The general manager heard all this in thoughtful silence. At last he said resignedly, “Maybe this is the best way out. Rebuilding their houses out on the hillside is the least of our worries. And perhaps it will be healthier for the men at that. But this man Pettibone is something else again. It seems obvious to me that as long as he stays on here there can be no peace. So go back and tell them that we’ll do everything they say on one condition—that Pettibone leaves town.”
When the men heard the condition on which their wishes had been granted, they were reluctant to accept. “We’ve all gotten pretty fond of you, Mr. Pettibone,” Mr. Evans admitted. “And anyway, once we’re living out on that hillside, it’s going to be pretty hard to plan those big gardens without you.”
But Mr. Pettibone shook his head. “I’ve taught you just about all I know,” he said. “It’s time I was moving on anyway because my seeds and bulbs are just about gone and there are some fairy lanterns and fritillarias waiting for me a little farther north.”
So Mr. Pettibone shook hands with Mr. Evans and Mrs. Evans and Marilyn and Peter Evans and Mr. Lewis and Mr. Olivante and all the others, and then the superintendent personally drove him out of town.
They drove for miles, without saying a word, and then the superintendent said through clenched teeth, “Funny thing—I can usually smell a troublemaker. I knew you were one first time I set eyes on you.”
And Mr. Pettibone answered, “When you build those houses out there on the hill, be sure you give them plenty of outside faucets, because those flowers will need lots of water in all that sunlight.”
To himself he thought again, Who’d ever have dreamt it would go that well, all those men getting so excited about a couple of bulbs in a flower box, and then he looked out and saw a lovely meadow covered with wildflowers and he said, “You can just drop me here if you don’t mind.” And before the superintendent could recover from his surprise, Mr. Pettibone was saying, with a courtly little bow, “It was terribly kind of you to give me a lift this way.” The superintendent took this for sarcasm, and opened his mouth to tell Pettibone exactly what he thought of him, but the old man with the faded yellow beard catching the sunlight stopped him with: “Now you mustn’t waste your breath on name-calling, because name-calling just isn’t dignified, and dignity, you know, is everything.”
There was no answer from the superintendent. Time was money and he had to get back to the plant. Mr. Pettibone watched him speed away, and then wandered out into the meadow to begin filling his sack with wildflower seeds.
MOTHER
OF
THEM ALL
It was not pain at first, only a quick flutter, and she waited, patient, almost eager for the flutter to become a stirring and then, more quickly, for the stirring to become the beginnings of pain. When she was sure, still firm and without panic, she called the doctor. She was afraid as she picked up the phone that the fear of the last few days had left her weak, for fear had been everywhere about her—in her mind the cowardly fear of the pain that would not have been so lonely with Toby there; in her womb silent fear for the safety and future of a life she had taken upon herself to push into a world that did not seem to appreciate its value; in her apartment house and in her city and radiating out toward all the borders her country was determined to preserve, group fear, the fear of millions whose minds were preoccupied with death and dying, its frantic prevention and its heroic necessity, as they vacated their homes and dug their bombproof shelters in the parks with the outward calm of people puttering in their gardens.
But now as she held the phone she felt herself beyond fear or any weakness. An hour ago, hearing snatches of people crying out their anxiety, and listening to the army trucks rumbling by with their soldiers sitting on the benches in invincible postures, she had wondered to herself, What if I do not have the strength for it? How ridiculous to conceive, suffer morning sickness, and protrude, while the embryo takes on features, real eyes and organs and feet to kick throbbing pain into my memory—to go through all that and fail now, to sink in weakness and be drowned on the shore after the channel has been swum.
She had not known where to find the strength she needed, and while she was wondering it seemed to come, an unexpected faucet turning on suddenly inside her, an independent stream having nothing to do with her mind and its doubts, filling her rapidly and efficiently with energy and physical confidence. Pushed up into the attic of the subconscious was all thought of the war that she and all the other human beings in the invaders’ path had been telling each other about and trying to stop and preparing for so long now. All she knew was that the pain was on its way at last, and with that strange fundamental rightness of things this pain seemed to bring with it the sudden strength with which she was going to be able to endure it.
She had been depressed about the war that everybody kept saying would end in a matter of months or minutes and she had been depressed about the hot stirring lump within her, but now she felt almost hysterical with joy to think that she had not surrendered to weakness after all, though she had come as close as the doctor’s waiting room, dingy and crowded with other women there to sacrifice their motherhood to hopelessness and fear. She remembered staring into the faces of other young women, women sculptured in sorrow because the war was already in them, forcing them to throw their babies away in mercy (as a refugee, on finding she could not be allowed to enter the haven she had struggled months to reach, tossed her infant into the sea); staring into the faces of older women on whom nature had played the practical joke of leaving them young enough for conception but too old for motherhood. She remembered the smothering sense of frustration that hung over that room, and how, at the moment her name was being called, she had run out and down the stairs and into the street.
