Love, Action, Laughter and Other Sad Tales

by Budd Schulberg

  “Here,” she said. “One for each of you. Now, why don’t you trot on home like little men.”

  It frightened her, saying that. Absurd, really, calling these babies in all their injured innocence little men. She wondered if she said that because there was no time for children anymore, because the children could be sheltered from the harshness and cruelty no more than the grownups, so that their lives must be sinister and violent from the day of birth, running to avoid shells instead of each other in a game of tag, playing a grim new game of hide-and-seek, in bombproof cellars where death was always “it” and where they could lose but once.

  “We’re waiting for Mother to come home,” the younger one answered. “We don’t know where she’s gone.”

  She felt as if they belonged to her, with their shabby clothes and their little pinched faces, playing on the barricades like puppy dogs. I am your mother, she wanted to say, I am going to give birth to you tonight. And you must promise me to be good boys and stop fighting, you must promise me not to die, because if you die …

  She caught herself, reminded by a sudden twinge at the pit of her stomach, more definite than any before, that she must go on more quickly. So she left the children, begging them not to hurt each other again, and when she looked back they were sitting on the edge of the sandbags together, swinging their legs and flipping the mysterious coins in their hands.

  Dr. Mank had left word for her to be placed in a room with another woman, red-faced and robust, whose child had been born a few days before, and who looked comfortably settled and established in bed, surrounded by newspapers on all sides.

  The rhythm of tension down her sides and through her abdomen, recurring, disappearing and recurring again, each time with greater force and for longer intervals, was not painful enough to prevent conversation.

  “Any hope of peace?” she asked.

  “Peace!” The woman seemed to spit the word out. “There won’t be any hope of peace till those madmen are in padded cells. Some of their troops are over the border already. They’ve been shooting back and forth all afternoon.”

  Perspiration was beginning to form in tiny beads across Kathy’s forehead. The dilation pains had set in now, tidelike contractions breaking over her in little waves, followed by the ebbing relaxation, giving her time to catch her breath.

  “No,” she protested, “they can’t start it, they mustn’t, they …”

  The rhythm was quickening, knotting so long she felt something was trying to strangle her, not around the throat but through the waist.

  “Here,” the other woman said. “If you don’t believe me, read it yourself.” She passed the papers over, black with headlines and pictures of men preparing to kill one another.

  Kathy reached out her hand for them, but midair the hand faltered, like an injured plane, and flopped down to clutch the edge of the bed. She was not engulfed in pain yet, she could still feel the core of it shooting out along her thighs and down her legs, the dark weight in her pressing back the walls, cutting its way down with the infinitesimal movement of a glacier.

  She lay back with her teeth clamped so hard together the nerves began to ache. She was stiffened and crying and absolutely silent.

  The woman began to talk to her again, calmly speculating as to when the war would come, but Kathy, straining through her tears and sweat, could no longer hear the words, only the sounds. And this time a nurse put her finger to her lips to silence the hearty convalescent.

  She lay back, staring at the ceiling, at the sandbags, at the little boy crying, at Toby. Hello, darling, she said, all to herself, her mind chattering away, hello, darling, do you know where I am? Maybe you were right because you always did say you didn’t want me to go through it until we could be sure of being together, and now we’ve lost each other, maybe even forever, and here I am at the hospital about to do it anyway. And don’t be afraid, Toby darling, because I’m not, not too afraid, and don’t think I’m silly because it isn’t silly to think that this is just as important as war, is it? Nor heroic either, for I know I’m neither of those, I’m not trying to do anything great because of war, I’m just trying to be myself, a young woman in love about to have a baby.

  All day she lay there softly moaning, fighting her quiet battle, no longer seeing the other woman, sensing people walking in and out only as shadows gliding through darkness, catching only a word here and there that winged out from the flock of words flying back and forth around her. “Shhh … raid … shouldn’t … hours more … husband is … tonight?… brave … sterilize …” the words forming a dim, meaningless pattern as her mind coasted on.

