Experiment in Springtime

by Margaret Millar

  “That’s more like it, Charles. Now you’re talking natural again.”

  “Thank you. What is ‘natural’?”

  “You know, ironic and rather nasty. I like you better that way. I can’t stand these happy, happy moods of yours when you go around starry-eyed and full of hope.”

  “But I am full of hope,” he said quietly. “I can change my dialogue if it will make me seem more natural, but I can’t change the way I feel.” He paused. “Are you hungry?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought so. You always act like this when you’re hungry.”

  Her mouth opened in amazement. “Act like what?”

  “Uncontrolled and shrill.”

  “Uncontroll—”

  He raised his voice. “Forbes, bring the soup in. Mrs. Pearson is starving.”

  Forbes brought the soup in and then scurried back to the kitchen like a cockroach. It was obvious that he had heard every word of the conversation and that he didn’t want his presence to interrupt it.

  “Have a cracker,” Charles said.

  “I will not.”

  “Do you mind if I do?”

  “You’re the most impossible man. One minute you’re full of hope, and the next minute you’re calling me names.”

  “I didn’t call you any names. I merely pointed out the fact that when you’re hungry you have no control over your emotions. Eat your soup.”

  “I don’t want any. I prefer to go on being uncontrolled and shrill.”

  “All right, but I’ve only got one more clean handker­chief. The laundry hasn’t come back yet.” He helped himself to another cracker. “Which reminds me of another small point. Do you have any handkerchiefs of your own?”

  “Why?”

  “Because every time you want to blubber, you blubber into mine.”

  She glanced at him doubtfully, wondering why he was lying. She had never before borrowed one of his handker­chiefs and she couldn’t recall that she had ever cried in his presence.

  She told him so, but he merely looked at her, smiling, and after a minute she realized that he was lying, hap­hazardly, saying the first thing that came into his head because she had wanted him to change his dialogue.

  She picked up her spoon and began to eat, feeling de­feated. Though the issue was small, a mere matter of words, Charles had outwitted her. She was doing and had done, in fact, exactly what he wanted her to: she had agreed that he was to come home, she was sitting here having lunch with him, and she was making a fool of herself. Charles was too profound and intricate for her. She could not erect a barricade against him because she never knew what road he would take. He had all kinds of devious little detours and he would pop up one and down another and be waiting for her at their destination, fresh, composed and somewhat amused at her laborious plodding in a straight line.

  He reacted to everything—a gesture, a look, a silence that lasted too long or a word too quickly spoken—and his reactions were always complex. When Charles became displeased, it was not a simple matter, as it was with Steve, of losing his temper and swearing, and then apologizing. Steve was direct and comprehensible—somebody said or did the wrong thing and made him mad. But Charles’s anger seemed to come from inside himself. It germinated independently of exterior circumstances or other people; it was born without any reason except that the period of gestation was up; it died suddenly, without cause, and it was buried stealthily, without a name.

  They finished their lunch in silence. She felt Charles’s eyes on her as she ate, but what emotion lay in wait behind them she couldn’t tell. He may have been con­templating her with pleasure or enjoying her appetite, condemning her foolishness or merely attempting to understand her, with a perplexity that equaled her own.

  “What are you thinking about?” she asked abruptly.

  “Aspirin tablets.”

  Her mouth went tight. “I see.”

  “I don’t believe you do.”

  “Oh, I knew we’d have to go into it sometime . . .”

  “We’re not going to go into it the way you mean. Look, Martha.”

  “I won’t. I’m going home. I’m sorry I came.”

  “All I want you to do is to see what I have in my hand.”

  She turned. He was holding half a tablet between his thumb and forefinger.

  “It’s aspirin,” he said. “I’m going to take it.”

  “It will only make you sick. Stop trying to show off.”

  “I’m not showing off. I want to prove something.”

  “Prove what?” Doubts and suspicions gathered in her mind like an angry mob and burst suddenly into violence. She knocked the tablet out of his hand. It bounced into a glass of water, dissolving as it sank to the bottom. She shouted, “Forbes! Forbes!”

  He was at the door in an instant.

  “I want you to hear this, Forbes. He was going to take an aspirin while I was alone in the room with him, so he’d have more evidence against me.” She turned back to Charles, breathing hard. “Isn’t that right, Charles? Isn’t that what you wanted? All this business about loving me and wanting to come home again, it was all a pretence, a trap for me, wasn’t it?”

  The two men were silent.

  “Well, why don’t you admit it?” she cried. “The two of you probably cooked it up between you, maybe the doctor was in it, too! I was to be here alone with you when you became ill, I was to be caught in the act this time!”

  “He takes aspirin every three or four hours,” Forbes said in a rather bored voice. “He practically lives on the damn things.”

  “Martha,” Charles said.

  She sat down, bowing her head. The mob dispersed, wandering aimlessly in all directions. Its anger had been spent, leaving no substitute.

  “If you distrust me so deeply,” he said, “I must deserve it somehow. I wish I could change that, make you regard me as a friend.”

  “You’re no friend of mine.”

