Experiment in Springtime

by Margaret Millar

  “No. I get the idea.”

  “Here’s the kitchen.” He pushed open a swinging door. “Take a look at it yourself. There’s not room for both of us.”

  Steve glanced inside. “It’s fine.”

  “Forbes cooked all his own meals.” Brown sat down in one of the armchairs and pulled out a package of cigarettes. He didn’t seem in any hurry to get back to his job, what­ever it was. “Forbes was a good cook. I used to come over and eat with him sometimes, just to get away from the women. Over in the house they’re all women. A man gets pretty damn tired of women sometimes. There’s no friend­ship in them. They either want to marry you or lynch you.”

  He sounded, suddenly, like a lonely old man mourning the loss of a friend.

  “Well, thanks for showing me around,” Steve said.

  Brown rose, twisting the key to the apartment in his hand. “Like the place?”

  “Very much. But as a matter of fact, I was looking for something more permanent.”

  “Suit yourself. If you change your mind, give me a ring.”

  They went out and Brown re-locked the door. At the bottom of the steps he nodded goodbye, then he walked over and picked up the sprinkler again and started across the lawn.

  When Steve returned to the hotel he found a telephone number in his mailbox. He called from his room, but as soon as he heard Beatrice’s voice he wished he hadn’t. He had no idea what to say to her, beyond asking her how she was.

  She was, of course, fine. So was he. So was her mother. It was also very warm for this time of year.

  After this interchange, came a long uncomfortable pause. Then Beatrice’s voice again, sounding natural enough, though a little playful: “Mother’s mad at you for walking out on her the other night. She says the only way you can make it up to her is by coming out to dinner.”

  “I’d like to, but the fact is . . .”

  “Oh, not tonight especially. Any night. We eat every night in this house.”

  She giggled faintly and he knew he should have re­sponded to the joke, but he said earnestly, “I’d like to come. Whenever you say.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow would suit me fine.” All his life he’d been accepting invitations like that, right off the bat. But a minute after he let himself in for something, he always began planning ways to get out of it. The more distant the invitation, the more time he had for planning. Usually he ended up by going anyway, and having a very good time.

  Tomorrow, he thought. If I get on a plane tonight I could be in New York by tomorrow, or Florida, or Ari­zona.

  He said, “What time do you want me to come?”

  “The earlier the better,” Beatrice told him.

  “I’ll be there.”

  “That’s grand, Steve.”

  Another silence, longer this time and more personal, somehow, the kind of pause that occurs between lovers which nothing will fill but a passionate declaration of love or hate.

  “Hello?” he said. “Hello? Bea?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought we’d been cut off.”

  “No. I was just wondering whether you like steak.”

  “Certainly I like steak.”

  “We’ll have that then, if we can get it.”

  “Good. See you tomorrow.”

  “Goodbye, Steve.”

  “Goodbye.”

  He hung up but he kept his hand on the telephone as if he intended to call her right back and say he was sorry he couldn’t make it tomorrow, how about next year?

  He didn’t call her back but the invitation nagged him for the rest of the day. He kept picturing Beatrice in the butcher shop, flanked by rows and rows of raw porterhouse, testing each one delicately with her long white fingers.

  He went to bed early that night. When he dozed off he discovered that Beatrice had an embarrassing habit of removing her clothes in butcher shops. Quite a crowd gathered around. He told them all that Beatrice didn’t know any better, she was just a child.

  The telephone woke him up. He picked up the receiver guiltily, afraid that Beatrice had in some obscure way divined that he was dreaming about her. But it was only the kitchen calling to see if his was the room that had ordered the cornflakes.

  He said, “No,” and hung up again, wondering who in hell would want cornflakes at eleven-thirty at night.

  There was a party going on in the room next door. One of the women had a shrill and continuous laugh, and someone kept thumping against the wall in time to the radio.