  She wasn’t unconscious, simply preoccupied with pain, for the timing was reversing itself now, the moments of wrenching seeming to last for hours, the lulls hardly long enough to brace her for the next attack. The impact reminded her of a swing, each time shoved off returning faster and farther, until pain had begun to glaze her eyes and draw the nervous moisture from her pores. But she was still composed because she did not fight the pain, feeling equal to it, giving her body to it as if she were embracing it.

  Then a strong hand was at her chin, and a firm voice spoke: “… Ready for the delivery room.”

  “Toby?” she said, reaching out her hand, and the strong hand held it.

  “Don’t leave me, Toby.”

  “I’m right here. I won’t leave you,” said the young doctor.

  It was strange, moving through the halls with that strong hand, Toby’s—yet knowing it wasn’t—Toby’s only in that it was young and strong and loving, Toby’s in that it would rather sow life than death; coasting through the white halls, remembering the first time her hand ever touched Toby’s, that night when peace still seemed the normal way, Toby a tall, intense stranger with a fine unhandsome face, speaking to her and the others with none of the arrogance of a public lecturer, Only fools and rats refuse to fight until they’re cornered. The chief difference between us human beings and the other animals is that we can remember the past and envision the future. So, as fellow human beings, let us weed out the fools and rats and lock arms to check aggression while it may still be done in peace. She would never forget his quiet simplicity, scorning orators’ tricks. And yet no one else had ever made her feel that war was so hideous or peace so possible. When the meeting ended, she had rushed up to tell him this, though she had never done anything like that before, surprised to find how young and shy he was, earnest but blushing too as he answered, “Thanks a lot. This is a war where we can use”—pausing a bashful moment—“pretty young girls in the front lines.” Then their hands clasped, and she liked the solid way he shook her hand, as if man to man. She would always remember his hands, long and narrow, with white tapering fingers that might have looked feminine if they had not been so strengthened with nervous energy. And now, for by this time she had forgotten, it was good to feel Toby’s hand on hers again, reassuring to know that even if what she was tensing her body against was not the worst of it, his closeness would ease the pain.

  “Toby,” she murmured, “you won’t take your hand away, will you? Hold it tighter.” And her fingers tightened around the hand convulsively, pressing so hard they trembled, as the hand’s voice floated down to her like a cool breeze. “I won’t leave you. I’m right here.” This man who was more Toby than the young architect up there in the dark, poised to kill other young men in defense of the sky.

  She was not being rolled through corridors any longer. She was lying still in a white room, surrounded by white bodies, among them Dr. Mank’s, when suddenly she was crushed in a vise of pain so powerful that she knew everything she had endured so far had not been pain at all, merely the prelude to pain. Everything before had only been a hurt, for hurt is specific, in definite places, she had felt it localized all day, able to put her finger on it, but now the pain was not inside her at all, but she inside it, there she lay squirming in the womb of pain, so absorbed in it she could not cry out, dumbly exultant, no longer thinking she had to be brav
e because suddenly bravery had become instinctive, not a virtue but a reflex.

  Then, at the moment when she thought she must explode, the vise released her and she sank down limp and faintly conscious. Her hand crept blindly to the edge of the table and Toby’s was there to meet it again. Toby had tried to prevent it but nothing could stop it now. After the peace rally they had talked the night away and then had watched the dawn come in together, Toby saying softly, If contrast makes beauty, we’re seeing the most beautiful sky in the history of the world, for it’s a sky full of fleecy clouds instead of enemy planes, and the crimson light spreading across it pours from the sun, not from incendiary bombs. And that was the way they spoke their love, not in romantic phrases in idyllic spots, but through whatever they were doing, peace meetings, lunch hours and bicycle trips, arguing modern architecture and modern ideas for the preservation and extension of human living, knowing the world was a serious business but helping each other to play in it too. They were able to skip the maneuvering stage between meeting and adjustment, ready at once to share each other’s life, hopeful, hectic, doomed and unafraid. If these times were too highly charged for low-current happiness, at least they were alive and together, and those factors, multiplied, produced the positive result of wanting to go on.

