Experiment in Springtime

by Margaret Millar

  He walked toward the door without knowing exactly where he wanted to go or what he wanted to do. It was good to be in motion, to be independent. It meant he was no longer a victim, but a man capable of victimizing.

  He went out into the hall. A maid in a green uniform was dusting the banister with sketchy haste. She was about thirty, with nice eyes and bad skin.

  “Hello, Lily,” he said.

  She turned, startled. “Why, Mr. Pearson. Why, my goodness!”

  “Thought I’d take a little walk around,” he said, smil­ing, “see how you were all getting along without me.”

  Lily had a secret passion for Charles and his presence had the effect of alternately choking off her voice entirely or putting wheels under her tongue. In private she fre­quently planned things to say to him, but when the time came she forgot them all. This occasion of his first appear­ance after his illness was to have been the scene of many suave and pretty sentences. She couldn’t remember one of them.

  Mute, and on the point of tears, she twisted the duster around her fingers and wished that the floor would open up and swallow her.

  Charles, who understood ordinary women quite well, glanced away and said cheerfully, “How’s your mother getting along, Lily? Brown told me she was in an accident.”

  “Oh—she’s fine—she’s just fine.”

  “That’s good.” He noticed that Martha’s door was closed. “Well, don’t let me interrupt you, Lily. I’m just getting re-acquainted with the house.”

  Martha’s door, blank, imperturbable, like a royal sentry standing guard over the secrets of the princess’s bedroom.

  Then he saw that it wasn’t quite blank. It was equipped with a golden eye, and a brand-new Yale lock. He turned, groaning, back to Lily.

  “Burglars,” she said with a gasp.

  “Burglars?”

  “I mean—there might be, so she had a man come last week and put it on, on account of burglars.”

  “Oh,” he said, as if he’d known all about it, had even suggested the idea himself. But the golden eye winked at him, and he felt suddenly exhausted and had to put his hand against the wall to steady himself.

  Lily gazed at him with love and agony in her eyes. This was her love, her Mr. Pearson who moved naked and bold and humble through her dreams, and all she could talk about was burglars. Oh, if the floor would open up . . .

  “Oh, yes, there is a great deal of crime in the city, a great deal,” Charles said, and slid slowly down the wall.

  “Oh, Mr. Pearson! Brown! Oh, Brown!”

  Her screams came to Charles muffled in cotton wool, and clung to his ears soft and sticky as rumors.

  His ears were smothering, he would never be able now to go out among the people of the world. There would be war, poverty, crime, and a Yale lock on every door. The people would grieve in whispers: Charles Pearson will never come this way now; we wait, but he will never come. His wife won’t let him.

  He blinked and found he was back in bed and Brown was holding out a glass of water to him.

  “You haven’t got much sense,” Brown said. “Drink this. How do you feel now?”

  “Fine,” Charles whispered.

  Brown helped him raise his head. “I fainted like that the first time I got up after my operation.”

  “That makes it all right then,” Charles said. Some of the water slid out of the side of his mouth and down his neck, but it didn’t matter. He felt light-headed and detached, as if the Charles Pearson who had fainted ignominiously in the hall had nothing to do with himself, was, in fact, rather a comic fellow, born to be a butt.

  “It seems to me you don’t have much sense,” Brown said. “That’s my opinion.”

  “Well, don’t nag.”

  “I’m not nagging. Dr. MacNeil said you were only to get up and sit quietly in a chair the first few days.”

  “He didn’t tell me that.”

  “He told Mrs. Pearson. I heard him.”

  There was no expression in Brown’s voice. None was necessary. The statement stood by its own strength.

  Martha’s first piece of carelessness. A lie. Hardly even a lie so much as a small error in reporting. “The doctor said you could sit quietly in a chair,” had been transformed into, “The doctor said you may get up as soon as you’ll make the effort, he said it would be good for you to get up.”

  Not perhaps such a difference in meaning, but a striking difference in texture. The first suggested that the doctor was rather grudgingly allowing him to get up; in the second, the doctor seemed to be implying that he could have been up long before this if he, Charles, hadn’t been a lazy bum.

  A sourness formed on his tongue, as if the tears that he had dammed behind his eyes had found a secret pas­sage to his mouth. The heat in the room became suddenly unbearable. It seemed to whirl, to gather itself into a ball that spun around and around him, forcing the moisture out of his body and leaving him as dusty and dry as a mummy.

  I do not care about spinning things. Spinning things do not affect me. I can think quite clearly. Sweat and tears contain the same percentage of salt as sea water, and the square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. Right? Right. I have always had a very remarkable memory, Martha. I recall exactly what you said, and I recall exactly what Brown said. You are getting careless.

  The doctor said . . .

  The sentence rang over and over again in his mind like a dirge.

  3

  Martha disapproved of the car. It was too sleek and ostentatious and didn’t match the personality she had selected for herself. Besides, every time she rode in the car, she was reminded, annoyingly, of the presentation speech Charles had made when he’d given it to her for her birthday, three years before. Charles had probably in­tended the speech to be ingratiating but it hadn’t sounded that way.