  Usually he enjoyed hearing other people have a good time but tonight it just kept him awake. He even con­sidered phoning a complaint down to the desk, though he knew he couldn’t do that any more than he could have refused Beatrice’s invitation to dinner or denied Brown the opportunity to show him the apartment. He seemed to have lost the ability to make any definite and immediate decisions. Though he was deeply suspicious of Charles’s “social conscience” and Martha’s offer of the apartment, and resented the patronage implied in it, he hadn’t been able to refuse outright. He had simply walked off, leaving the whole thing up in the air, giving himself a chance to change his mind. Perhaps it was weakness of character, lack of will. Or perhaps he no longer wanted anything badly enough to cause trouble to get it.

  If I really want quiet, I can phone down to the desk. If I don’t want to see Beatrice again, I can ring her up and tell her so. If I want a decent place to live, I can move into the apartment tomorrow. Just three simple, straightfor­ward telephone calls will do the trick. Forget about hurting Beatrice’s feelings, forget about Martha, don’t let a noisy party spoil your sleep.

  Next door the party broke up suddenly, and someone turned off the radio.

  That left two calls. Or, if you stopped to reason it out, one would do. He didn’t have to go to Beatrice’s house tomorrow, he could just move out of the hotel without leaving a forwarding address or telephone number. Bea­trice could surely take a hint.

  The plan began to grow in his mind. It seemed to him reasonable and sensible, not like a lot of crazy things he had done in his life on impulse. There were objections, certainly. But there always were in everything anyone planned. What did it matter how or why he got the apart­ment? Getting it was the important thing. To hell with Charles and his hives and his social conscience and his wife. He, Steve Ferris, was the person to be considered.

  He went to sleep, secure in the knowledge that for once he had come to a decision in cold blood, without reference to anyone’s feelings but his own.

  When he checked out of the hotel the following after­noon, he left his forwarding address and his telephone number, and he called Beatrice from a pay phone in the lobby. He told her he was terribly sorry he couldn’t come for dinner; he had found an apartment and was moving in right away.

  She didn’t seem at all disappointed. She understood perfectly, she said, it was perfectly all right.

  “I really am sorry,” he repeated. “Tell Aunt Vi, will you?”

  “Oh, I will. Where are you moving?”

  Without hesitation he gave her his address and his phone number, and accepted an invitation for dinner the following week. By next week he could be in Mexico, Cuba, Buenos Aires.

  9

  When he arrived at the house he went around to the back door to get the key to the apartment. Brown let him into the kitchen, murmuring something formal in the way of greeting. He was more subdued in the house than he had been in the apartment. Steve thought it must be the woman’s influence.

  The woman was introduced as Mrs. Putnam, the cook. She stood at the sink watering a windowbox of green stuff that looked like parsley. She was very short, with wide sloping shoulders like a man’s, and a drawn delicate profile. She acknowledged the introduction with a pained fleeting smile.

  “What’s that stuff?” Steve said. “In the windowbox
.”

  “Parsley.”

  “I thought it looked like parsley.”

  “It is parsley.”

  “Well, what do you know,” Steve said. He didn’t care what was in the windowbox, he wasn’t even consciously trying to make Mrs. Putnam like him. But whenever he met a woman, no matter what her age or appearance might be, he couldn’t resist trying to personalize their relation­ship right away.

  Aware of Mrs. Putnam’s relentless back, he turned to Brown again.

  “Do I pay the rent to you or Mrs. Pearson?”

  “I’ll handle it.”

  “All right.” Steve took fifty dollars from his wallet. Brown gave him a receipt and a key ring with six or seven keys on it.

  “It’s Forbes’s key ring,” Brown explained. “One of the keys belongs to the apartment. The others you can ignore. Are you going to do your own cooking, Mr. Ferris?”

  “I might make a stab at it.”

  “If you find yourself starving to death, come over here for a meal. Mrs. Putnam won’t mind.”

  “Pleased, I’m sure,” she put in.

