An April Afternoon

by Philip Wylie

  Then he stopped talking. For a quarter of a minute he stared carefully at me. His lips leveled. His dark hair looked black--because his color had diminished a little. I couldn't imagine what had happened until he spoke. "Pretty tan, aren't you, Frankie?"

  I hadn't thought of that. It made me feel suddenly ill.

  I tried to stall. "Pretty tan? Why--sure."

  "I mean--for Wyoming--in the Winter."

  I had to lick that. I wound down the window so that a little air would blow into the car. "You get snowburns. Sun's warm up there. Powerful. You often go skiing stripped to the waist."

  He wasn't looking my way any more. He spoke quietly. "You better say you sat under a mercury--vapor light every day."

  "Listen, Ivan--" I began.

  He shrugged one shoulder. "You listen. I've always liked you a lot. For my money, you can do as you damned please. You're a poet. I'm a doctor--or going to be one. You're a sentimentalist. I'm a realist. The letters from the ranch came all right. Nobody else will guess. Not if you pull the ultra-violet light gag properly. I'll help you. But I know a genuine desert tan from the artificial job."

  "Thanks."

  "Skip it."

  He reached out, after a while, and turned on the radio--although we weren't far from Fort Sheffield. Somebody began talking about a facial cream. He tried another station. A woman was discussing charm. He tried another. A politician. I supposed he wanted music--and I marvelled for a moment that millions of people could stand having others harangue them that way. Playing the radio is like having uninvited guests constantly around you--and guests who are usually offensive. It is the salesman's foot in your door raised to its millionth power. I was thinking things like that--because they thought themselves at a time when I did not want to be responsible for reasoning or imagining--and he found a jazz band. He made it loud.

  We drove into the garage and he cut the motor and the radio at the same time. I opened my door and felt his hand on my arm, so I turned.

  "How was she?"

  I had an impulse to answer that my business was none of his--but I knew the question came not from Ivan's superficial hurt ego but his deep and sympathetic self.

  "She's fine, Ivan."

  Then I wondered why I had lied. Maybe she was fine--now. Now that I had gone.

  She had seemed fine when I arrived. I'd been wondering all during the flight. Had it been me--and the memories I brought? Me--and the friction a third person automatically caused? Or was Connie's collapse on the bed that last night a commencement of despair for her? I couldn't be positive.

  So I'd said she was fine.

  "Happy?"

  "In a way. A way I think she missed here. In some others--she's not. Just what you'd expect, I guess."

  "She was putting on an act for you!" He sounded hurt--the way Larry would if he had made the discovery of where I'd been.

  "Damn it, Ivan, sure! We're all putting on acts all the time. Everybody on earth.

  We all live partly for the effect we believe our behavior will have on others. That's why every one always brightly imagines he understands everyone else: some of the acting is bound to be transparent. Sure, she acted. Only--she did it for my benefit. Now--you act for your own benefit. You are right now. You're your own best audience. How in hell can I tell exactly what she feels? How much bliss and how much regret she has? I can't. It's her life and she did what she wanted to do. She'll stand or fall on what she wants to do.

  She lives by her feelings. She got feeling stuck and stifled and bored here. So she tried something else. I can tell you this--Connie never looked younger or brighter or more beautiful--or healthier--in her life. And she was having fun."

  He'd taken my homily patiently. As John might have. "In a way," he said after a while, "I'm glad."

  Suddenly I felt very sorry for him. I wasn't much older--and at his age most people topple backwards into childhood easily and unexpectedly, when crises of emotion occur. But I felt twice as old then, and a realization so familiar that its presence brought fatigue, filled my brain and sapped my nerves: crises of emotion had been the stuff of my childhood. Toppling backward was difficult nowadays. The slight gap in our ages was a broad chasm in spiritual comparison. I put my arm around him.

  "However you look at it, Ivan, it's tough."

  "Yeah, keed. And thanks for going out there."

  "I had to."

  He opened the door on his side. "Guess you did. A dirty job for somebody to do."

  "Wish you didn't see it that way."

  "Jesus," he.said absently. "She was my mother."

  That got to me--so I didn't say any more.

