Hard Rain Falling

by Don Carpenter

  Twenty-One

  Sally’s boredom with Jack’s program of discovery soon turned into criticism. He did see things from a rather special point of view, and after a while he was no longer listening to her recommendations as carefully, nor was he accepting her judgments of what was good and what was bad. Sometimes it got pretty irritating. Once, for example, he spent a month wading through Ulysses, which Sally told him was the greatest novel ever written. He threw it aside late one night and said to her, “Baby, I just can’t cut it. That book’s as full of shit as a Christmas goose. It’s too much for me. I like Bloom a lot, but I can’t stand his goddam crazy wife or that asshole Stephen. He’s just a turd. I don’t want to read about turds.”

  “Maybe it is a little too advanced for you,” she said. She was, Jack realized, just sitting there doing nothing, and probably had been ever since he got home, and God knows how long before that.

  “Maybe it is,” he said. “Maybe I should go back to comic books. How the hell can you sit there doin nothin? Don’t you go nuts?”

  “I’m thinking,” she said. “But maybe you don’t know anything about that.”

  “Oh, boy,” was all he could think of to say.

  She giggled. “`Stephen Dedalus is a turd.’ That’s something you might see on the wall of a public toilet. Like, `Donald Duck is a Jew,’ or `Plato eats it.”’

  “Do they write stuff like that in women’s rest rooms?”

  “No,” she said. “I always use the men’s room.”

  “We’re lucky,” he said abruptly. “We have a sense of humor. That saves us. A lot of times.”

  “Saves us from what?”

  “Oh, you know. Arguing.”

  “I think argument is good for a marriage,” she said. “It cleans out the dirty little places; the stuff you might bury away.”

  Jack agreed, and they had a long talk about marriage, and how difficult it was, and how lucky they were that each of them was such a fine example of a generous, warm, and loving human being. They went to bed feeling smug, satisfied that theirs was a perfect marriage. It was a feeling they often had, and sometimes it lasted for days. But more and more they found themselves arguing about things outside the marriage, things that did not really matter at all, like art, literature, music, or politics. While both of them admitted that taste was a very personal matter, they argued as if each had the proper taste and the other had to be kidding or was being defensive. Jack could not finish Ulysses, but read From Here to Eternity with rapt attention, and at the end hugged the book to his chest and said, “This son of a bitch has really been around! Man, what a book!” But Sally merely sneered and said, “Illiterate,” leaving Jack in the dark as to whether she meant him or James Jones.

  “At least when he wants to say something, he says it,” Jack insisted. He began to illustrate from the text, and realized from the way Sally looked evasive that she had not actually read From Here to Eternity but knew what it was about from the movie and from book reviews. She admitted this, and did not see why it mattered.

  She took him to a production of Waiting for Godot, perhaps rather cattishly hoping it would snow him and make him feel inadequate; but when they left the theater and she began talking about Beckett’s use of language, Jack interrupted her and said, “Hell, it seems simple enough to me. They’re waiting, that’s all. It don’t matter what for.”

  “Doesn’t,” she said automatically.

  “Doesn’t. They’re just waiting. What did you want?”

  “It’s not that simple,” she said, but she was not sure why it was not that simple.

  “I’ve done a lot of that waiting jazz,” Jack said. “I know what it’s like.”

  “So have I,” Sally said. “What do you think I do all day?”

  And it was true. Sally was waiting for—she did not know what. Waiting day after day, perhaps for the nerve to walk out. It was not really the marriage she had hoped for, and she often wondered sickly if any marriage could be. She felt chained by the marriage, trapped, her freedom gone. It was so maddening. She would sometimes just sit around the house all day, anticipating Jack’s return, allowing most of the housework to go undone, and when Jack did arrive, she would experience a sharp sense of disappointment. She did not know why. Often she would awaken with a feeling of resolve—to give the apartment a thorough cleaning, or to get a job so that they would have enough money to do more things; but the dullness of the morning routine of breakfast, toilet, dishes, and daily newspaper would take the edge from her resolve, and she would just sit. Looking through the classified ads for work was depressing, too. Women were always wanted for jobs, but no one seemed willing to pay a decent salary. With a twinge of guilt Sally realized that if she got a job, she would want to surprise Jack with it, not mentioning until he asked that she would be making more money than he was. And the plain fact was that such jobs required training, and she had none. She was getting older, and they were not having any fun, and she was becoming a housewife.

