by Belva Plain
“I don’t know whether you’d say ‘sick’ exactly. I felt beset, that’s all. As if I couldn’t bear any more.”
“Bear? Bear what? Your hard life?”
She cried out, “Why are you so fanatical about having all these children? Why does it mean all this to you? When—you admit it to yourself—you don’t follow your faith. Why? Tell me. I try, I have tried to understand.”
“You don’t need to understand. It’s the way I am … better women than you, from some of the most outstanding families in the nation, are willing to bear children.”
“Good! Good for them, but I’m me.”
Once more they stood almost toe-to-toe. With the back of her hand, she smeared her tears. If you don’t take care of yourself you’ll be no help to anyone else either, the doctor had said.
Donal went to the door and tried the lock. “I don’t want my children to come in here and see their mother looking like this.”
“I don’t want them to see me like this either. Don’t you see, that’s the point? If only I didn’t have to worry about having another one every year!”
“You’re hysterical,” he said. “Look at yourself.”
She turned to the mirror. Her face was blotched. She was supposed to be docile, charming, and calm, when she would have liked to be honest, but it was no use. There was no way through the stone wall. The only route lay in the box in her purse, so she would use it. What he didn’t know wouldn’t worry him. Besides, there was that other thing, dammed back, that wanted now to flow out.
“I’m sorry if I’ve been acting strangely,” she began.
“You have.”
“I’ve been troubled, Donal. Thoughts come to me like a fog that lifts for a while and then creeps back. I try to push them away—”
“Thoughts! Fog! What are you talking about?”
“Sometimes I think—I think about the way Ben was killed, and—”
He grasped her shoulders. “What do you mean, the way Ben was killed?”
“You know there was all that business in the papers about how it might have had something to do with his going to court. I know it died down, but still it makes you think.”
“So my wife has been lying in her husband’s bed with her secret thoughts in her head about how her husband had a man shot? God damn if I ever heard anything like this!” His fingers dug into her shoulders.
“Donal, I didn’t say you! Only I couldn’t help thinking, some of the men who come here look capable of doing terrible things. They’re hard people. Couldn’t you have sensed what might happen? Didn’t you care enough to pay attention? I can’t help having uneasy feelings. I didn’t say you!” And she began to sob.
“Who put this idea into your head? Who was it? Leah, that smart little bag of tricks? Or your cousin, pious Paul, the high priest of morals? Who?”
“No one, no one, I swear it—”
“This,” he said, “is the most outrageous thing I’ve heard yet. A wife accusing her husband … Why, Ben and I never had a cross word between us. We were a team, we’d have gone on together for the next fifty years, and you—you have the temerity to suggest that—”
“Donal, I didn’t mean, truly I didn’t—”
“Or that anyone connected with me—”
“Donal, I didn’t mean—”
Strength, like a pool as it oozes away into dry earth, ran out through her arms and legs and was lost. She sat down on the edge of the bed.
His voice was low now, quivering with emotion. “That my own wife has no more regard for me—” He stopped and stared, not so much as if he were regarding her, but rather as if he were seeing something in the air between them. “Well, I’ll not forget this in a hurry,” he said.
She wondered whether he was feeling more sorrow or more anger. Then he went out, closing the door with a sharp smack.
She had said too much. Perhaps her accusation, that he had not done enough to protect Ben, had been unfair.… She was bewildered. One problem, though, the most pressing one, had been solved. A little rubber gadget had freed her. And she got up to hide it.
Then she sat again for a while, stunned and numb. She was not quite certain whether she had lost or won.
Weeks passed with minimal contact and in cold civility. Meg’s timid attempts at reconciliation met no success. She studied her husband’s face for a sign and could read no forgiveness in it.
It was clear that he wanted no further confrontation, yet she always felt as if they were on the verge of another one. She walked around the house with a placating air. Her voice was an octave higher than was natural to her.
Once she said, “Donal, how long can you be like this?”
“Why? What am I doing?”
“Donal, please. Your face is like cold stone.”
