in revenge against the casual object--as if rooms or stones or furniture contained in themselves the power to offend.

  I lay there, methodically despising the walls and pictures, my old trunk and the desk at which I work. I detested my clothes and the sonnet I had just written about ants. I knew why I was doing it, and I realized it was infantile, but I've found that if you try to restrict such feelings as that, you succeed only in driving them to a deeper place, where they can do more harm.

  To cure such states of childish outrage, the reverse technique is better. "This room," I said to myself, "is hideous. It is the most ugly cell in cosmos. Spiders should tenant it. Stalactites should hang from the ceiling; there should be ooze on the carpet; and I should be lying here rat-gnawed and gangrenous. It is a penitentiary, a dungeon, a chamber of torture. Those framed paintings and drawings by my friends which have hung upon the walls are blasphemous and ill-gotten. Their decorative value is nil. They are the opposite of aesthetic--crass spectacles that I have masochistically maintained here to dig my sensibilities."

  At the end of another fifteen minutes of that I got giggling. After all, it was a darn pretty room. I undressed and put on a bathing suit and beach robe and some sandals.

  Virginia and Bill were lying on their backs in the sand in our cove, looking up at the sky. They weren't talking--and I was more envious of that silence than I would have been of any conversati
on. Words are so ambiguous that the silences we human beings share often have more meaning than our eloquence.

  I sat down beside them, and we all smoked cigarettes. Bill said it was a perfect day, and looked at Virginia when he said it. She smiled, and after a while we swam out to the sand bar. It was neck-deep there, and Virginia dove from our shoulders. We'd hold her hands and crouch down in the green-foamed murk until we felt the touch of her feet.

  Then we--Bill or I--would surge up and she'd dive--forward or backward or sideways, sometimes landing fiat, splashing and laughing. It was an effort for me--but Bill lunged clear of the water to his waist every time, bursting out like a sea animal and tossing Virginia high and clear.

  We had lunch in the solarium. Then Bill drove off with Virginia to see, they said, the Old Stone House in Gilford, and Lyme, and Saybrook, where the Connecticut comes down to the Sound.

  I finished my work that afternoon.

  Connie came home from the country club at five and made me swim again with her. Before we left the beach, Larry sailed in slowly and moored his boat. He was spending all his time in it, because he was soon due to start work in the Bridgeport factory. We waited for him to furl his sails and row the dinghy from the buoy to the sand.

  Then we went up to the house. John was there, and so were Virginia and Bill. They'd made rum drinks-three for themselves and three for us--and we changed in a hurry. It was when we came downstairs again, Connie in a tea gown, Larry and myself in flannels --

  when we were holding cool, sweated glasses--that Larry reached a leaping identification of our guest.

  "Say!" Excitement made his voice break-a humiliation he had still occasionally to bear. "Say, I know who you are! You're 'Flying Bill' Bush! I read about you in a book!"

  Everybody looked at Bill, and he flushed.

  Larry's enthusiasm took him out of the realm of ordinary conversation and he addressed us all, as if he were a public speaker, "I remember him from his picture! The book was called, 'Great Moments in Sport.' It was a long time ago--" that youthful presumptuousness scarcely made Larry falter, "--ten years, anyhow. He was playing against Harvard. He was captain--and fullback. They were in the middle of the field and Harvard was six points ahead. One of those terrific things--"

  Bill tried to assuage his discomfort by murmuring, "Like the movies."

  Virginia was smiling, and so were John and Connie.

  But not Larry. He spilled a little of his drink, without noticing it. He made a broad sweep with his unencumbered hand. For him it had become Autumn. The afternoon was waning. The sky was blue and sharp. The stadium was packed. Harvard led. No one was breathing, a whistle blew, a hoarse and desperate quarterback slapped his knees and called signals. Ten white stripes lay between his gritty human machine and the goal posts: "It was one of those terrific things! They spread out for a pass, and Harvard spread to cover it. They gave the ball to 'Flying Bill' Bush. He cracked through the line. An end took out the quarterback. He reversed the whole field three times, and almost stepped over the side lines doing it, and he made a touchdown! Then he kicked the goal."

  When he had finished his recital, he was left suspended. The hero worship died out in him. He realized that he had embarrassed Bill. He looked at us in a sort of panic, set down his glass and, muttering something about having to go to his room, he fled. It is difficult to be seventeen.

  I thought Bill should have laughed then, but his discomfort had only grown greater. Virginia was looking at him. "You never told me about that."

  "No."

  John tried to exorcise his embarrassment. "Larry's a little dotty on the subject of football-not to say completely nuts."

  Bill nodded. His chin had a curious set and his eyes were looking out through the window. "You see," he finally said, "nobody ever paid any attention to the facts about that touchdown. It was the first time we had beaten Harvard in eleven years and I carried the ball, so I got the credit."

  Connie laughed. "It sounds as if you were entitled to a little."

  "No." Bill took a cigarette from a box and lighted it. His hands were shaking. "I wasn't. Our left tackle that year was named Spofford. He was a good-humoured guy, with a heart as big as a beer barrel. He wasn't very bright, but he had a funny kind of off-handedness and an insulting smirk that invariably infuriated whoever played against him.