  Three months after they met they were talking marriage. But one evening, with the date already set, they were slowly strolling arm in arm when Toby broke a queer, long silence by suddenly blurting out: “Kathy, I’ve been thinking it over. I … I think we better call it off.”

  She had halted, her flesh pimpling with chill but her dark eyes steady. “But we love each other.”

  His restless eyes avoided her and then, obviously struggling to overcome weakness, he raised them to hers. His voice had the firmness of decision after long agony. “They took another country today. You know what that means. War is just a matter of time. If that’s the logic of it, then love is illogical. The more attached we are to each other now, the more we’ll have to suffer when it comes between us. I love you, Kathy, I always will, but … love in these times is a luxury we can’t afford.”

  She had fought the first shock impulsively, the words seeming to reach her lips before her mind. “Toby, don’t be a coward. You’re running away.”

  They had not been able to keep their voices from being angry with each other, even though both knew the irritation was only a superficial sign of the grief dividing them. “Coward? I’m just trying to make myself face the truth, no matter how it hurts. Kathy, don’t you see what’s ahead? The closer we cling to each other now, the more unbearable it’ll be when we’re torn apart. I’m not being cowardly. Just goddamn realistic.”

  On the surface she could understand his words and they made a kind of sense. Until this moment she had not quite realized how violent life had become, twisting love itself into a denial of life. But there was no hesitation. For reasons she hardly recognized or understood, she knew that denial must be checked and routed with all the persistence of her mind and body. “Who’s talking about clinging? I’m thinking about living. We’ve got to go on on doing that, no matter what happens. And that means breathing, eating, thinking, loving each other. If you run away from this, you’ll run away from something else, and then something else, until finally you know what the logical step will be, to decide that breathing isn’t worth doing in these times either—because living itself is a luxury you can’t afford.”

  She paused, the two of them there in the darkness, victims of a war that had not yet begun. “Toby,” she said, “what you’re trying to do to us is brave. But it isn’t brave enough. Living is harder now than it ever was before. But it’s just as necessary. So is loving. Maybe more so. These times make us belong to each other more than ever—not to escape from life into each other, but to love each other so much that we want to keep life going on.”

  It had seemed a long time, reliving that. Now she was shocked to realize it could not have been more than a few seconds, for the moment of release was already ended, and pain was crashing around her again, waves of pain looming higher and higher, carrying her up, up, up, and smashing her down again into a violent sea of pain, foaming around her, breaking over her and rushing through her. But she held on, biting her lip into silence, knowing this terrible unleashed fury was life, her triumph, born in pain and blood.

  Because the spasmic rhythm had taken the place of any concept of time, she couldn’t tell how long it had been before she realized that the scream she was hearing was not her own but the shrill cry of the siren, that the terrible rumbling, louder and louder, was not the whirring of her own brain, that these white walls were not the boundaries of the world, for alien sound was penetrating them, the ominous sound of fears she had forgotten in her self-absorption. But as pain finally ebbed, the movement and speech sharpened for her, the doctors and nurses staring up as if believing their eyes could drill holes through the roof, the way fear was passed back and forth from face to face, the hoarse whispering: My God! and Air raid! and It’s begun!

  All of them heard the first blast, at the far end of the city, the roar muffled but the vibration strong enough to make the hospital walls shudder. One of the nurses turned to run, and Dr. Mank’s voice barked “Stay,” and then they heard, louder and closer, the second blast and Kathy’s body shook to it, not knowing where the pain of the city began and her own left off, screaming at last as she saw through eyes tightly pressed together the bombs, plowing through buildings, the floors falling away into little pieces, the sky full of bits of glass and human beings, everything falling, falling, the sirens rushing down the streets screaming through human mouths. All this she felt, her whole body suddenly filled with destruction and terror, the thought scurrying through her mind like a maniac that she was being bombed while the city was giving birth, for it had become all one, one long and ugly suffering.