He put on a caricature of a grin. “There, is this better? Is this what you want?”
She hung her head, sighing. “Never mind. I don’t want anything.”
He was such a complicated man! Maybe a simple man could have suited her better, a quiet man, perhaps a teacher.
And yet she loved him …
During the nights she lay beside him, listening to his untroubled breathing. Nothing shook him. No, that wasn’t true. With her suspicions she had hurt him. But the last thing she wanted was to hurt him. Tenderness for him was sore within her.
Once as she moved tentatively closer her arm brushed his back, and he drew away. Even though he was asleep, or seemed to be, he had rebuffed her. How long would he stay like this, remote and cold? And if he should, how was she to bear it? His punishment was out of proportion to her crime. Was it so dreadful, what she had said? He ought not to have been so wounded by it. It was just something that had been bothering her, the thought that in some way he could have protected Ben, and he could easily straighten it out. Maybe it had been a stupid thought. Yes, it had been, since he had explained it all. Stupid, but not mean. He ought to forgive her for it. Perhaps he never would. Well she knew how inflexible he could be, so it was possible. And yet she loved him.…
Her eyes stayed wide open, fixed on the gray ceiling. The clock on the landing would chime the half hour, then the hour, while she waited for the nights to pass. And one morning, after many weeks, she woke up to a decision that had made itself during her brief doze. She was going to leave. She was going to show him that she would not be treated this way and stay with him.
She heard Leah’s voice: Don’t be a fool You can’t live like this.
You’re right, Leah, whether I love him or not, and no matter how it hurts.
A plan took shape in Meg’s bewildered head. There would be ample room at her parents’ house in Laurel Hill, at least for a while. Then: clothes, carriage, crib, bicycles, toys, a school, a new dentist and doctor … Donal would simply come back and find they were all gone. She would show him. He would be sorry.…
It would take a week or two to put all this in motion. Carefully she studied the calendar on her desk. Yes, by the middle of November, surely before Thanksgiving, it would be done.
Something was happening in America. All through the golden days of fall, while others sewed costumes for Halloween and shops were thronged with buyers, examining the new long skirts just in from Paris, and boys played football on high school fields and turkeys were fattening for Thanksgiving and towers were rising on Manhattan’s avenues, something was happening.
Not many were aware of it. Paul Werner was one of the few. Donal Powers was another. There were some financial writers who gave warning, but their warnings were dismissed as the ravings of unqualified alarmists. When in September the stock indicators, which had been soaring, took a dip, it was said that there was no need to panic. So it was stoutly, cheerfully spoken by those who had invested all they owned in stocks. There were a few more rises and a few more dips. Brokers who had lent their money out, began to want it back. When the money wasn’t available, there was nothing to do but to sell out.
Pure disaster was in the making.
> Doom and the bottom were reached on the twenty-ninth of October. Wall Street collapsed in shock, and some jumped out of a window on the thirtieth floor, and some went home to sit in stunned despair, and others went running around to everyone they knew to borrow or to plead.
Such were the golden days of fall in 1929.
A wood fire burned in Paul Werner’s office. It was a pleasant, fragrant anachronism on this street of steel towers. He gazed across to an unfinished structure. With so many brokers having gone under, he wondered how much of its space could be rented when it was completed. Already, during these first weeks after the disaster, which he mentally compared with the eruption of a volcano, prices had plummeted. His own cooperative apartment, for which he had paid fifty thousand dollars, wouldn’t fetch more than half that today, were he to put it on the market. Fortunately, he didn’t need to. It had been bought and paid for in full. “No mortgages,” his father had taught him; he could hear the old man’s grating voice even now, telling how he had weathered the panic of ‘93 while much bigger men had gone under. He was thankful for the advice, for having been taught to be cautious. So he had protected himself and those, most particularly Hank Roth, whose affairs were in his care.