  “Do I go now and wash the dishes,” Forbes said, “or do I stick around and act as referee?”

  “I don’t like the way he talks,” Martha said.

  Forbes raised his eyebrows at Charles. “She doesn’t like the way I talk, so I’ll go and do the dishes.”

  He went, muttering under his breath.

  “How can you allow him . . .”

  “Wait a minute, Martha. Before you say anything about Forbes, you may as well know he’s not working for me anymore, and he’s not coming home with me when I go. He’s only staying here with me now for some obscure reason of his own.”

  “Because you have no one else you can trust. That’s his reason. He told me so himself.”

  “Nonsense, there are a great many people I can trust implicitly—you and Laura and . . .”

  “Forbes doesn’t think so. He hates me, that’s the real reason he’s not coming back.”

  “He doesn’t hate you,” Charles said patiently. “He likes to make you believe he hates you. You don’t under­stand Forbes. He’s a lonely man. He has no family and no friends, and none of the excitements and delights and calamities that go with them. He lives off other people, a kind of emotional parasitism. For instance, you should see him when I take my aspirin every four hours. He stands there quite prepared to have me drop dead on the spot.” He smiled. “He wouldn’t exactly like it if I did, but the possibility of it flavors his existence.”

  “Maybe,” she said, with sudden insight, “it even flavors your own.”

  “True. I feel very daring. Like one of these arsenic-eaters, you know.”

  “So that’s the idea—you’re building up an immunity.”

  He spoke eagerly. “That’s only part of it. The whole business is experimental. You might call it silly.”

  “What does Dr. MacNeil call it?”

  “Nothing, yet. But he’s very inter
ested. He comes out every other day, and we talk.”

  “About what?”

  “Sometimes about you, but mostly about me. He asks me questions and I answer them. It’s a little bit like the old type of psychoanalysis, perhaps, except for this differ­ence: MacNeil believes, and I agree, that no one can face the complete truth about himself. No neurotic is cured, he merely substitutes one set of neuroses for another. Like a man who stops biting his fingernails only to start scratch­ing his head. Or like me—when I became able to eat tomatoes, I couldn’t eat pork. Or you might look at it this way: When you start to houseclean and you sweep out one room, unless you keep the door shut, the dust will go into another room. Well, that door can’t be shut, not entirely.”

  “You make it sound hopeless,” she said.

  “That’s the first step. That was the initial fact I had to grasp, that, no matter how much money I spent or trouble I went to, I would still have more difficulties than the average person, just as I have more benefits. The problem was then to try and guide the difficulties, to sweep the dirt that came out of that room into neat little piles, so that I would have some idea of what was in each pile, the people, experiences, thoughts.”

  She stirred, and he said instantly, “If I’m boring you, I’ll stop. I have no right to inflict all this on you.”

  “I suppose I’m in one of the piles of dirt.”

  “I think so.”

  “Do I have one all to myself, or do I have to share it with someone?”

  “I am boring you,” Charles said, with an attempt at a smile. “It was foolish of me to try to explain something I don’t understand very well myself.”

  “Does MacNeil?”

  “No. I told you we were experimenting. He believes that every one of these bouts of allergy poisoning was a form of suicide, that I wanted to die.”

  “And did you?”

  “I’m beginning to think so, yes. They always occurred when I was having some difficulty, mostly with you.”

  “You were having them before you even knew me.” She turned and faced him. “I see. I’m sharing my pile of dirt with your mother.”

  “Well. . .”

  “How are we getting along together? Any scratching or hair-pulling?”

  “I’m serious,” Charles said. “MacNeil thinks that I was over-spoiled and dominated by my mother and too de­pendent on her, and that when she died, I looked around for a substitute, someone who resembled her in appear­ance.”

  Her mouth opened in amazement. “Are you telling me that the reason you married me was because I looked like your mother? I’ve seen pictures of . . .”

  “Oh, I didn’t say that. MacNeil did.”

  “That old quack . . .”

  “Please listen. The real point is that when we did get married, you weren’t in the least like my mother. You paid very little attention to me, you didn’t try to boss me, and God knows, you didn’t over-spoil me.”

  “I’m not the type.”

  “That’s it, exactly. You’re not the type, and I can’t change you, so I must change my conception of you and my expectations. I must change myself. I can, too. I already have to a certain extent.”

  He waited for her confirmation, but she could think of nothing to say. She felt tired and confused. Following Charles as he scampered up and down his little detours was exercise too strenuous for a cumbersome mind like her own. Perhaps he and the doctor were right, perhaps they had evolved, with a little deft borrowing from Cove, Freud and Mary Baker Eddy, a system whereby Charles could live at peace with himself.

  “I’m going to get rid of all the old trappings of de­pendence,” he went on. “Even Brown and Forbes, because they were with my mother and they both treat me as if I were still a kid. The only person I need is you, Martha.”

  He came over to her and put his hand under her chin and raised her face to his. “I’m not asking you if you love me. I’m afraid to.”

  She moved away from him with an imperceptible sigh.

