Days Like Today

by Rachel Ingalls

The moment he looked at the child he could see that he was the father. And he recognized even more clearly that the mother was the ruined girl he’d left behind.

  ‘She’s gotten her story in first, hasn’t she?’ his mother spat at him. ‘The liar. The bitch. My God, there she is outside. Here, sweetheart, there’s the bad woman again. What do we say when we see her?’

  The boy ran to the window. ‘Whore-whore-whore,’ he shouted.

  ‘I’m your dad,’ he said. ‘Did you know that? Daddy: that’s me.’

  The boy turned around.

  ‘Your father, who’s been fighting in the war. And now I’m back. Would you like to come with me? Let’s go for a walk.’

  The boy held out his hand to be led but the soldier picked him up and sat him on his shoulder. The grandmother screamed, ‘It isn’t true. That slut has had bastards by every man in this town.’

  He ducked to pass under the door frame, and walked out into the street. As soon as the boy saw his mother, he began to chant ‘Whore-whore-whore’ again.

  She fell into step beside her lover. At the end of the street he set the boy down. ‘Listen to me, sonny,’ he said in a quiet little voice. ‘I’m your father and this is your mother and that’s a dirty word you’ve been taught: whore. If I catch you saying that word again, I’ll wash your mouth out with soap. Do you hear me?’

  The boy looked down. His fear electrified the silence between the three of them, which continued for a long time; no one knew how to break it. At last she said, ‘If we can ever afford to waste soap that way.’

  He gave a snort of laughter. She turned her head against his shoulder, her face brushing his neck. ‘How I love you,’ she whispered. He kissed her, the first time in four years. The boy, guessing from which direction harm or help might come, nudged forward and pulled on her skirt, his hands pressed to her thighs through the fabric. Like the sudden flickering of a light in darkness, warmth sprang from the center of her body, flying up to her heart and outward – igniting every part of her with a feeling of life that had nothing to do with the past and made all of it powerless against her: as if no one except her lover and her child had ever touched her.

  ‘Fertility,’ her friend commented, hearing her tell the story twenty years later.

  ‘Love,’ she declared.

  ‘Don’t split hairs.’

  ‘Fertility doesn’t know the difference between one love and the next.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said the friend, who was a doctor. ‘And maybe not. Fertility leads to motherhood. Motherhood can take people in different ways.’

  ‘Exactly. Love is different. And anyway, he wouldn’t have believed my side of it if he hadn’t loved me.’

  ‘Let’s just say that there’s a time for everything.’

  ‘Love doesn’t have set times.’

  ‘I meant,’ the doctor explained, ‘that there’s a time to be a mother and a time to be a grandmother. And they aren’t always the same.’

  ‘Oh, her,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean her. I understand that.’ She took up her work again, washing dishes in a bowl and then rinsing them under the spigot.

  She refilled the bowl with water and started on the next batch. After a while she said, ‘I’ve heard so many stories about those times. A lot of people went through much worse than anything that happened to me. I know that. You can’t imagine the things I’ve heard. So, in one way I just think: I can forget about this or that – those things weren’t important. But what I can’t understand – in fact, I still can’t accept it – is why my own parents would have wanted to treat me that way. Strangers, maybe: but your family should stand by you.’

  ‘You were the last thing left in their world over which they had some control. As long as you behaved according to the rules they’d laid down, they felt secure. When you stopped being the girl they’d trained you to be, they couldn’t recognize you as theirs.’

  ‘Um,’ she murmured.

  The doctor went on, ‘I have a colleague who says everything that happens in the world is entirely impersonal and it’s brought about by large astronomical upheavals. You know, there are times when the sun shoots up fiery gases like geysers – some of them are so high that they alter the weather here on earth: crops grow better, the woods produce more lumber and – a whole generation in advance – the ratio of male to female births changes dramatically so that soldiers, who are going to be killed in a war that hasn’t yet begun, will be replaced by another generation of men. Do you see what I mean? Everything that’s essential happens on a huge scale and over vast periods of time. It takes centuries before you can see that a general direction has been established or that something new is being worked out. But that’s what really drives us: biology. Everything else is superficial.’

  She stood the last of the dishes in the rack, slung the wash rag over the rail and dumped the dirty water out of the bowl and into the sink, where it gurgled away down the drain. ‘That,’ she said, ‘is spreading the blame too thin.’

  3 Veterans

  Some people forget; it can be a failing or a convenient knack, easily acquired. Others remember right to the end, without discriminating as to what they can recall. And there are those whose memory in later years is haunted by an early, careless wrongdoing – an indiscretion, folly or even a crime.

  Franklin Page remembered. He remembered that he hadn’t stopped to think. Before he realized what he was doing, or could imagine what it might lead to, he had committed the act that was to change his life as well as that of someone else.

  His was a good deed, not a misdeed. At the time of the incident he was fighting in a war. And when the moment came, he figured that he could probably make it into the field, pick up the wounded man and get back out again. He never gave a thought to what might happen if he didn’t succeed. He saw that it was possible and he started to move.