  “Thanks very much,” Steve said. He was pretty sure that Brown had extended the invitation merely for the sake of finding out how good a friend he was of Martha’s. A good friend of Martha’s wouldn’t want to eat in the kitchen with the servants. He added carefully, “I’ll take you up on that.”

  Brown looked a little surprised, but he didn’t say any­thing.

  Steve finished unpacking in ten minutes. He had only a few clothes, two new suits, his old service underwear and socks, a camera, a portable typewriter, the shaving kit Beatrice had sent him last Christmas, and a leather writing case with a snapshot of Bea and Aunt Vi sitting grim and indivisible on the front porch of their house. In the envelope folder there were other pictures. Most of them were members of his squadron, but there were a few whose origin he couldn’t even remember: a couple of Land Army girls giggling straight into the camera, some pigeons in Trafalgar Square, a castle, a plane with a miss­ing wheel, and a dreary transient-looking building labeled “Home Sweet Home.” At the bottom of the pile there was a creased snapshot of Martha. She was leaning against a big oak tree. She wore a light summer dress and the wind was blowing the skirt and her short yellow curls. She was laughing and holding down the skirt of her dress with both hands.

  He took the picture and put it in his wallet. He didn’t want Brown to come across it and recognize her. Brown was the kind of man who might like to snoop into other people’s things in an innocent way.

  There was a chest of drawers built into the wall. He put all his stuff into the top drawer and left the others empty. Using just the one drawer made him feel better. It em­phasized the fact that he needn’t stay if he didn’t want to, or if anything happened. He could pack in three minutes and be out of here.

  He closed his suitcases and put them in the closet. Then he strolled around the apartment, looking into cupboards, turning the stove off and on, seeing if the bed was com­fortable, examining the books Forbes had left in the book­case. He sat down again and took out the key ring Brown had given him. The keys were labeled with bits of card­board: Ignition Chev. Door Chev. Ignition Cad. Door Cad. Apartment. House B door. Garage.

  Seven keys. And that wasn’t half the number Brown had on his own key ring. Well, the more money you had, the more you had to lose and the more you spent on locks and keys. He remembered the house Martha used to live in. It had two doors, too, but neither of them was ever locked because someone had lost the keys years ago. Any­one could walk into the place any hour of the day or night, but nothing was ever stolen.

  He separated the garage key from the others and went down and unlocked the side door of the garage. He climbed in behind the wheel of the Cadillac. He would have liked to take it out on the highway and test its speed. He started the motor. It had a nice steady hum that rose to a roar when he stepped on the gas. He let it roar for a minute, enjoying the feeling of being behind the wheel of a car again, instead of a plane or a jeep.

  Idling the motor he looked at the dashboard. It had been carefully dusted and polished, the gas tank was full, and even the clock was still running. Illuminated by a shaft of sun that streamed in from the open door of the garage, its hands pointed to 4:20. He checked it with his watch and found it was exactly right. He pictured Forbes coming down here just before he left, to give the car a last once-over and say goodbye to it like an affectionate mother. And then, as a final touch, winding the clock, as if to make sure of leaving behind him for a time some trace of his existence in the mechanical moving hands.

  4:22. He could see the clock all right, but the shaft of sunlight had disappeared. Someone had closed the garage door.

  So quickly that the action was almost a reflex, he leaned forward and shut off the ignition. Then he opened the car door and got out.

  He said, “This is a pretty big garage. It would probably take quite a while to fill it with carbon monoxide, but you’d better open that door anyway.”

  The girl put one hand up to her mouth. “Oh. Oh, I never thought of that. I just didn’t want people to—well, you know how people spy on people.” She kicked the door open with her foot, keeping close to the wall. It was clear that she thought of herself as keeping a rendezvous and intended to squeeze the last ounce of drama from the occasion.

  “You don’t remember me,” she said.