She remembered Toby coming home that day, tall, unhandsome, good to look at, oddly unromantic in his reserve flying corps uniform, for he never looked slick in his clothes and it seemed to her his pale rugged face was too gaunt, the forehead too high, the dark inquisitive eyes lit with too much intelligence to make him look anything but incongruous in military dress. Kathy’s friends considered Toby beautiful, with his black unruly hair, his nose high-bridged and well chiseled, his long face broken into interesting planes. But Kathy knew that his perfection was less in the face than in the athletic vitality of his movements, his quick and open smile, the way he set his strong mouth in thoughtful silences. Now at the telephone she remembered that scene with him, the way they had clung to each other as if trying to keep the world from coming between them, and then the way he had asked, Honey, is it over?
He had wanted her to do it. They had fought about it, as they had fought about getting married, with a fierceness rooted not in hate but in the depth of their love, for they realized it had been magnified, intensified and deepened by the crush of the times, by the quickening crises, by the dread of savage dislocations.
It seemed strange for a young man and woman toughened with the realism of the generation on the brink of a new war to be so thoroughly in love and yet so thoroughly divided on their problem. She had wanted the marriage and he had not and she had wanted the child and he had not, yet each could accuse the other of being unrealistic. It was never a case of one being right and the other wrong, for they were like the positive and negative sides of a battery which, when wired together, produces current.
So she had sensed that note of hope in his Honey, is it over? and she had fought it. “Toby, I thought I could, but I couldn’t. I want to have it now. I’m going to have it.”
“Now, Kathy, for God’s sake.” His young face seemed drained of its youth. “Do you know what we’ve been practicing all week?” The anger in his voice wasn’t really anger. It was frenzied anguish trying to be hard-boiled. “Bringing down enemy bombers over the city. It’s just a game of cops and robbers among friends so far. But now that they’re mobilized along the border, we’re liable any moment to begin playing for keeps.”
She had answered with more
than stubbornness, full of defiance and life. “If they kill us, they kill us. That’s the chance we have to take. But Toby, I want to take that chance. I want to have it. Please, Tobe, want to have it with me.”
That made his eyes tear as he kissed her in little private places, earlobes and the tip of her nose. “Look, honey, you know how much I’d get out of it with you—if it was only five years ago or.…” He paused, angry at himself for crying, for these were not times for tears, these were days with a war almost here. And he was never meant for war. That was not what he had learned at school all these years, what he had studied in the university, worked long hours with low pay for as an architect’s apprentice until now he felt ready to interpret his dreams into action. Toby’s dreams were girded with stainless steel, walled in with poured concrete, new materials for dreams, but then these dreams themselves were new: low-cost housing, clearing out the slums. But not this way, not slicing them in half or splintering them into the air with no warning for the occupants that their homes were to be blown off the earth, along with all the fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters who happened to be with them when the bombs struck. “… If it were only ten years ago, or ten years ahead. But now you have to be able to travel light. You have to be ready to run when the siren screams. Down into shelters or out into the country. You can’t do much running with a baby at your breast. And even if you could, what sort of infancy is that? Honey, can’t you see? It’s the wrong time.”
Now at the phone, feeling those muscles tighten, untighten, tighten, the rhythm still slow and casual, abdominal flux almost but not quite pain, she was surprised how their words rose out of a blur and came into focus. It was all so sharply remembered:
“But, Toby, just because there’s liable to be a war … we can’t stop living. And there’s still hope of peace, if—”
Toby interrupted her. Bitter. “If. The lives of people aren’t hanging by a thread. They’re hanging by an if.”
That wasn’t the whole fight. That had only been part of one and that one had only been part of many. They had argued over it, fought and cried over it, but she had clung to it, with moral arguments and regenerate instinct, and in the end she had won. Though victory had seemed pyrrhic when, at the six-month stage, the staccato boot steps of the invading battalions threatening new conquests echoed in their own little apartment, for the government was mobilizing its own troops in defense and Toby had been called. Historians may argue as to the day war began but for Toby and her it began the night he kissed her too quickly, said Take care of yourself in a voice that was not quite as casual as he meant it to sound, turned stiffly and hurried out, afraid to look back for fear of starting all over again. She watched him from the window as long as she could and then, because sitting there thinking about it was the worst thing she could do, she became very busy putting his things away, the drafting board with its half-completed plan, the clothes to be stored with mothballs, pipes, the toothbrush he forgot to pack. When she realized she was putting things away for no reason at all, she felt so lonely she climbed into the double bed, on her own side from force of habit, curled up beneath the blankets the way she used to as a child afraid of the dark, the lonely blackness bounding her consciousness the way it did that of the inner life her body could no longer conceal.
It was not the same with Toby gone and war uncurling from its own great womb. It was after that that the moods came, fits of depression when she would sit for hours in a thought-vacuum, or suddenly feel like screaming out that Toby had been right, that she was a fool not to have gone through with it that afternoon she was so close, that now they were caught together, she and it, trapped by each other, and it held some of the horror for her of a live man chained to a corpse. She even thought of going back to that doctor and finding out if it wasn’t too late yet, but something always seemed to interfere, one day not feeling well enough to make the trip, or having to wait for registered mail from Toby, until at last she began to realize that nothing was stopping her but herself, that no matter how much reason hammered at the bars of her mind, deep down where we are bloody landscapes with a magnificent system of trellised canals, the undying and antidying force of renewal would prevail.