  It was just as well. When we came out of the garage, Bill and Virginia were walking toward it. They might have overheard a longer discourse. She yelled and ran up to me and kissed me. Only--now--it was Winter and there weren't any lilacs.

  "Frankie!" She leaned back to peer at me. "You must have gone to Egypt!"

  I was ready for it now. "Gloomy place, Wyoming," I said. "After an hour in the morning looking for postmen lost in drifts, I made it a rule to get under a sun lamp with a good book."

  Bill had my hand. "Hello, boy. Place has seemed liturgical without you. Gibbons, I hope?"

  "--and 'The Anatomy of Melancholy.' No fooling. The Weyburns have grooves on the soles of their feet! St. Peter will give them outboard motors instead of wings! They nearly killed me. You ought to try ski-joring with a motorcycle sometime."

  "We read your letters," he answered. "Sounded gay. Especially the avalanche."

  We were at the house. I ramified the avalanche yarn over rum toddies.

  Everything looked the same--but it felt different. The Christmas tree was still standing, and it must have held for all the other Sheffields what it did for me: the Christmas tree was just as tall as all the other Christmas trees in all the other years had been, and it stood in the same place; there were ornaments on it that had been on our trees since I could recollect--each year we had unpacked them from excelsior with a sense of gay familiarity, but this year the unpacking must have been nostalgic and sad. Connie had always superintended the decoration of the tree, announcing annually her theories: that it must be gaudy--that the biggest globes must be put on the biggest branches--that a glittering star must go on top--that the light bulbs must be set deep in the tree--and that all people who had color schemes of blue and white or green and gold for Christmas trees were dopes. So each ornament was sad, and the very splendor of the tree itself an emphasis of our depression.

  Larry came red-cheeked from racing on the ice and walloped me on the back.

  John drove up from Bridgeport and said how much they had missed me and that my presents were still under the tree. I opened them and the family stood about in the half-embarrassed and half-delighted mood of givers sure of their gifts.

  There was The New Oxford Dictionary from John, and from Virginia a new desk into which the volumes fitted, especially built for me with a place to write, copied from the battered favorite in my room. Besides that happy collaboration, a whole new set of trout flies from Larry--so many that it looked like an entomologist's collection--and from Ivan an autographed Keats. Anne had knitted the regular half dozen pair of socks, and from Barry came the standard carton of cigarettes. Presents that meant not only money invested but time spent, thought, affection, and understanding of me.

  Having to open them up alone, instead of in the midst of the glee and gusto of a regular Sheffield Christmas morning, crystallized out my consciousness of how much they cared for me and how good they were. At the end I choked up and beat it for my room.

  The Sheffields!

  All that for nobody from nowhere.

  Virginia caught me, later, in the hall. She had a habit of doing that--as if she listened for me from her room and then ran out to intercept me with an appearance of casualness. But she was generally dressed and ready for dinner on such occasions. This time she took my arm and turned me around, looked up and down the hall, and just sa
id,

  "Well?"

  Again the blank feeling of frustration and dismay came over me--stirring my insides and making me curse myself for an overweaning fool. I didn't try this time to filibuster as I had with Ivan. "She's all right, Virginia. Reasonably happy and very well.

  She intends to get divorced from John and marry Barney."

  It was murky in the hall, and I couldn't see her expression. She let go of me and stood still for a little while. The wind blew outside and the window vibrated noisily.

  Finally she said, "Of course I knew where you were going the minute you spoke about being away for Christmas, but I don't believe anybody else guessed at all."

  "Ivan did."

  She was silent again, and again the wind blew and the pane quivered. "Ivan. Odd.

  Well, the others haven't--even Bill. Don't say anything to John or Larry, will you?"

  "Of course not."

  "Particularly Larry."

  "Why particularly Larry?"

  She shook her head. "I couldn't say. He's young, and he feels all this almost more than he can bear."

  I didn't answer anything to that.

  We stood there for another minute, and then she kissed me on the cheek. "You're a sweet guy, Frankie. And you've got what it takes. But don't ever say anything more to me about it, will you? You've told me all I wanted to know."

