The Nightingales Are Singing

by Monica Dickens

She was a good wife. She took a lot of trouble with the apartment, she tried not to be extravagant, and she was always there looking nice when Vinson came home at night.

  It was fun to have her own little home to do as she liked in. Housework, with her bright modern kitchen and all her gadgets, was a very different matter from the hopeless drudgery of trying to keep Roselawn from degenerating into a shambles. At first she was very busy, but after a while, when she had done everything she could think of to soften the apartment out of the bachelor habits it had acquired when Vinson lived there alone, she found that marriage had not given her enough to do. There were days when she was bored, bored, bored, and longed for her busy working days at Goldwyn's and for the friends she had left behind in England.

  Christine liked most of the women she met, and she had made friends with Art Lee's wife, but Nancy, like most of the naval wives, had children and was busy in the daytime, so Christine did not have anyone to go out with unless she was with Vinson.

  She missed Timmy painfully. It was terrible not to be able to have a dog. She came home from a pet shop with a kitten one day, but Vinson said that cats were not allowed in the

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  apartments either, and she had to take it back. She changed it for some goldfish, and they swam moodily round in a coiled glass tube fixed to the kitchen wall, poor company when she was lonely.

  Her apartment was on the fourth floor of the building, which had stone stairs and a cold iron banister. AIL the apartments had ultramarine painted doors with brass knockers and nippled rubber mats outside. As you climbed the stairs you could hear what was going on behind every door. A baby crying, a saucepan lid falling, a radio commentator declaiming about a political scandal or an airplane disaster. The news never seemed to be about anything else. Christine's door was like all the others, except that when you pressed the bell dulcet chimes sounded on the other side of it.

  Inside the door was a little square hall with the bedroom and bath on one side and the sitting-room on the other. The wall between the sitting-room and the kitchen did not go to the end of the room, and the space where the kitchen merged into the sitting-room was used for dining, which was handy in some ways but awkward in others, for guests sitting at the table could see what kind of chaos your kitchen was in.

  The nicest thing about the apartment was the screened porch which led off the sitting-room. It had a tiled floor and cushioned windowseats, and potted plants grew there with an ease which would have delighted Aunt Josephine.

  The apartments were in great red-brick blocks set up the side of a hill, with a sandy playground in the middle, which screamed all day long with the children who were too young to go to school. At the side of the apartment buildings ran a new road where the residents fought for a place to park their cars at night, and opposite was an expanse of raw earth, where the ground had been cleared for new houses.

  Christine's windows faced this clay desert on one side and

  the playground and the back of another apartment block on the other. There was nothing beautiful to look at, and nothing beautiful to listen to. The playground resounded with children's shrieks, and the occasional scream from a window flung up by an exasperated mother. The apartment walls were thin, and all day and most of the night babies cried and radios clamoured and men and women argued, or gave parties, or knocked on things with hammers.

  It was not a very nice place to live. Christine longed for a house, but Vinson said they could not afford it yet, and this was quite a good address for a naval officer to live. Why, there was even a captain living two floors below them. That made it all right.

  The navy had to be at work by eight o'clock, which seemed to Christine unnecessary. Other wives told her that their husbands were seldom in the office on time, since they did not have to report in until eight-thirty, but Vinson was never late. He left the apartment punctually at seven-thirty, and it seemed a very long day until he came home. Other husbands left their offices at four-thirty, but Vinson often stayed late to finish some work, and she might not see him until after seven. Sometimes he brought work home, or read naval manuals for long hours after supper. He was very conscientious. One day he brought home a dictaphone and put it by his bed in case he had an idea in the night about his work. Christine was sometimes tempted to say rude things into it, but she refrained. She was a good wife, and she would help him to be made a captain, if that was what he wanted.

  Christine got up when Vinson did and gave him his breakfast and kissed him goodbye by the front door. She determined that she would kiss him goodbye until the end of their days together. When you did not kiss your husband goodbye in the morning and hullo in the evening it was the end of a

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  proper marriage. It happened to a lot of people, but how exactly did it come about? Did the kisses become cooler and more perfunctory until gradually they faded away to nothing? Or was there one terrible day when you had quarrelled and you did not kiss him goodbye, and the quarrel was still with you in the evening, and he just unlocked the door and flung down his cap and you did not get up to greet him, and that set the pattern for all the days to come, long after the quarrel was over?

  After Vinson left in the morning, Christine cleaned up the kitchen and washed the supper dishes from the night before. Vinson would never let her do the dishes at night, although she always itched to get out to the kitchen after supper. He wanted her to sit with him, although he usually worked or read the paper or listened to the radio and did not talk to her very much. It sometimes seemed as if they had exhausted nearly everything they had to say to each other at supper.