  The afternoons were the worst times. Even if she had been busy, even if she had been a good housewife, there was nothing to do in the afternoon. She almost always wanted to take a nap by then, and Jack was up and around the apartment. If he left early, she was angry with him for deserting her in the apartment, and if he hung around, reading or sitting in the kitchen drinking coffee, she was resentful because he was in her way. By the time he did leave, she would be too full of coffee to nap, and too nervous to do anything but sit. It was driving her crazy. She felt that she actually might have gone out of her mind, if an incident hadn’t occurrred to break the monotony.

  Jack, in the course of his work, had to deal with a lot of drunks, and he knew that the only way to handle them was to get them somehow into their cars, or if they were too drunk, into a cab, and get rid of them; he knew he could not rise to any challenge, he had to withstand any insult without losing his temper, and it really wasn’t too hard to do. After all, it was part of his job. But one night, after a series of particularly haughty, drunk suburbanites, he was walking up Broadway alone, on his way home, and there were four teen-agers blocking the sidewalk, arguing with each other. He tried to get past them, but one turned on him and shoved him against the building and swore at him. Jack wanted to get home, so he tried to leave, but the boys surrounded him. He was still a very hard-looking man (he had not yet begun to wear glasses) and perhaps the boys, in their desperate boredom, felt challenged by his obvious toughness. They ganged up on him, and something drawn very tight inside him snapped, and with real joy he took them on, grabbing two by the neck and smashing their heads together, kicking another in the stomach and hearing with great pleasure his grunt of surprise, and then watching the last of the boys, his arms akimbo, his mouth open in stupid fear, backing away from Jack. With a giggle, Jack followed him and hit him in the chest, as hard as he could, and the boy folded up. Two policemen in a patrol car had seen the whole thing and were crossing the street when the last of the boys folded up. They put the arm on Jack, and after calling for another patrol car and an ambulance they took him downtown. Both of the policemen had been delighted by what Jack had done, but they braced him and took him downtown anyway. When they found out he was on parole they were genuinely sorry they had picked him up.

  Jack was certain he was going back to San Quentin, and he retreated bitterly into his hard shell, hating himself for his pretended hardness. They offered him his one telephone call and he shook his head angrily; then, rising out of the stupid hardness, accepted, and called Sally.

  “I’m in jail,” he told her.

  “Oh my God, I’ll get you a lawyer,” she answered.

  The next morning, after a great deal of fussing, Jack was released. He had never seen and heard so much bathos in his life. They were all there—his parole officer, his lawyer (Jack had expected to see John, the man he had hit out in front of Rosenbloom’s, and was surprised to find that he was being represented by Cyril Whitehead, one of the most famous criminal lawyers in the countr
y), Sally, the four punks, their parents, a representative of the District Attorney’s office, two or three other lawyers with the fat, well-bred look that comes from a corporation practice—all these people milling around, talking, touching each other, alternately smiling and looking serious; and the upshot was that while fighting was forbidden to parolees, they did have the right to protect themselves, and as to the four boys, well, they were all from good, local, prominent families, and were really good boys at heart, and they were awfully sorry (sorry they had been knocked around, Jack thought) and promised not to do anything of the kind again, etc. etc., and Jack and Sally went home, and for weeks she was very loving and devoted to him. She had almost lost him; it could happen just like that.

  For his part, Jack understood what Sally must be going through, stuck at home all the time, and a most wonderful solution came to him: it was time to start having children. Even though he only made $72.50 a week, which was really not enough to have children on, it was better just to dive right in now and save Sally from her perpetual boredom that to wait around and perhaps lose her. It was a very rational solution, particularly because Jack felt that Sally pregnant would inspire him to do something really serious about bettering himself, getting a job he could love and making the kind of money they needed. Everything seemed to click into place: that was why the woman stayed home, and that was why men tried to better themselves—children. Just thinking about it gave him a rich, meaningful sense of reality.