  “I want you to have the best I can afford, Martha. I want to make up to you for all the years when you had so little.”

  Those were his exact words. Implying that he’d picked her up from the gutter and rescued her from starvation, instead of from a $35-a-week-and-chance-for-advancement job at Burleson, Bonds. All the years when you had so little. Hooey. Maybe her salary wasn’t so large then as the one she received now for being Charles’s wife, but the hours were shorter and she was free. Free, at least, for something to happen to her.

  Well, there was no point in thinking about that. It was over, she was married and settled, and nothing more would ever happen to her because she wouldn’t let it. She was not one to shirk her responsibilities or change her mind. Duty was her favorite word and doing it was her favorite occupation. No matter what her personal feelings about Charles were, she would have gone through hell for him if she thought people expected her to, and someone was watching. She had a great deal of what she con­sidered strength of character, but which Charles called a perfectionist obsession. She was deeply hurt when he told her that. “You have an obsession, Martha. You want everything to be perfect, yourself and me and your mother and Laura and the servants and the house, and we’re all failing you daily and hourly.”

  They continued to fail her and she continued to do her duty. As one dull and blameless day followed another, she had only one outlet, Charles’s money. Money was her drug, and spending it was her method of escaping from her life. The department stores and antique shops and French salons and auction houses all intoxicated her. Like a drunk who doesn’t care what he drinks as long as it contains alcohol, she bought without discrimination, with­out restraint. Later, when she took her purchases home and unwrapped them, her euphoria would evaporate and she would be left with a hangover. The genuine antique candlesticks looked shoddy, the bargain French original didn’t fit, and the still life was childish. But she couldn’t restrain herself from buying things, nor could she force herself to return or exchange t
hem once they were bought. That would be a confession of failure, a weak spot in a strong character, a rift in the obsession.

  “Forbes.”

  She tapped on the glass partition that formed a Mason-Dixon line between her world and Forbes’s world.

  The chauffeur gave no sign that he had heard. She frowned at the back of his head, trying to decide whether Forbes was getting deaf or subtly insolent. It was difficult to tell. From behind, he looked very young and guileless. His ears stuck out a little too far from his head, and the back of his neck was shaved and scrubbed and vulnerable, like a victim’s ready for sacrifice.

  “Forbes.” She tapped again. This time he turned his head slightly and the illusion of youth and innocence disappeared. His face was ugly and sharp as a witch’s.

  “Stop at Ryrie’s, Forbes.”

  “Pardon, ma’am?” He kept one hand on the steering wheel and with the other he turned down the glass partition.

  “Stop at Ryrie’s.”

  “I won’t be able to get a parking place near there. Is it all right if you have to walk a couple of blocks?”

  “Why, certainly,” she said, a little hurt that Forbes should have forgotten that she was very fond of walking. Though she seldom did any, she often pictured herself striding freely along country lanes with the sheerest en­joyment; and striding with her, at her heels, a dog. The dogs varied in breed, but their behavior was always perfect; they responded to her faintest whisper and were of indeterminate sex.

  The car stopped smoothly beside the curb. Forbes was a good driver and a good mechanic—let credit be given where credit was due—but he had one baffling peculiarity. Every few months he would disappear for a week or so without telling anyone. When he returned, looking rather worn, he offered no explanation and Charles asked for none. It was as if Charles had some secret way of under­standing and tolerating the various necessities of people’s natures; he would no more question Forbes about his disappearances than he would remind her of her extravagances.

  She got out of the car and crossed the street, raising her feet carefully because the glasses made the sidewalk appear too close. She turned off onto Madison Avenue, excited to be out of the house again, and pleased with the crowds who seemed more polite and cheerful than she remembered them.

  She quickened her pace. The drug was already having its effect.

  A diamond clip for her mother for Mother’s Day. Two sweaters and a slip for Laura. A set of canisters, a crystal vase, a pair of real gold bobby pins. A tie for Charles. From counter to counter, out of one revolving door into another revolving door, until her arms were full and the euphoria had taken possession of her.

  The tie for Charles was bought as an afterthought. He would never wear it, but it was a nice gesture, a nod in the direction of the fact that it was his money, after all, and he might as well get something out of it.

  She passed from the last door into the street again. She paused, blinking gently behind her glasses, her eyes scan­ning the crowd as if she hoped, half-expected, to find a friend there. But there was no one she knew. She had lost touch with her old friends and had made no new ones. These people were all strangers, indifferent to her. They were all hurrying from someone and some place to some­one and some place. Without interest, they brushed past her and she loathed them.

  She began to walk again. The sun was warm on her face, the wind fresh off the lake, but in that minute’s pause outside the store she felt that she had died a little. She had waited and no one had come, nothing had happened.

  The hangover was setting in already. She felt cheated—by the spring, by Charles, by the very packages which had grown heavy in her arms, by the whole world.