  “I have to be going now, Charles. Where’s my coat?”

  “But it isn’t dry yet. You can’t wear a damp coat all the way home, you might catch cold.”

  “I never catch cold.”

  “That’s right, I’d forgotten.” He went out to the porch for her coat, walking as if his legs had suddenly become heavy.

  When he returned he said again, “It’s still damp,” but he spoke listlessly as if he knew very well she would leave, even if the coat were dripping wet.

  As soon as she was out of sight of the cottage she began to run. The pine needles were slippery as ice and the moist earth treacherous as quicksand, but she kept on running, senselessly, knowing that no matter where she ran, how fast or how far, Charles would be waiting for her.

  18

  She stood on the veranda, watching the cab drive away, until it was no larger than a pink bug scuttling down the road.

  She thought, I’ll have to go over and tell Steve what happened right away, before I lose my courage as I did with Charles.

  It was broad daylight and everyone was at home, their eyes and their tongues ready for the moment that she would cross the lawn. I must comb my hair, she thought, as if the mere act of combing her hair and tidying herself might prejudice the watchers in her favor.

  She went into the house and up to her bedroom, moving through the halls uneasily, as if she expected to be challenged.

  She picked up her brush and began to do her hair. She avoided her own face in the mirror, half-afraid that she might see Charles’s face there, too, peering over her shoulder, laughing and malicious: See? I beat you home, didn’t I? And I’ll be right behind you, too, when you go over to see your lover. I know you won’t mind my coming along. You’re so honest,

  you have nothing to conceal. You’ve always been so honest!

  With a stifled exclamation she flung the brush away. It struck the mirror.

  The mirror splintered into smiles. She saw her face cracked and wrinkled like a hag’s and her head chopped into sections like a phrenologist’s chart.

  “Martha!” her mother called out. “Is that you, dear?”

  She turned, alert, suspicious. “Yes?”

  Her mother trailed into the room, looking sleepy. “Oh, there you are.”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought I heard something break.”

  “The mirror.”

  “What a shame. Be careful you don’t cut yourself.”

  “I broke it on purpose,” Martha said. She realized that her mother knew this already, had, in fact, figured it out as soon as she entered the room. Her mother’s vagueness was a camouflage, a protection; if she pretended not to notice things, she would not be expected to do anything about them.

  I wonder how much else she’s figured out, Martha thought. She said aloud, “I went out to see Charles.”

  “How is he?”

  “Fine. He’ll be coming home one of these days.”

  “Won’t that be nice.”

  She didn’t answer, and her mother repeated delib­erately, “I said, won’t that be nice.” She didn’t look sleepy anymore. She had stepped out of her vagueness as out of a negligee, and put on something sharp and tight. “Won’t it, dear?”

  “Yes, won’t it.”

  From downstairs came the sound of Laura fooling with the piano, snatches of boogie-woogie, long sweet chords and low blue ones like ecstatic groans.

  Her mother’s voice picked its way carefully among the notes. “She doesn’t play pretty little tunes anymore, just these modern pieces that keep reminding you of things or promising you things.” She added, without change of tone, “Well, if you don’t want to live with him anymore, why haven’t you got nerve enough to pack up and get out?”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why can’t you? If you’re thinking you have any obligat
ions to Laura and me, you can forget it. I got along all right for years without Charley’s money. As for Laura, you’re not doing her any favor by staying here.”

  She went over to the window and looked out, speaking over her shoulder, as if it were a matter of no importance: “There’s just one thing you can’t do. You can’t keep on living with Charles and making a cuckold out of him. He won’t like it when he finds out. Men are pretty fussy on that point.”

  She didn’t turn around to see the effect of her words. She seemed to be musing aloud in front of a picture.

  “You know, Steve’s the kind of man I understand better than you do, though in my day, we had a different name for them—lady-killers.”

  “You can’t tell me a thing about . . .”

  “Yes, I can. I’ve known quite a few of them. Steve’s a little different, he’s a cut above the rest of them, but he shares the same weakness. He can’t help chasing skirts, and the more inaccessible the skirt, the better the chase. And then what happens when the chase is over, you should know. It’s happened to you before. You got left. He walked out on you.”

  She turned. There was no pity or censure in her face, it was as immovable as a fact.

  “I didn’t say a word to you the first time. You were so much in love with him, it wouldn’t have done any good. Besides, you’ve always had to learn the hardest way. You could never know how high a cliff was until you fell off and broke a few bones. But, do you know, I used to nearly go crazy lying up in bed listening to that darned couch creak.”

  Martha averted her face, as humiliated as if she’d been told that every scene on the couch had had a voyeur.

  “I used to have to bite my tongue to keep from saying anything, Martha. Sometimes I prayed that you’d come out of it all right, and sometimes I even planned what I’d do if you had a baby. I would have taken it as my own.”

  “Why tell me this now?” Martha said harshly.

  “Because your life isn’t entirely your own anymore. You signed a bit of it over to Charley when you took his name.” She gave a dry little smile. “And the couch still creaks. You’ve fooled nobody—except Charles.”