  “Certainly I do. You’re Laura.” He would never have recognized her in a crowd, though. She was at least six inches taller. Her black bangs were gone, and her hair hung straight and smooth down to her shoulders.

  “Come on, let’s sit in the car,” Laura said.

  He didn’t budge. “Why?”

  “Well, I haven’t seen you for years. I want to hear all about everything. I heard Brown telling Martha you were coming, so I skipped a psychology lab. They’re not very interesting anyway, just finding out your hot and cold spots, et cetera.”

  “It sounds fascinating.”

  “Well, it would be if you didn’t have to remember it.” Her voice trailed away and she moved her hands in a fluttery, embarrassed way. “Are you—aren’t you surprised to see how grown-up I am?”

  “Yes, I am,” Steve said. “Very.”

  She seemed satisfied with that, and became more at ease. “Are you going to live here?”

  “For a while.”

  “That will be fun.”

  “For whom?”

  “I only meant, it will be fun to have someone to talk to sometimes. I get so bored.”

  He noticed that she had put on a thick layer of lipstick. When she talked she barely moved her mouth, as if she were afraid of smearing the lipstick or getting some on her teeth.

  “I’m sorry you get so bored,” Steve said wryly.

  “Have you got a cigarette?”

  “I have, yes.” He raised the engine hood of the car and looked inside, hoping she would take the hint and leave.

  “I’d like one.”

  “Look,” he said. “Aren’t we starting off on the wrong track? You can’t hang around garages smoking cigarettes. You’re getting to be a big girl now. People might get the wrong impression. You know how people spy on people, don’t you?”

  She flushed and backed away. “You don’t have to be so mean about it. And you don’t have to say it’s for my own good, either. If you knew how dull things are around here, how damned bloody dull!” She started to emote, but re­membered the lipstick in time and changed her expression to one of boredom. “Now that Charley’s gone, it’s worse. We don’t even talk anymore, nobody has anything to say. I might just as well crawl into a corner and die. And no one would care, no one! Why can’t I have a cigarette?”

  “It will stunt your growth.”

  “I haven’t grown for a whole year.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake.” He banged down the ho
od of the engine. He took out a package of cigarettes and tossed them at her. “I hope you turn into a pygmy.”

  “I haven’t any matches either.”

  “Okay.” He flung a packet of matches in her direction. “You’re sure there isn’t anything else I could offer you? A martini? A Scotch and soda?”

  “You don’t have to be sarcastic. A lot of girls my age smoke and drink. You’re behind the times.”

  “Apparently.”

  She lit the cigarette expertly. “As soon as people get to be twenty-five they start to get stuffy. No matter how nice they were to begin with. They don’t want other people to have a good time because they can’t anymore. Old age is a terrible thing. It makes everyone so sour.”

  “Am I sour?”

  “More than you used to be. You haven’t even smiled, for instance.”

  “Haven’t I? Well, watch this one.” He smiled at her, very broadly.

  She flung the cigarette on the floor and stamped on it, grinding it to shreds with the toe of her shoe.

  “I guess I’ll go back now,” she said without raising her head.

  “It would be better.”

  “Do you ever get so—so discontented and—sad . . . ?”

  “Everyone does.”

  She walked out slowly, as if she half-hoped he might call her back and explain everything to her.

  He returned to the apartment, a little disturbed by the meeting. He had never been particularly fond of Laura. He had tolerated her because she happened to be Martha’s younger sister and because, at eleven, she wasn’t any more obnoxious than other eleven-year-olds.

  But he found the new Laura rather pathetic. Sixteen, and suffering from growing pains, and passionate and con­flicting desires. She wanted to live intensely or to die, to have a wonderful time or be a martyr; she wanted the excitement of a grand passion or the austerity of a nun’s cell. All extremes were possible, were even necessary to her in order that she might convince the world, which was gradually encroaching on her, that she was not an ordinary girl, but Laura, set apart and destined for extraordinary things.