  In England, before they were married, there had always been so much to talk about. Vinson had been interested in what she had to tell him about her day at the shop, and there was so much to discover about each other's past lives. But now that they had told nearly everything about themselves that they intended to tell, what was left? Sometimes there seemed to be a great vacuum between them, a no-man's-land across which they could not reach each other. Christine would look up from her book or her sewing to where Vinson sat dangling a house shoe from his toe, and realise in a moment of panic that she was married to him and that he was a stranger.

  She wondered what other married couples talked about when they were alone. Gossip, probably, about people they both knew, but Vinson did not care for gossip. He had definite ideas about people. He either liked them and they could

  do no wrong, or he did not like them and he could not hear any good about them. That was that, and he was not interested in the fascinating details of their lives.

  Marriage was supposed to bring you close, but sometimes, as you got to know a person better, it drove you farther apart. When you did not know someone very well, irritating habits and small disagreements were passed over in the excitement of discovering the things you did have in common. But when you were sealed within the walls of marriage for ever, small inadequacies, even tiny differences of mood, could grow out of proportion and push you both as far back into yourselves as if you had had a real quarrel.

  When Vinson came home feeling masculine and wanting to love her, everything was all right between them. At such times they were happy together, and in these first months of their marriage there were enough of these times to make up for the moments when Christine struggled against disappointment like a fly caught in a cobweb.

  She was happy. Of course she was happy. She had wanted to be married, and now she was. It would come out all right. Marriage was not as easy as it looked at first sight, and if there seemed to be anything wrong it must be her fault. She would be more loving and more tolerant and everything would be all right. Everything was all right. Think what some people's marriages were like! She and Vinson were lucky.

  These things she told herself as she cleaned her apartment and listened to the morning quiz programmes on the radio, which were like nothing she had even heard from the sober B.B.C. in England. When "Strike It Rich" had finished its tales of woe, Christine swit
ched off the radio, made sure that she had her keys in her bag, for she had locked herself out more than once and had to take a taxi to Vinson's office, and went out to do her shopping.

  It was a quarter of an hour's walk to the shops. Down a hill, under a railway bridge where there was often a puddle of muddy water which cars splashed on to your stockings as they sped unheeding by, and up a winding hill on the other side, past house after little surburban house with awnings on the windows and cutely planted evergreens and sometimes a light by the gate made like a miniature street lamp.

  One of the houses had a lamp held aloft by a plaster statue of a dwarf dressed as a jockey. He was fastened to the gatepost by a stout chain and padlock, although Christine did not think he was in any danger of being stolen.

  The shopping centre, when she reached it, was all that she could wish for. There was a Woolworth's, and a hardware store that sold every kind of nail the world had ever made, a florist where she bought her plants, a drugstore with a soda fountain where she treated herself to banana splits, until Vin-son told her she was getting fatter, and finally the supermarket, which she did not think she would ever cease to enjoy, however long she lived in America.

  The supermarket has become one of the natural phenomena of American life. It would be a small and backward village indeed that did not have one. Children are brought up to it and never know the friendly tea and biscuit smell of a corner grocery. No one stops any more to think how wonderful it is, but to anyone fresh from post-war England the supermarket is a marvel, a cornucopia of the world's riches.

  The suburb where Christine and Vinson lived was in Maryland. It was a long journey from there to the centre of Washington. No buses ran past the apartments, so she had to walk fifteen minutes to the shopping centre and take a bus from there to the District line, where you had to change, because the state transport systems would not run into each other's territory. You got on to what Christine had quickly learned to

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  call a streetcar, after she had asked a man painting white lines on the road where the trams stopped, and he had straightened up and stared at her as if she ought to be in St. Elizabeth's asylum.

  It was a forty-minute ride to the centre of the town. You stopped and started and stopped and started and jerked, and the bell clanged like a locomotive in a switchyard, and the streetcar's radio played dance music and told you to buy a reconditioned sewing machine for no money down and a long, long time to pay on the magic credit system. It also told you where you could borrow money on the easiest, friendliest terms in town. It exhorted you, it begged you to borrow money. It encouraged you to spend more than you earned and then pay off your debts by getting into debt to a loan company. It told you to forget that you had been brought up to think there was anything shameful in borrowing money. There was nothing wrong with it. All the best people did it. It was one of the most delightful business transactions you could make, and jolly Jim Jedwin was there at the Anacostia office to help you, and friendly Art Farmer would welcome you at the Friendship Heights branch. Just plain old country folks all of them, eager to give you the old-fashioned greeting of a simple, homey firm.