  Behind her a man’s voice called, “Martha! Oh, Martha!” and for a second she hesitated because the voice sounded like Charles’s. It held the same bantering note, as if there was something intrinsically humorous about her name and the repetition of it. It was not Charles’s voice, of course. But her mistake was significant. It showed how much of the time she thought about him, how completely he had pervaded her life.

  “Martha!”

  She stopped and turned around. A man in a light brown suit and no hat was threading his way through the crowd towards her. She didn’t recognize him, and she was on the point of walking on and pretending she hadn’t heard him.

  But it was too late. He was beside her, his hand fa­miliarly touching her arm.

  “Well, Martha.” He stood very close to her, smiling, and because they were the same height their closeness seemed indecently intimate.

  She drew away and said stiffly, “I’m sorry, I . . .”

  “I thought it was you hiding behind those glasses. Come on over here. I want to look

  at you.”

  He gave her a friendly little push and she moved, from sheer momentum and shock, and stood in the doorway of a florist’s shop. There was a sheaf of daffodils in the window flanked by white china swans. She tried to concen­trate on the daffodils, count them, one, two, three, four . . . He was deeply tanned and in contrast his eyes looked very pale and excited. He had a queer, tense way of standing, as if he was all ready to do something drastic, like snatch her purse or break into a hundred-yard dash. Anyway, there were twelve daffodils. An even dozen. A round dozen. A . . .

  She turned and faced him. “Well, Steve. How nice to see you again.”

  “Just got back a week ago. First thing I did was to phone the old number. But you weren’t there, naturally.”

  “Naturally.”

  “Take off those glasses and let me have a look at you. You’ve changed, Martha.” He was frowning and his face wore a disappointed expression.

  “Oh, have I? Well, in five years you can expect a reason­able amount of change.”

  “I want to talk to you. Come on in some place and have a drink.”

  “No, sorry. I can’t.”

  He smiled, very faintly. “Why not?”

  “Well, it wouldn’t look right.”

  “Why not again?”

  “Besides, I have the car waiting.”

  “Can’t cars wait by themselves or have they got them so personalized now that they have to have a companion?”

  “This one happens to have a chauffeur in it,” she said with careful indifference.

  He took a step back and said, “Well, well. Doing all right for yourself, eh, Martha?” He noticed then for the first time what she was wearing. “Husband dead?”

  “Of course not. Why should he be dead?”

  “Shouldn’t be. But then a hell of a lot of people are. Including me, almost.”

  “Really?”

  “I have a few pieces of flak here and there. When they get them all dug out of me, I’ll send you one for a souvenir. Do you want it plain or inscribed, for Auld Lang Syne?”

  “I don’t consider that very witty.”

  “No.” He avoided her gaze. “No, I guess it wasn’t.”

  “Why aren’t you in uniform?”

  “I’m out now. I’m a civilian.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Do? Well, first I’ll take a rest and then I’ll write a book not about the war, and when the book doesn’t sell, I’ll get my old job back on the News.”

  “You mean you’re going to stay here?”

  “That’s right.” He added dryly, “I hope you don’t mind. It’s a pretty big city, there should be room for both of us.”

  “Why should I mind? As a matter of fact, Charles and I will do our best to help you.”

  “Thanks.”

  “If you’re serious about writing a book, perhaps Charles can help you make some good contacts. He knows a great many important people.”

  “If it’s a good book, I won’t need good contacts, but it’s kind of you.” He glanced at her curiously. “Charles. Is that his name?”


  “Yes.”

  “I’d heard you married a good guy.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “I was very glad, naturally. I was hoping you’d get some­one more suited to you than I was.” He shoved his hands in his pockets, as if they needed some restraint. “Why the funny clothes? Remember the blue dress with the white flowers on it?”

  “Blue dress?” It was at the bottom of a trunk packed in layers of tissue paper and mothballs. The last time she’d taken it out to look at it she found that the flowers had yellowed. She had told Charles that she had a headache, and she went to bed and stared for a long time up at the ceiling in bitter silence. “No, I don’t remember.”

  He traced a pattern on the sidewalk with the toe of his shoe.

  “What’s he like? Charles, I mean.”

  “He’s—well, he’s very nice. He’s older than I am. He’s good-looking and he has a nice sense of humor.”

  “And money. In fact, the works.”

  “In fact, the works, as you say.”

  “Well, I’m damn glad to hear it.” He spoke with too much emphasis. “I really am. I’d like to meet him.”

  “I’m afraid that’s impossible.”

  “Oh?”

  “Charles has been very ill.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it.”

  He twitched his shoulders and she saw that his suit was too small for him. She had told him once that he always got his coats too small and that the next time she would go with him to the tailor to supervise the measuring. But the next time he had gone to a tailor he had ordered uniforms and she didn’t even know about it until later. He had walked out of her life as completely as if he’d stepped off the edge of the world.

  Yet here he was back, an image in a florist’s window. The daffodils grew out of his throat, reached up their yellow heads to touch the tip of his ear. The swans drew away, arching their delicate necks in elegant disdain.

  “Look,” she said. He looked, and saw himself framed in flowers. Neither of them smiled.

  “Well,” he said finally. “I don’t want to keep you.”