  I'd never have gotten away for that run, if Spofford hadn't made the hole. He made it with five ribs broken from the play before. And his collarbone went when he hit the Harvard man. They forgot he was carried off after that play. I did myself. We were all pretty crazed. I got hoisted around on people's shoulders in a snake dance. That night everybody bought me drinks, and girls danced with me. Sunday morning I was allover the newspapers, and I didn't even know Spofford was in the infirmary until late in the afternoon. By that time the victory fire had burned out and the newspapers weren't interested. Spofford won the game and I got the glory." John tried again to heal the dissatisfaction in his eyes. "You both won the game."

  Bill went on slowly, "Spoff was in the hospital for eight weeks. He never caught up with his work. It was his last year and he flunked out. Nobody knows where he is now."

  "Maybe," Virginia said softly, "he's some place far away, winning some other kind of game where things are tough."

  "Maybe. I hope he is."

  Nobody said anything then. Ice tinkled as we took sips of our drinks. You could feel people--everybody, including myself--seated there, liking Bill for that recitation, and it made me understand my first impression of him, when I had met him in the hall--that impression of directed power, of strength and control. It would have been so easy for him not to have told all the truth--so simple for him to have accepted Larry's rhapsody as a lucky introduction to the Sheffields.

  But he hadn't done it.

  Dinner that night was very gay. Bill had made his expiation and thereby freed himself. He fell for the Sheffields, as almost anyone did who had intelligence and feeling.

  He'd sailed boats--so he and Larry had a long and uninhibited conversation about matters of which I had by choice remained ignorant. Jibs, luffing and spinnakers, I think. His father had been a druggist and he was a broker, but Bill, nevertheless, had picked up somewhere a small stake of knowledge about brass manufacturing--so he met John interestingly and on his own grounds. With Connie he flirted just the right amount. And he knew one of my verses by heart. At first I thought Virginia had put him up to that, and I was sore. But there was a streak of naïvete in Bill Bush which made him accept at their face values just such sentiments as I had so often rhymed, sometimes cynically and sometimes, for all I know, sincerely.

  After dinner he clinched his achievement of the Sheffields. He played the piano.

  Not Bach or Brahms--I don't believe he'd have understood it--just jazz, but all the best jazz from all the last nostalgic twenty years--songs that woke in me people forgotten, and unremembered experiences all the way back to my childhood--to his own youth. And for those mnemonic purposes he was a superb pianist. Music came from the piano like a rush of water, like still water, like wind-driven rains--and I think Connie cried, and I know I wanted to.

  When it was all over, I understood what Virginia felt about Bill and I knew that however much unhappiness he had brought me--her misery must be infinitely greater.

  CHAPTER IX

  Bill stayed with us that night. Everyone asked him simultaneously, when it became apparent that he was going to say goodnight. His brief hesitation was all the Sheffields needed for sensing that he could be prevailed upon--and when he said he had to go, they insisted. I insisted, too. For by that time I had forgotten--or submerged--my own lost feelings, and two others gripped me--a liking for Bill, and a devastating sympathy for Virginia.

  Bill went out to his car and brought back his suitcase. I suppose he was on his way to see his wife, or had been spending some time with her, although he had said nothing about his own immediate place in his difficult destiny.

  He talked
about his wife, though--in a fashion that was shy and proud and defensive--in the helpless way adopted by determined people who have no false defenses.

  Of course, John knew that he was married, and I suppose he had told Connie--although I have known them to keep secrets from each other--and I have also known them to share secrets, expertly pretending all the while that one of them was innocent. So only Larry could have been uninformed. And not even Larry could have missed guessing how Virginia felt. There were Virginia's eyes, there was the sound of her voice--the way she looked at Bill when he was talking to someone else--the way she looked down when he talked to her.

  On the other hand, Bill did not know how much Virginia had told the family about him, and he brought the word "my wife" delicately into the conversation while he was telling an anecdote of business, of a prom at college, or a summer in the Adirondacks--one I have forgotten.

  Those two words had cost him all his skill and all his deep integrity. After he had said them he looked at each of us. He must have been relieved to see that if the Sheffields felt concerned, they also possessed grace. So, when he finished his story, he talked about his wife deliberately. He looked at John most of the time, as if he felt that perhaps an older man and a kindly one might find the deepest root of sympathy among us all--or perhaps as if he feared John's censure more than ours. "Joyce--" he said quietly "--that's my wife--was hurt. Quite some time ago. A truck smashed into her car, and since then she's never been able to find the way back to herself. She's in a sanitarium." He amended it, "Sort of a sanitarium." Then he was afraid we wouldn't understand that. "It's very nice.

  Beautiful and quiet."

  Virginia's eyes were on him, admiring him for this. John and Connie were sad.

  "Amnesia," John suggested.

  "Something like it. And yet different from most cases. Sometimes she remembers things."

  "Maybe surgery--"

  Bill shook his head. "Nobody understands what it is. I've had the best neurologists, surgeons, psychiatrists--. Organically she's perfectly sound, now. Of course-