“Hello, Dr. Mank? Kathy. They’ve begun, Doctor.”
“Good. How often?”
“Oh, every half hour or so.”
“How do you feel?”
“OK. Except when it grips me and it’s hard to breathe but …”
“Fine. Sounds normal. Nothing to be frightened of. You have plenty of time.”
“Shall I hurry over? Get a friend to drive me?”
“No, I want you to walk.”
“Walk?”
“Yes. Walk over slowly. You have hours yet.”
“But …”
“Walking will do you good. Makes it easier going. Are you worried?”
“No, I don’t know why, but I’m not. Not any longer.”
“Good. These are tough times, for all of us. See you at the hospital.”
When she entered the street it was dusk but people were not in their houses. The routine of their lives had been gradually transformed, perhaps forever, but they already were beginning to take the new life for granted. The men, dry-eyed and grim, were leaving their homes again, the children jammed into trains for the country, perhaps to preserve them for future wars, the women and the old men and the young boys had been working through the week with quiet fury to give the city its nightmare appearance with the sandbags, the barricades and the trenches cut deep into the streets.
She brushed by two middle-aged women on the corner with gas masks slung casually over the shoulder. “I absolutely refuse to wear it,” one of them was chatting, as if discussing hats. “It’s the most uncomfortable old thing. Why, I can hardly breathe in it.”
Kathy had to laugh to herself, thinking how very silly but wonderful it was for people to be able to worry about the discomfort of breathing in a gas mask when the only alternative was the discomfort of not being able to breathe at all.
Over the city lay a nervous calm. Last night and the night before, at the signal of sirens, screeching up one street, down another, millions of people had blacked out millions of lights, plunging the city back into Stone Age night before men invented fire. Tonight, working under streetlamps that had begun as symbols of public safety but were becoming looked upon as targets of public death, the people were stripping the city of whatever could be quickly saved.
Not calm but cool, fighting off the pain within and without, she smiled as she passed the art gallery where volunteers in two lines like ants were transferring works of art from the ancient building to the waiting trucks. She smiled because she knew that even now, when the droning of planes and the whistle of bombs could make the preservation of paintings seem ridiculous, these people, without quite knowing why, would go on saving and salvaging, defending and conserving all that had been built and passed down and improved and passed down again, a fine hopeful line from the cavemen all the way down to Toby and Kathy, to Kathy’s baby still curled in the dark peaceful womb. As she walked slowly through the unrecognizable city of her childhood, Kathy was gripped by a great coolness, an inexplicable pride to belong to the force of human life that was going on. Though she might have been afraid, she felt too strong to admit these qualms, for she was not alone, even with Toby vanished somewhere into the sky; she was not alone, for these desperate unpanicky people saving their works of art were one with her, though they might not know her as she passed them at this moment. She knew that if she had stopped to tell them of her uncertainty in these last nine months and to ask them what they would have done, their answer would have been her own, the answer she was walking slowly toward the hospital to find.
Several blocks further she had to step down from the curb and walk along the gutter, for the corner was piled waist-high with sandbags surrounding a government building. One little boy was standing on top of the sandbags looking down at another, somewhat smaller, lying on the
pavement crying.
Especially drawn to any suffering now, she stopped, helped the child to his feet and tried to check the quiver of his shoulders with her hands.
“There. You’re all right. Don’t cry.”
For there is too much to cry about, she thought. And all we need is to have someone start us, the tears of all of us flowing and flowing until the dam breaks and the very city is flooded, drowning us in our own sorrow.
The little boy blurted his rage through his sobs. “He pushed me. He knocked me down.”
She brushed him off and looked up into the face of the larger boy, who was still perched on the sandbags, staring down at them with undisguised hostility. She scolded him with motherly patience.
“You didn’t really mean to hurt him, did you? You look like too nice a little boy to be a bully.” And we have too many of those in the world now, she thought.
The larger child whined his defense: “Well, he pinched me first. So I tried to pinch him back and he fell off.”
Queer the way he wasn’t able to doubt that he was in the right and the smaller boy had started it. All that morning waiting until it was time to call the doctor, she had tried to keep her mind free from war the way he had cautioned her to. She had just one job now, Dr. Mank had reminded her, and she had to give it all the strength and concentration she had. But there beside the sandbags and this tiny war oblivious of the enormous one into which it fitted, it was impossible to forget another bully’s words, We will match bomb with bomb—what a roundabout way of saying what did not need to be said at all, because everyone’s consciousness pounded with it already, We will bomb your cities or blow you off the face of the earth or go down in flames ourselves!
“But aren’t you two boys friends?”
“No,” the smaller boy raged. “He’s my brother and I’m going to kill him.” He started climbing up the sandbags in pursuit, but the shiny coin that she held out to him checked the attack.
Love, Action, Laughter and Other Sad Tales Page 29