  He was astonished to learn, when he got home that night, that Sally did not want to have children. Not just yet. It was something he had always assumed, and suddenly he remembered that they had never actually talked about it at all, not seriously, not talked about it. He lost his temper.

  “Look, I’m for it,” he said. “We aint getting any younger, and I read that it’s best to have the kids when you’re pretty young, so’s you don’t get tired of them too quick. And anyway, it’d give you something to do, something to make plans for. So how about it? Are you just scared?”

  “Maybe I’m too old already,” she said. They were both in bed now, the night-light on overhead. She looked a little frightened. Her hair was up in pins, and her nose stuck out shrewishly. The light from above gave her skin a sallow, unattractive look, and made her eyes smaller and not blue at all.

  “Well,” he said, “we’re gonna do it. And we might just as well start trying right tonight. You don’t have your diaphragm on, do you?”

  She eyed him suspiciously. “You know when I put my hair up I don’t. You’re going to rape me, is that it?”

  He gritted his teeth. She was about as lovely as a corpse. “If I have to, I will,” he said.

  “You mean it, don’t you,” she said. “You’d just make up your mind like that, and do it.” She laughed sourly. “I should have known. It always comes down to that. This is the way you do everything. You sit down and think it out, and then when you’ve got it thought out, you do it. Nobody else matters. Just you. No wonder they threw you in prison.”

  “We have to have kids,” he said stubbornly. “Or it’s all bullshit.”

  “Maybe it’s all bullshit anyway,” she said. As if saying goodbye to something ineffable, something long gone anyway, she held her arms out to him, and they made what passed for love. Just to be sure, they made love fifteen nights in a row, and the irony was that these hurried matings were the least loving in their marriage. When Sally’s period was eight days late (and she was very regular), she disappeared and was gone for a week.

  Jack went nearly crazy. He thought she might have jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge, or done something equally dramatic and final. But he was stubborn, too, and he would not look for her. He did not have that right. They were only married, as she had once said, not sewn together.

  At the end of the week he was standing out in front of the parking lot on Broadway, in his white knee-length coat, his hands in his pockets, waiting for the crowds to start coming out of the club, when a Rolls-Royce sedan pulled in next to him and Myron Bronson stuck his hand out and smiled at Jack. “When do you get off?”

  “Couple hours. How are you?”

  “I have a message from your wife.”

  Jack was not surprised, and he kept his face blank. “Meet me at Vesuvio’s about one, then. Okay?”

  “Where is it?”

  Jack told him, and the huge rich car backed out and tooled off.

  Vesuvio’s was crowded, as usual, but Jack had no trouble spotting Bronson, with his beautiful wavy gray hair. They took a table by the window, and Bronson ordered Bushmills for them, and they talked.

  Sally had been staying in Bronson’s elegant Pacific Heights mansion, alternately getting drunk on Bronson’s excellent brandy or bitchily begging him to get her an abortionist, on the cuff. One of the sins of poverty, Bronson told him with a shy smile, was the lack of funds needed for a good abortionist. He would have given her the money, he told Jack, if she’d only been a little dishonest and not told him why she wanted it; because she knew that he, Bronson, did not believe in either contraception or abortion.

  “Are you Catholic or something?”

  “No, I just don’t believe in them. When I was very young, not much older than you, I had a vasectomy performed on myself; I had myself neutered, so that, I suppose, I could enjoy what pleasures there were without having to be anxious about getting tied up in a lawsuit, or worse, getting married.” He smiled. “I’ve been married three times since then, and possibly, just possibly, the cause produced the effect. Anyway, I don’t like the idea of murdering the possible. Of course, I can afford such ethics, now.”