  His introduction to military life had been similarly unconsidered. He hadn’t waited to be drafted. He’d joined up, choosing armed combat as an alternative to suicide.

  Whether he’d run away from home, or had been kicked out, was a point on which his family would never have agreed with him. He’d thought that they had made it clear: he wasn’t doing any of the things they expected of him and they didn’t want him around until he did. He could go somewhere else till he pulled himself together.

  He went to the big city, where he fell in love with a pretty girl several steps above him, who had an ambition to be a ballerina. Her parents liked him but since their daughter was so young – as he was himself – there was no question of formal approval or disapproval; he looked and sounded right, and wore recognizably good clothes. He appeared to be a boy from a stable background and therefore someone who could be trusted to take their daughter out to movies and meals and the kind of drinking that didn’t get out of hand. It was understood from the beginning that the relationship wasn’t to be regarded as serious because it wouldn’t be subject to the rituals that applied in those days: he’d fallen in love at a time when people still got engaged. Her mother and father wouldn’t have thought she’d be sleeping with him; sexual intercourse was reserved for a fiancé. They would have assumed the probability of kissing, cuddling and even heavy petting, but – naturally – what he and the girl wanted was every thing that went with love – the full, physical and sexual encounter without which they couldn’t achieve the oneness they longed for.

  The fact that his ardor and incompetence had combined to make the girl pregnant was something he didn’t know until a series of telephone calls involved him and, eventually, her mother. The mother was the only other person the girl had told and she was also the first to be informed, which should have given him a clue about how matters would progress.

  The girl was horrified. He’d kept telling her, she said, that everything was all right and now it wasn’t any such thing. Hadn’t she said to him that she wanted to be a great dancer? And even if she hadn’t had any ambitions, who would want to have a child at the age of nineteen? And to go throug
h nine months and everything afterwards – to undergo all that and then give up a baby for adoption and think she could go on happily with the rest of her life – no: she’d have to get an abortion. Of course she would. If she didn’t, what was the rest of her life going to be like? She’d be tied hand and foot for the whole of her twenties. He didn’t even have a job; he was doing dish-washing and that kind of thing to put himself through college on a scholarship. And he’d only just started. He didn’t expect her parents to support them, did he? Because they couldn’t. And what about the child? To grow up resented by a mother who never had time for you because she was busy trying to recapture her lost chances – that wouldn’t be so wonderful. And ten or twelve years later, when it was the right time to have her family? For the child that was a mistake – to have to look on and see everybody else being showered with love: that would be a torture.

  She rattled off every thing she had to say, without allowing him to get out a single word. Then she collapsed. She was nice; even on the verge of hysteria she wasn’t going to remind him that his grandfather had drunk himself to death and his aunt had gone crazy. After a long pause she just said that this was goodbye. And she hung up.

  He called back. He called back forty-three times. Every time, her mother answered; she was polite but unyielding, as was to be expected of the mother of an only child.

  He talked about his love. He said that he’d do anything. He hadn’t meant to hurt anybody – he’d have done anything rather than that. This just couldn’t be goodbye, no matter what they all decided. He reasoned, he whined, he tried not to sound angry. He cried.

  When he realized that everything was over, he went out and got drunk. And in the morning he joined up.

  *

  His wasn’t a world war. It was one of the smaller wars, but just as deadly as any other. ‘Wars are like snakes,’ his first commanding officer said to him. ‘Some of the little ones can be even worse than the monsters.’ It was certainly as bad as anything Franklin had ever imagined, despite all the comforts of modern warfare: danger money, paid leave, medical care, disability compensation and the G.I. Bill if you came out in one piece.

  In a modern battle you didn’t often see enemy blood. What you encountered in the way of death and mutilation was mostly from your own side or among the civilian population who weren’t supposed to be in the fight: the women and children. Women and children – and, of course, land – were what you were expected to fight for, not against. His war was up to date: air power was an important factor. But it was also like any other war in that after the aircraft had done their work, paratroopers and then the infantry had to go in on the ground. For some troops there was always going to be blood.

  In Franklin’s case, the most blood he ever saw at one time came out of another man in his outfit. Not even several years later was the birth of his second child – which he would be forced to watch because of a dream his wife had had – to generate so much blood. The soldier out-bled anyone or any thing Franklin had ever seen and a lot of it ended up over his own uniform because he’d gone to the rescue, while their friends – some of whom hadn’t considered the man worth the trouble – covered him.

  He was given a citation for bravery but at the time he hadn’t felt any sense of his own courage; he’d still thought it didn’t matter if he died but he was pretty sure that if either of them got hit, it would be the wounded soldier he was carrying over his back, like a protective blanket. There wouldn’t have been any better way to get out of the field unless he’d dragged the man, which could have killed him. As it was, every step Franklin took exposed the wounded soldier to further danger. But to abandon him would have meant leaving him to die cruelly, when he might have been saved. Franklin didn’t think of himself as heroic. Any other soldier would have done the same if the man to be rescued hadn’t quarreled with a bunch of them over something. It was never really clear what that had been about: he suspected it had to do with food supplies or liquor and money, or maybe women.

