The Middle of the Journey

by Lionel Trilling

  But she gave no sign of vanishing. She lay there beside him, very much in the ordinary flesh that does not easily vanish, her hand still in his, her ankles lightly crossed and her skirt neatly over her legs where he had disposed it for her. No sign at all of vanishing, but only of being about to speak. She turned her head and smiled at him. She seemed to begin with difficulty, and apparently to make it easier for herself she sat up. In what she said there was nothing silly or affected or in the fashion of what another decade had been in the habit of saying after its love-making. When their conversation was over, the cloud had appeared in which she was to vanish. She quite brought to an end all question of there being a “situation” for Laskell, of his being in any way “involved.” The cloud she conjured up for herself was, however, not exactly a golden one.

  Her beginning was not promising. She said, “It shouldn’t have happened. Should it have?”

  To this he could not consent. “Of course it should.”

  She was docile and modified her opinion at once. “Then it must not happen again.”

  To this he must refuse to agree. “Why not?” he said huffily.

  She really had no tenacity about her views. She sat with her legs drawn up, her skirt wrapped neatly around them, and she looked over her knees at the stream. “Then it mustn’t happen this way. I don’t mean— What I mean is—” She was very miserable. “If we ever do meet again—I mean like this—would you— That is, if you ever do want again—” She had not been well trained in the frankness on which her culture prided itself. “I mustn’t take any chances. Do you mind? But if I were to become pregnant—”

  It was the practical discussion that all lovers have to have. She had now turned a little toward him and her weight was on one hand while with the other she poked intensely at the ground, as if to distract his attention from what she was saying. She was blushing and looking down at her finger’s work.

  “You see,” she said, and looked up at him in full agony. “It’s because of Susan.”

  “Susan?”

  “I mean if I were to become pregnant.”

  It was not her husband that she spoke of in connection with this contingency. As Laskell looked at her face, he saw no slightest sign of guilt in it. And he felt none himself. Still, he thought, guilt or no guilt, it would be no light thing that he would be implicated in. No light thing at all, considering it apart from morality, considering it only practically, poverty being what it was. But that was the colder of the two ideas that were in his mind. The warmer one was the contingency itself, the idea of a pregnant Emily.

  “You see,” she said, “Susan is so ill.”

  “Ill?” And he heard that his voice was rough and suspicious. “She doesn’t look ill.”

  “She doesn’t, does she? And she doesn’t know—doesn’t really know. But ever since she was little. It’s her—it’s the heart.” She seemed to prefer to say “the heart” rather than “her heart,” as if it made the weakness less immediate.

  He did not believe it. But he remembered the evidences that showed that the child’s mother was determined to act as if she believed it. There was the time when she had called after him when he was walking away with Susan, cautioning him against walking too fast up the hill—it was not him she was concerned for but Susan. He remembered how cool she had been to Susan’s declaration of her ambition to become a dancer. He understood why it was that Susan could violently tumble Emily into the water with only the gentlest retaliation from her mother. There would have to be retaliation, Susan would have to be ducked in revenge, but only, as it were, in token form. And yet Laskell did not really believe what Emily Caldwell was telling him.

  “I try to make a life just as if nothing were the matter with her. And I want her to have every pleasure now.”

  He remembered her carpe diem, the swift passage of envious time. Yet still somehow Laskell did not believe her. As she spoke of the threat to her daughter, she had the air of one of those young women—Laskell had known several—who make up elaborate and romantic lies about their lives, transparent lies, which give them significance or excuse their actions, either their sexual fear or their sexual excess. They invent tragic events in the past and speak with certain knowledge of tragic events to come, early betrayals by men or fate, or family “tendencies,” illnesses of mind or body that are yet to appear, either in themselves or in some member of the family to whom they will have to devote themselves, or insisting that some sad incident in the lives of their mothers must inevitably recur in their own lives. It is for this reason, they say, that they will never marry, for they can only bring sorrow to the men they marry, or it is for this reason that they are so prodigal in their sexuality. In such lies and fantasies of fate, there is always the dignity of necessity, no matter how easily the lies can be seen through—they are needed and therefore one listens to them with a kind of awe.

  For the moment, he was convinced she was lying. But whether she was lying or not, the extremity of her statement—of her truth, if it was the truth; of her lie, if it was a lie—quite drove from Laskell’s mind any thoughts about being caught in a “situation.” It was not only because she was saying, whether it was a lie or not, that she had her own large and particular fate in which he had no part. It was also because her speaking of her daughter standing on the edge of mortality made irrelevant everything that a critical mind might hold against her—her having been a schoolteacher or librarian with ideals, her being the wife of Duck Caldwell, her having run a tearoom, if it was true she had done that, her sad artistic slang, her foolish reading of Spengler, her foolish painted bowls. All these things that had stood as a barrier between them, now, as she spoke of mortality, whether in truth or in falsehood, became quite beside the point.