  She saw the little boy sitting on the sandbag, waiting playfully to catch the bomb in his hand like a shiny coin. She tried to break away from the many hands that held her, for he was her child, the child Toby had not wanted her to have for just this reason, because the bombs were falling, and she had to save him because in another second … darling don’t stay there run away help help they’re killing him fighting off the hands that held her let me go do something don’t let him die.… They tried to tell her that she had no child out there, that her child was here, safe and not quite born, but she knew better, she was the mother of all the children in all the cities where bombs were falling, she would lie there in pain forever, giving forth child after child, feverishly trying to replace the thousands being slaughtered tonight while playing, while nursing at their mothers’ breasts, while saying Now I lay me.… while sitting on their potties, while being born.

  There was another thundering blast and she screamed again, thinking the hospital was hit, feeling the walls collapsing around her, the glass shattering, ceilings tumbling down through floors tumbling down through ceilings—but this time the only explosion was within herself. She trembled violently with the impact, throwing her head back, her hair soaked and matted with sweat, her eyes bulging, the cords in her neck straining as if they would break. No longer embracing pain. She was fighting it now, hating it, screaming at it. She wrenched her hand away savagely from the one that had been holding it. You aren’t Toby! What made you think you were Toby? Toby is out there, trying to stop those bombs. But he isn’t stopping them. I can hear them falling. He’s only dying. Everything is dying. My little son on the sandbag is dying. I’m dying. My baby is dying. This pain that’s in me and that I’m in isn’t birth. It’s death. She screamed again, It’s dead, it’s dead, it’s dead!

  The voice in her ear was like the distant roar in a seashell, Steady now, steady, we’re almost done, but she wanted to fight them off, these fools who insisted on going on dealing with life when the world was full of death. Toby, can you hear me? Toby, you were right! What am I doing here, what am I bringing into the world, another target for bombs, flamethr
owers and poison gas? Toby, I must’ve been mad, forcing a living baby out into this dying world, where the only air his lungs will ever breathe is lethal gas. Oh, Toby, you’ve won! It’s not too late not to have it. I’m not going to let it be born. I’m just going to lie here motionless and not give birth to it. Then we’ll both be dead, Toby, and that will be right because that is the way the world is going (tonight I heard the bombs fall, darling) and I can’t populate the world single-handed with all those bombs against me.

  Dr. Mank bent over her tensely. “Please—you’ve got to help me.”

  “I won’t,” she screamed. “I won’t. You’re trying to fool me. You only want more soldiers. But I’m not going to give them to you. Toby was right. No time for marriage, or children, or … Let it die. Let us both die!”

  “More gas,” Dr. Mank whispered. “A little more gas.”

  “Gas!” she screamed.

  “Want to put her under, Doctor?”

  “No. Just enough to quiet her. She has to work with me. Its position is very bad. If she doesn’t help me …” He shook his head.

  She fought the gas. “Poison,” she sobbed, too weak to scream now, “the planes are … spreading poison gas. I feel … all full of death.”

  Bending over her, the doctor pleaded, “Bear down. Bear down harder. Harder!”

  And if I don’t, she thought. Toby, you’ll forgive me if I don’t.

  Overhead more planes droned. Explosions were coming regularly now, a new rhythm of pain.

  She lay there trembling, numbed with pain, struggling against an instinct no longer controllable. Eagerly the doctor worked with the life force as the momentum of her labor began to carry her through.…

  Consciousness trickled back slowly, white shadows piercing the blackness, the shadows slowly forming patterns, becoming objects, until the sense of her body began coasting back into her mind again. Finally she began to realize where she was, back in the double room she had left the evening before. There seemed to be something changed about the room. Gradually she discovered what it was: the other woman was gone and even her bed was missing. That was pleasing, just to lie there, saturated with listlessness, surrounded by whiteness and solitary quiet here in this peaceful and empty room. I feel like this room, she thought wearily, emptied and peaceful too. She tried to tell herself she was glad the child was gone, but it wasn’t gladness, only the backwash satisfaction of resignation. It is best, she thought, and Toby is right. What is birth today but the beginning of pain our child’s being spared?