As distress deepened and business came almost to a halt, the city, except for a thin layer of dazzle on top, became a gray shambles. Once Paul had passed a man in an English tweed overcoat, someone he recognized from the country club, selling apples from a tray on the corner of Broad and Wall streets; wanting not to embarrass him, Paul crossed the street. Everywhere were signs: FOR RENT, GOING OUT OF BUSINESS, BANKRUPT STOCK. Hundreds of builders had gone under and as many more would do so before this business was over. Had Anna’s husband been one of them?
Deeper and deeper, Paul dug into his pocket. He gave to Hennie for the settlement house downtown; he gave to his wife for her adoption agency, and to the blind in the clinic that his father had founded. And the more he gave, the more he worried about Anna and Iris. But there was nothing he could do. He had given his word.
These thoughts went through his head while he made believe to be studying some papers, until, reluctantly, he had to return and face the agony in Alfie’s face.
“You see,” Alfie said, “I had it all figured to the dollar. With the market rising, I planned by Christmas to sell out and use the cash to meet my mortgage payments. I would have gotten rid of my mortgages, or most of them. You always advised against heavy mortgaging, I know.” His voice trailed off.
All the lines of his face turned downward; the eyebrows over the large sunken eyeballs were inverted U’s. The mouth was a convex semicircle; from the nostrils to the corners of the mouth ran two folds of exhausted flesh, deep enough to conceal the tip of a fingernail. The entire face was in the process of collapse.
“People trying to get their hands on your money as fast as you get hold of it yourself,” he mumbled. “Can’t wait half an hour after a payment’s due. After all these years, with my reputation, you’d think my credit could be extended till I straightened things out. It’s not as if the values weren’t in the properties. First class, every one of them, you know that, Paul. I never bought junk.” He wiped his damp forehead. “My God, it’s a jungle out there! A jungle!”
Yes, of course it was. And always had been. People wanted their money and yours, too, if they could get it. And Paul saw wolf eyes in the last faint dusk before total dark; electric bright, yellow and unblinking, they waited in a circle between your fire and the towering dark trees, waiting for your last embers to blink out into total night, panting in expectation of the rush to destroy you. He saw the picture that Alfie must be seeing.
And he said, very, very kindly, “I’m not that rich a man, Alfie. I’ve already advanced a hundred thousand. I can’t do any more. I just can’t.” He hesitated. “Have you thought of going to your son-in-law?”
Alfie groaned. “It would kill me. Like sticking my head in the gas stove.”
Neither spoke. Paul was thinking how brutal it was to have come as far as Alfie had, without help from anyone, and now—also without help from anyone, for he had been warned, Paul himself had advised him that stock values were false—to be hurled back where he had begun. Yet one couldn’t blame him too much for not listening. Hardly anyone had been listening.
He watched the man get up. All the familiar jaunty cheer had gone out of him. He wiped his hat with the back of his hand and moved toward the door.
“Well, Paul, it’s tough, but I see your position. I understand. It was a good try, anyway.”
Paul went to the door with him. “Alfie, if I can think of some way, talk to anybody, buy some time for you, I’ll do what I can.”
Empty words.
Alfie put two fingers to the hat brim, giving his old salute.
“Thanks, Paul. I know you will. Regards at home.”
The weather was mild enough for them to be sitting on the veranda steps. They had probably been waiting for her all morning. They had that patient look, Meg thought, as she stopped her little Nash. She hadn’t brought the big car with the chauffeur, hadn’t used it at all since the trouble with Donal. Anyway, in these circumstances it would have been flaunting wealth before them.
“Come inside. There’s lunch on the table,” Emily said.
She had thought perhaps her mother would be crying, or show signs of tears. But on second thought, she ought to have known better, for Emily, like Marie Antoinette, would meet disaster with dignity. Her father looked like death.
They helped themselves from salads on the sideboard. Emily poured tea and the three sat down at the table. The day was dark gray. Emily lit candles. If it hadn’t been for the expression on her father’s face, there would have been no difference; the linen mats and napkins, beautifully ironed, the Waterford goblets, the heavy silver candlesticks, were the same as always.