  He said quietly, “Are you sure about that? Was it only the local doctor who told you?” For he had the city man’s lack of faith in country doctors.

  “Yes, it’s sure.” And she looked at him with something like an apology, as if she were very sorry to have to force the inescapable truth upon him, as if she were sorry that she could not let him prove his doubts. “Yes, I’ve had her to two Hartford doctors, very good men.”

  Then suddenly she said in a panicky way, “Oh, I shouldn’t have told you. I shouldn’t have. She doesn’t know—nobody knows. You won’t speak of it to anyone, will you? Not even to Mr. and Mrs. Croom. Especially not to Mrs. Folger. Even her father doesn’t know.”

  He did not even bother to give his promise of secrecy. “Her father doesn’t know! How could you not have told him?”

  Emily looked puzzled. “I don’t know,” she said. “He wouldn’t respect her.”

  “Wouldn’t respect her? What do you mean?”

  It was the only thing she had ever said that could be construed as a criticism of her husband, and when he asked her what she meant by it, she could not explain.

  After a moment of silence, she said passionately, as much to reassure him as herself, “But of course it’s just a condition. Nothing has to happen.”

  And then she said, referring back to the consideration which had led her into an account of these circumstances, “So you see!”

  “Yes, I see,” Laskell said.

  He had to believe it now, he did believe it, and yet somehow he saw it as a fantasy, a thing that he could believe only for its own kind of truth. If it was a fact at all, it was not so much a fact in life as a fact in a poem.

  So here it was, the cloud in which Emily Caldwell would vanish after her visitation. Here was the circumstance that would keep Laskell from being involved in a situation, that would make it possible for him to go his way when the few weeks of summer that were left should have passed. It set her apart and marked her off—she was committed elsewhere. It therefore put the term to his commitments and his necessities of feeling. And at the same time it gave great dignity to Emily Caldwell and to the eventual separation from her.

  What Laskell did not know then was that, for their relationship, whatever that was,
it was fortunate that almost immediately it had to take a third person into account. Whatever that relationship was: Laskell did not know what it was, neither now nor later. It was apparently not love, not in any sense in which Laskell would have used the word. There was no promise in it, no exchange of things undertaken, no futurity or desire of futurity. They were to say little to each other and find out little about each other. Laskell was able to see Emily in the light of the simple sexual dignity she had, her quiet gravity, and he saw her in the cloud of mortality in which she walked, whether he thought of this as invention or as fact. But he felt none of the pride or possessiveness he might have expected. He was grateful, but gratitude did not make the bond that connected him with her. Laskell never was able to understand what their connection was, what it might have become or what name it ought to have; but he did come to understand that what made it so really strong, so wholly inexpressible, was its being limited and hedged, its being conditioned and defined, and not only by time and circumstances, and not merely by their own wills or by their own capacities for feeling, but by the existence, the perhaps precarious existence, of a third person, who moved all unconscious of what was between them, and all unconscious of the precariousness of her own existence.

  9

  IT WAS GENERALLY admitted among Kermit Simpson’s intellectual friends that you could not possibly dislike Kermit. It was natural, as things go, that the attempt should have been made. Kermit had a great fortune, from New York real estate on his mother’s side, from Western chemicals on his father’s. He was very handsome, a big, rangy man who was good at field sports, court games, and boating, and it was said that he still took an interest in such things. He had a wife who was expected to be impossible because of her prettiness, her social position, and her name, which was Sheila, but who was really a modest and rather intelligent girl with a very solemn sense of duty. Kermit had two children who charmed everyone and a country house so simple in its beauty that even the poorest and most socially maladroit of Kermit’s friends were not ill at ease in it. All this endowment of his life—or, indeed, the mere fact that he had once played polo and still owned horses—should have closed him out from the sympathy of the people who were his friends, and that it did not was a great tribute to his character and intentions.

  But Simpson was not really a fortunate man. The ease and luck of his life made demands on him that he could not meet. At this time the way was beginning to open for men like Simpson to have a career in government, just as it was opening for men like Croom. But Kermit had been well-born just a little too late to think of government as a career. He needed an American Revolution to match a fate to his fortune, needed to fight at Yorktown and to have pledged himself to the Continental Congress. Failing that, he should have been English and in the Foreign Office. His sense of social responsibility had been formed at a time when senses of social responsibility were likely to be in conflict with government. He declared that his magazine was devoted to Jeffersonian ideas, but that only made an irony—as one heard him say “Jeffersonian” in his beautiful Westport house, one might be tempted to think of Monticello and to understand how far apart the two houses were; and one might think of Mount Vernon too when Kermit stood at his full Washingtonian height and his streak of stubbornness appeared, as it did now and then. But he had never lived in danger, he would never put his ideas or his life or his fortune or his sacred honor to the test of establishing them at Yorktown, he would never face responsibility or defeat or disgrace.