  Afterwards he was surprised at how good he felt. He’d saved somebody. He’d tried to do the right thing and it had worked. It was a shame that the man wasn’t particularly worth while but after living a long time with danger, you came to believe it was ridiculous to make those distinctions:everybody was the same. Nobody was worth more than anybody else.

  He asked after the soldier, and was told that he’d probably live. And that he’d be transported back to the States. Franklin forgot about him.

  *

  As soon as he’d served his time in the military, he felt free. He could start a new life. Because of what he’d been through, he knew how precious everything was that he used to hold in contempt or take for granted. He loved his country as he never had before, when it had always seemed to belong to other people and to be a place that was never going to be his. In an odd way he was proud of himself. And now he had money in his hand and all the choices in the world. Do it right this time, he thought.

  No serious attempt was made to educate him and his friends back into civilian life. They were given help in other ways. Financially, he was going to be OK and that was pretty good in itself. That was what he needed. Maybe there were others who had different plans. Whoever they were, nobody told them, either: how to deal with the fear and the anger. They were given a few lectures, that was all. The rest was for them to figure out for themselves, because it was private. They were warned that perhaps powerful emotions might become hard to control, once there was no way of expressing them. They were cautioned against drinking to excess.

  ‘Don’t drink?’ one of his buddies said. ‘What is this – Sunday school? Jesus.’

  But Franklin soon understood. After one or two binges out on the town with a couple of pals and a crowd of strangers, and after waking up from blackouts to find that he had no memory of the night before, there were times when he seemed to be reliving the worst parts of active duty and of the family hatreds that had preceded it. At those moments, if he’d had a weapon on him, he would have used it.

  He gave up liquor. He gave up smoking. Not smoking was the worst. With the help of the government he went to college. He threw himself into learning.

  He studied history; he didn’t know exactly why – he had no plans to use what he was being taught. But he felt that everything he read and heard was helping to explain to him what the world was like and how it got that way, and why. He read, hour after hour, and he worked at jobs on the side. He was saving money but still having fun. He didn’t know why he was doing the saving; it seemed to be a compulsion, like a squirrel’s instinct to bury acorns.

  After a time he felt confident enough to start drinking beer again.

  When four years had passed, he finally relaxed about everything. He was ready to become reintegrated into civilian life. He went back to see the relatives he’d quarreled with. He made peace with them but he didn’t want to hang around afterwards. While he’d been away they’d shifted their dissatisfaction and malevolence to other members of the family. They were as pleased to see him as if they’d always loved him. But if he stayed, the burden of misery would come back on him, he knew that. It would ruin his life again because he was always going to be fool enough to let them abuse him until he couldn’t stand it any longer, and then he’d have to get out again. They talked about how he could take his rightful place now. That meant the will, the land, and so on. That would be something to think about, he told everybody; but it might be a better idea for him – while he was still young – to go and seek his fortune like the boys in the fairy tales: they always ended up running the kingdom, didn’t they?

  They clung to him. They told him that it was his duty to stay. His duty to them. He reminded them that they’d thrown him out of the house. Oh, that – that was such a long time ago, they said. And he knew then that he was really well and free, because he didn’t tell them what it had done to him to be treated like that, nor did he say that he understood now what they were like: like a tribe of cannibals, eating their
own children, selling their own people and enslaved by their love of power. He just said that it had been good to see them and he’d send a postcard. And he left.

  At about the same time, he lost touch with other men who had been his friends when he was overseas. He’d kept up with them for a while but now he wanted to move on to new interests; and to different people, too. He wanted to see them again some day, just not too soon. In several years, maybe.

  He switched from place to place, trying out jobs and always managing to make a modest success as well as to have a good time. He’d stay in a place, start up a business – hardware or dry goods – and turn over a profit, sell up and move on. He didn’t mean to settle down anywhere. That wasn’t going to happen for a long time.

  He was driving across state, heading nowhere in particular other than from one town to the next, when he came over the brow of a hill in the late afternoon. The light was beginning to sleep in the air. The temperature had started to ease off and a breeze sprang up. It brought him a wave of thick, green fragrance from the alfalfa fields he was passing. And all at once he thought that it had been a beautiful day and that in spite of his intention to do a lot more traveling, this was such a pretty place that he might stop for a while and get to know it.

  He didn’t realize that at last he was cured and that the restlessness he’d suffered from in the past few years had been part of a healing process.

  He left his car next to a pick-up truck in a small parking lot off the old main street, stretches of which looked almost the same as they must have been in the last century. There was a dusty but elegant livery stable, a bank like a Roman temple, a drugstore with a tessellated floor. There was also a gas station, a newspaper office and a grand old wooden building twice the size of a steamship; it contained offices for doctors, a dentist, agricultural consultants, feed merchants, a lawyer, the water board and – downstairs – a beauty parlor, a barbershop and a fancy dress shop with a milliner’s adjoining it.