  I found I'd been holding my breath, and I exhaled slowly. "All right, gal."

  "Will you also--?"

  "Will I what?"

  "Nothing. Never mind."

  "Will I what?" I repeated.

  Virginia said, "Will you kiss me again?"

  So I kissed her, and we went downstairs. I knew that the kiss had not been the subject of her original question. She had been going to say, Will you also come to see Bill and me.

  We had a hilarious dinner, and afterward Bill and Ivan played an idiotic piano duet which they said was entitled, "Serenade to Frankie's Homecoming." Then Ivan produced a set of Extra-Sensory Perception cards, and we tried out our telepathic powers.

  We went to bed with the firm conviction that all the Sheffields and Bill Bush, too, were practically mediums.

  The next day it snowed.

  The night after we collected a bunch of people, hired a sleigh loaded with hay, and went for a ride. Because of the season, we sang carols--twenty-five or thirty people raising their voices in "Hark the Herald Angels Sing" and "Good King Wenceslaus."

  The stars were sharp. Our breaths streamed white in the moonlight, and, for a while, I had a feeling of exhilaration--as if my mind had at last conquered its sorrow about Connie and the denial of its wish for Virginia. I felt peacefulness in the world.

  Glory and bounty and inexpressible beauty. The lighted houses and the chirruping sleigh runners and the voices were so rich with life, and so full of goodness that I could not resist the collective sentiment.

  Then, as we rode over a hill, and the pale rays of the moon fell full into our sled, I saw Virginia in Bill's arms, her back bent stiffly, her lips pushed hard against his lips, their visible breaths united. I remembered Connie in the garden and the black sorcery of that summer night. I remembered the day Virginia had come back from Europe and I'd waited for her on the porch. Some sort of brash insanity seized hold of me.

  There was a girl sitting near me in the big sleigh--a pretty girl named Nora Rutherford, whose mother owned the summer hotel in our town. She'd acted definitely, if coyly, partial to me in the fourth or fifth grades, and, later, when I'd inherited the money of Grandma Sheffield, her partiality had sometimes been a nuisance. She had black, curly hair and black eyes--a nice profile--she was a tropical sort of girl--and when she came home from Vassar she took up writing poetry, perhaps hoping that I would be interested.

  It wasn't very good poetry, for, despite her education, Nora's mind was uncomplicated; in fact only physical desirableness camouflaged her stolidity.

  But I took her hand and she edged toward me across hay that smelled anachronistically of August.

  "It's a lovely night," I said.

  "It's terrific, Frankie."

  The demon was in me. "A night on which a man should kiss a girl."

  "You think?"

  "Don't you?"

  "Not think," she replied with unconscious accuracy. "But I have a sort of feeling--"

  So I aped Virginia and Bill and I was startled. For, when Nora's arms went around me and I found her lips were warm, her breath warmer still--I had a sudden picture of the sterility of my preoccupation with a hopeless love. There was vitality in this girl, and I enjoyed it. I thought--and laughed at myself--that there was some sense in rushing from our frustrated Nordic passions to the easier and more primitive blandishments of Tahiti or some other foreign beach. I thought again and was bemused.

  Hence, I kissed Nora appreciatively. Virginia looked up and caught me doing it.

  She remained for some time fixed in an unnatural position--and by that I knew she was surprised. But then, so was Nora--and so, indeed, was I.

  About midnight we were dropped off by the sleigh--in twos, mostly. I walked with Nora to the door of her mother's house.

  "It was fun," Nora said.

  "It was fun."

  "I've always liked you. I'm not a child any more. You seem to be alone a great deal. You ought to have a girl--whether you're in love with her or not--whether you marry her or not. Why don't you take me? I'd like it--and I'm nice."

  It wasn't a speech that a girl would have made a generation ago--but this was not a generation ago. She was asking questions she had a right to ask. I doubted then, and I doubt now, if any man or woman is wise enough to answer them completely. "I'll think about it," I said.

  She held up her face to be kissed again, and once more made her cogent self-definition: "It's so ridiculous to think about things that involve feelings."

  "Maybe it is. Goodnight."

  "Goodnight, Frankie."