  Kermit was all too bland. There was no roughness in him. He never followed passion where it led, nor did necessity ever constrain him to resistance. The blandness was fatal to his character. Yet as soon as this was seen, one had to see the queer grace he had. He was really an innocent man and he wanted everyone to have what he had. Only now and then did he show the rich man’s sense of vulnerability, the awareness that he could bleed and be bled more copiously than most men. At that time people were quoting an exchange between two American novelists on the subject of the very rich. “The very rich are different from us,” one novelist had said, and the other had replied, “Yes, they have more money.” It was generally felt that the second novelist had disposed of the first, who had shown himself to be a snob, but Kermit Simpson suggested that the very rich are indeed different, that they move at a different tempo, have a different density and intensity, that they have different nerves and, when they are innocent, as Kermit was, a different kind of innocence.

  Another man showing off his new trailer would have been silly, but Arthur and Nancy and Laskell were now crowded into the trailer and gravely followed Kermit’s demonstration with scarcely a teasing word. Kermit showed them how the beds came down; he showed them the washstand that folded away, the gas stove with its fierce blue flame, the concealed lights, and the unexpected lockers.

  “It’s a special feeling,” Kermit said, “to have a complete home on the move. I must have Scythian blood. You know, the ancient Scythians went around with little wicker houses and they must have felt the way I do. Do you remember D.H. Lawrence’s book of poems about the tortoises? I know why they interested him so much, the snugness and privacy, you travel with your home on your back.”

  But the documentation and the justification by means of the ancient Scythians and D.H. Lawrence’s observation of the tortoises were not quite enough and Kermit went on. “You know, don’t you, that Sheila and I are going to make a tour of the country? She’s never been around in the United States and she and I want to see things at first hand, really on the road, no hotels.” The day of seeing the United States from the road was really about over, but Kermit was usually a little late with things, though nonetheless sincere, and nothing could have better justified the sleek aluminum magnificence of the trailer than a tour to inspect the condition of life in America.

  “What about refrigeration?” Arthur asked.

  It was Arthur who was asking the questions. The trailer was sanctuary, and while they were in it, asking questions and getting explanations, they were safe from the confrontation of Nancy and Maxim. In the general exchange of greetings it was not particularly to be observed that Nancy and Maxim did not approach each other. Maxim had the manner which was not very different from the manner he used to have at meetings of “sympathizers.” He was detached from what was going on, his manner said, these people had to make their own decisions in their own way, yet at the same time he was enormously alert and ready to speak, quietly and mildly, if things should by any possibility go wrong. He was outside the trailer as the inspection proceeded, and Laskell, looking through the window, could see him sitting quietly on a rock. He was wearing an open shirt and light flannel slacks. They were Kermit’s and too tight and too long for Maxim. In their failure to be negligible they were ignoble. Maxim was no longer bulging with the future. And though his scar was visible, it no longer had its old meaning. He looked, as he sat on the rock, lonely and lost.

  “Refrigeration?” said Kermit, and in mild triumph he disclosed the little refrigerator, all gleaming white and purring gently. “How is that for refrigeration? And here,” he said, and took out a huge steak and held it up for them to see, “and here is your dinner. You three are having dinner with us tonight. I think I’d better leave the steak out now.”

  “No!” said Nancy.

  “I don’t think steaks should be let get too cold,” Kermit explained.

  “No, we can’t do that, Kermit. We can’t have dinner with you.”

  “Of course you can. You didn’t know just when we were coming so you couldn’t ask us, so I’m all prepared to ask you. If you want to be formal, you can invite us tomorrow.”

  “Kermit—I can’t eat with Gifford Maxim,” Nancy said, as precisely as possible to clear away Kermit’s misunderstanding.

  And some part of that undeveloped gift of Kermit Simpson’s appeared, for in answer, quite without surprise, Kermit put his arm around Nancy’s shoulder and said, “Ah, you just can’t imagine how easy it is. I know w
hat you mean, but he’s not the man you think.”

  His arm was so simple in its friendliness and there was so warm an overtone of faith and promise in his voice that Nancy had nothing to say in reply. She did not consent to come but she did not insist on the refusal.

  The place they found for the beautiful trailer was a patch of ground just off the road opposite the house. Kermit backed the car and trailer onto it and swung around so that the trailer’s door faced the road. They were shaded by a clump of trees. When they were established on the site, Nancy and Arthur left them but Laskell stayed behind.

  Simpson and Maxim brought out a folding table and folding chairs of light metal and then glasses and whisky and ice. Laskell saw in what a practiced way and with how few words they made camp. The intimacy between them seemed very sure. It had been there to be heard in Kermit’s voice when he had said to Nancy that Maxim was not the man she thought he was. He spoke as if he understood Maxim deeply. Laskell was no longer Kermit’s wise friend. That place was now held by Maxim.