Halfway through the meal, Alfie put his fork down. “It looks as if Laurel Hill will have to go,” he said abruptly.
“Oh,” Meg said, “no, Dad.” And impulsively, “I’ve so much jewelry I don’t even like. I’ll sell it for you.” She had planned to leave the diamond necklace, the emerald bracelet, all the rings, in Donal’s dresser drawer with a contemptuous letter.
Her father was very moved. “Meg dear, thank you, but it wouldn’t be nearly enough. You’ve no idea of the extent of the ruin.” He shrank down in the chair.
Emily said, “You upset yourself talking that way. You need to eat something. You can’t let yourself go.”
He wants to cry, Meg thought, but you won’t let him. I think you should let him.
Emily had always been like that. Cheerfulness, the denial of grief, were her particular ways of giving comfort. Meg could remember how, while tenderly binding up a cut knee, her mother would be murmuring, “There, there now, it doesn’t hurt!” She meant well. But it had hurt, all the same.
Meg finished her lunch. It was a good one and, in spite of everything, or rather, she corrected herself, because of everything, she was hungry. So she took another helping and listened to Emily’s local gossip that so carefully and absurdly avoided the subject on their minds.
All the while, she was conscious of her father’s silence at the other end of the table. So cheerful and talkative he had been, master of this house, so pleased with himself and with the world! She could still see him coming up the driveway after his day in the city, wearing the morning’s blue cornflower in his buttonhole. He picked one every day before leaving the house. And often, too, there had been a package under his arm, chocolates or a book for his “little bookworm.” She could still see him.
When lunch was over, they went into the living room. The dogs, who had been lying in the corner of the dining room, took their usual places on either side of Alfie’s chair; their eyes looked up at him as though they sensed his trouble. Emily got out her needlepoint. All those needlepoint pillows, the work of most of a lifetime, Meg thought, those innumerable bellpulls and footstool covers! She was so earnest about them,
too, holding them to the light, with her forehead puckered, as though there were some great purpose in the work. And Meg felt a sudden sympathy with the honorable, tidy, narrow-minded woman who, all her life, had been protected according to a standard, the only one she had known or could perhaps even conceive of. She had never tended a house by herself—any more than I have, Meg reflected, and no credit to me! If it was as bad as they had been led to believe and Emily had to lose all this, how would she manage? She was probably too old to learn how. It wasn’t much of a tragedy, when you thought of all the world’s forlorn and outcast souls, but things were relative and for the two who were sitting here, this was a tragedy.
Just yesterday, Donal had addressed one of his rare remarks to her.
“I suppose your father is weathering the storm all right.”
And she had answered, with what she hoped was dignity, that she didn’t know, that he hadn’t discussed it with her. She had thought, as she replied, that the plans which she had so thoroughly worked out, from the return of the jewelry to the hiring of the small van that was to take her and the children away, must now be revised. She could surely not now descend upon Laurel Hill, assuming that there would even be a Laurel Hill. Where, then? she had asked herself, standing in the front hall before Donal, who wore his sardonic look. Where, then? she was thinking now.
Her mother was still talking and talking. “The Warriners are going to stay the winter here this year. They’ve rented the New York apartment to cut expenses. Very sensible of them, I think.” She spoke complacently, belying her nervous fingers that moved as they always did: quick, quick, quick. Meg started. Had her father not told her the true extent of his losses? Quite possibly he had not. It would be like him to shy away from a truth so formidable, to evade and postpone.
“Look at all those leaves on the terrace,” Emily complained. “We’ve let Jim go and no one else seems to care about sweeping. I suppose I’ll have to do it myself. I hate the bleak look of dead leaves.”
Meg looked out through the French doors. Dry leaves were skittering before the wind. After one good rain, they would be a rotting dark brown mat. The wrought-iron chairs and tables had not yet been taken indoors. She had a vision of summers, of iced tea in a pitcher on the table, of women in Sunday afternoon dresses, sitting on the chairs, and the dogs lying asleep in the shade. A safe world.