  There was her embrace, an instant of the perfume she wore, the sound of the door closing, the trodden, moonlit snow between her house and the gate--then the sleigh bells.

  Bill and I paid the driver and waved him out of sight.

  Inside Fort Sheffield it was warm. The light from the hall fell tentatively through the living room and upon our Christmas tree, making it sparkle in the gloom. Bill yawned, and grinned his apology.

  "I'm not sleepy yet," Virginia said.

  She was looking at me.

  "Neither am I." I knew she wanted to talk--and it had been a long time since Virginia had wanted to talk to me--the way she had in the Summer, for instance, when we sat together on a flat rock.

  "I'm for getting something to eat."

  Bill looked at us and understood, and shook his head.

  "I've got my beauty to consider. Besides, I had nightmares last night. I dreamt all night that I was trying to chop down a tree, and every time I got it almost cut through, it grew back. Finally, I stepped away from it to take a look at it and saw that it wasn't a tree at all, but a woman's ankle. It gave me what might be described as quite a turn. Tonight, I've promised myself to dream only about pleasant fields full of flowers, or something of the sort." He yawned again and started upstairs.

  Virginia and I made two turkey sandwiches and poured two glasses of milk. Then we went back into the living room and turned on the Christmas tree. Its colored bulbs cast upon the ceiling shadows of branches in an extravaganza that was like the frost on window panes. Soft illumination pervaded the room, but the tree itself was glittering and hypnotic. We sat side by side on a divan and looked at it. Finally I turned away and allowed myself the still greater fascination of Virginia. The pale froth of her hair, the lines of her neck--and her lips, which had been modelled to meet exact and mystic specifications of my own imagination.

  She was breathing slowly. She sipped her milk. "Why did you kiss Nora tonight?"

  I had not expected any such inquiry as that, and it produced in me several quick changes of feeling--perplexity, am
usement, introspection.

  "I don't really know."

  "She's terribly attractive in a way. Maybe alluring is a better word. When I saw you, it flashed into my mind that if I were a man, I would probably do what Larry calls,

  'Go for her.''

  That made me laugh a little bit. "I guess I don't 'go' for girls much."

  "But why not Nora? It must be awfully dull for you this Winter."

  Perhaps that hurt me. Perhaps I then assumed that Virginia entertained some blind intuition about me and wanted to divert from herself what she did not even realize she possessed. "Do you recommend it?"

  She didn't answer for a long time. But she was thinking and I said no more. She had been sitting forward. Now she leaned back and turned her head toward me. "Is it so important? Does so much depend on things like that? Just what is the philosophy of denial, Frankie? What's the meaning of sublimation? What's the good? I need a lecture--

  about love."

  I was the--last person on earth to undertake that task--especially now that I knew she was thinking of herself and Bill and not of Nora Rutherford and me. I smiled and would have said something, but she went on.

  "No, I don't. I've read all the books and studied people and it's too late for a lecture, anyway. I've made up my mind."

  She said it sadly. She stopped looking at me then and lowered her voice.

  "Remember the story John used to tell us about the stone road that the Romans built?"

  Involuntarily, I glanced down at my game leg. "I remember."

  "Well--I've got mine almost finished, Frankie." She paused. "I can't base my life today, upon tomorrow. I've thought, too, that some day there might be somebody else who would take Bill's place. But you see--there's only Bill now. There may never be anybody else. What is, means more than what might be, and it's some sort of completeness we want in our lives--not perfection."

  "That's right, Virginia."

  The lowest branch of the tree reached out to where we sat and from its tip there hung a crimson bell. Virginia pointed her toe and touched it, setting it rocking. "Bill's going down to Washington after New Year's to spend a month. I'm going too."

  I had expected to hear that very decision but foreknowledge made it no less poignant. I could feel ache and paralysis in all my body. My throat choked, my eyes filled, I could not quite control my mouth. So I bent forward and tapped the crimson bell with my forefinger, swinging it back and forth as she had with her toe. It tinkled frailly. I told myself that now, above all other times, I must be in command of my emotions and I promised myself that at some later time I'd give them whatever compensation they demanded. So by and by I was able to talk.