  But Jack was not particularly interested in Bronson’s problems. “Tell her to come home to me,” he said. He wanted to say, “I need her,” but didn’t.

  “Well, she’s asked me to give you a message. Please understand the wording is hers, not mine, and that I won’t kick her out. I don’t think you’d want me to. She’s going through something awful; I think she’s afraid she’s going to lose the only thing that keeps her free, or at least makes her think she’s free; I think she’s afraid that having a child will make her old. I know it won’t, I know what it will do for her, it will complete her; but she can’t see that at all...“

  He trailed off, and sat looking out the window.

  “Well? What’s the message?”

  Bronson sighed. Without turning his head, he said, “She asked me to tell you, `Inform that son of a bitch I’ll have the kid where he can’t find me, and then stick it in an orphanage.”’

  Bronson knew the message was vicious, but nonetheless he was still shaken by what happened to Jack’s face. Bronson had been around a lot, but he had never seen anything like this, not even in 1929. Jack’s face turned the color of pale mud. His mouth froze, and his eyes seemed to have turned to lead; cold, dead, lifeless metal. He looked to Bronson as if he had actually died, right at that moment, at the very sound of the words. Bronson felt something like terror constricting his bowels, and he took a quick drink to cover his fear.

  Jack did not see Bronson’s reaction; he saw nothing. Twenty years of his life had just vanished and he was standing naked on a cold wooden floor in an endless corridor of shabby beds with cheap metal frames and he was alone and there was no one there to make him unafraid of what had wakened him in terror. He could not call out because if he had called out someone would have come and slapped him for making a fuss, and the other boys would have laughed at him for his fright, for his nightmare, and for not being able to hold it in. And yet deep inside him was the terror, the old terror, the dead, nameless, empty, silent screaming terror that had wakened him with dead horror of emptiness and he died right at that moment, and twenty years later he died of it again and sat there like a stone for minutes; minutes, not hearing the noise of the crowd in Vesuvio’s, not seeing the concerned, afraid, gentle face of Myron Bronson peering at him; until, by tremendous effort, he made himself come out of it, buried the memory, and said:

  “Tel
l her if she does that I’ll kill her.” He got up and left the bar.

  She came back to him late that night and found him lying like a stone in their bed, and she kissed his body and whispered her love in his ear and made him come back to life, telling him that she had not meant it, could not have meant it, wanted to hurt him the worst way she could and had known that would do it, and how she hated herself for having done it, and how she wanted the child now, loved it already and wanted it badly, his child, her child, and would love the child forever as she would love Jack forever; and at last he came to life, the first sign of it tears flowing down his cheeks, and then heavy racking sobs out of his chest as they clung to each other, both sobbing now, wordlessly, until it passed and they slept.

  Twenty-Two

  They had an argument about where the baby was to be born. Sally had been reading some books on the subject of natural childbirth and related matters, had been calling and visiting friends who had had babies, and decided that one thing most of the women really wanted but didn’t have the courage to face was to have the baby at home, naturally, without any pain-killers, attendants, or anything else that would tend to get in the way of the true, age-old experience of women. She had even given thought to having in a midwife instead of a doctor for that final, almost casual moment, when a woman seemed to need a little help. Naturally, she wanted Jack at her side.

  “Horseshit,” he said. “You’ll go to a hospital.”

  “But that’s so pasteurized. And anyway, it costs too much.”

  But he was adamant. “Crap. That’s not your reasons. You want to have the experience. I’ve read some of that crap, too. You want to have the kid naturally, nature’s way, like a goddamn Indian squaw, so’s the kid will really be yours, so’s you’ll really understand the magical process of birth. Bullshit on that. Do you think that’s the only way to learn how to love the kid? Do you think it’ll be any more your kid if you go through agony for it? If you love it, you love it. That’s all. Don’t think of yourself and your experience, and how good it’ll be for you to feel it; think about the kid. He’s the one gettin born, not you. He’s the one the safety, the sterilization, and all that stuff’s for, not you. Well, it’s for you, too. Do you want to risk your life and his for the sake of a goddam experience?”