  And so it'went on. The music played. The usurer's front man rollicked on about loans, and the streetcar jerked and stopped and started and clanged, and finally Christine got off at Fifteenth Street and dived for the pavement among the phalanx of cars that she never believed would stop for her.

  She sometimes spent an afternoon walking about looking at the dresses and hats and shoes in the shop windows, but she did not often risk going inside. Vinson was particular about her appearance. He was always saying: "You must get the right kind of dress" for this or that party, or: "You can't go

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  to the Henderson's without a hat," but if she spent too much his face tightened up when he went through her cheque stubs at the end of the month.

  He was a great one for saving, and Christine was glad, although she had never learned how to save herself. To her, money was money, to be enjoyed when you had it and wished for when you did not; but Vinson had been saving for a long time, and soon perhaps they would be able to get out of the apartment and have a house with a garden — and children?

  When they talked about having children Vinson always stuck to his original opinion that they should wait a year or two "until we see how things are/' He was always thinking that there was going to be another war at any moment. It was depressing. Christine wanted to have a child soon. It would give more point to her life, and make her days less lonely.

  "I'm nearly thirty-five," she said. "I oughtn't to wait too long. Soon I'll be too old. I'm dreadfully old now."

  "Women are in their physical prime at thirty-five," he said. He had read that in a magazine.

  Going home was a nightmare if you timed it wrong and tried to get on a streetcar when all the workers were pouring out of the shops and offices. Christine always had to stand up all the way to the District line. The only man who ever got up and gave her a seat was a coloured man. When she told Vinson this he would not believe it. He did not like Negroes. He said they were the ruin of Washington and someone ought to stop the evil that Roosevelt had wrought in letting them encroach all over the town like termites.

  Christine did not agree with him. She liked to see so many coloured people about. It made her feel that she was in an exotic country. She was fascinated by their high voices and by the loose-bent-kneed walk of the men, the garish clothes of the women and the way they sat about on broken chairs

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  outside their rickety homes in die evening sun, with the hair of the stick-legged little girls pulled into tight plaits that sprung from odd places all over their heads.

  She had a friend called Maxwell, who did odd jobs around the apartments. He was very black indeed and he wore a bellying cinnamon-coloured cap and had one thumb missing and a silver plate in his head from the war. She asked him to clean the outside of her windows, and Vinson came home too early and found Maxwell having coffee and cake in the kitchen and telling Christine the sins of his first wife.

  Vinson was cross. "You must learn that you can't encourage them/' he said. "Give them an inch and they'll take a mile. I know these shines. The next thing will be hell be asking you for money. You'll see/'

  "Oh no," Christine said. "Not Maxwell. He's terribly honest. He even told me when I gave him too much for the time he'd worked."

  "Softening you up," Vinson said, "for future benefits."

  "Oh no, darling. You mustn't be unfair. You're absolutely wrong," Christine said, but it was not two weeks before Maxwell rang the door chimes to say that if he did not have three dollars to pay off arrears of rent he would be turned out of his house.

  Christine gave him the three dollars. She did not tell Vinson, partly because it would be unfair to Maxwell, and partly because she did not want to admit she was wrong. After that Maxwell occasionally touched her for half a dollar to take his wife to the movies, but he carried her shopping for her when she met him in the street, 'and he unstuck windows that would not open, and told her about his method for picking up girls when he was in the navy — "You is on the street with a long black cigar, and you gits her eye in yo' eye and you keep it there" — and he was altogether a great pleasure to her.

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  The ordeal of getting to town and back in the streetcar determined Christine to learn to drive Vinson's car and get her permit as soon as possible.

  He was loth to teach her. 'It's dangerous/' he said. "It's nothing like your London traffic. I'm so afraid you'll get into trouble and get yourself hurt, darling/'

  Christine liked him to be concerned about her, but it did not deflect her. "I drove all right in England. You let me drive the Buick, and you said I was the only woman you'd ever not been scared to drive with. But of course that was when you were courting me."

  "Could be/' he said, "though you didn't drive so badly, for a woman. But you'll find it so hard to learn to drive on ther />
  "You learned to drive on the left in England pretty quick. I can do it if you can. Take me out tonight and let me try and I'll bet you I could go and take my test tomorrow."

  "Oh no, honey!" He did not want to think she was too efficient. "Besides, there are all sorts of highway regulations you'll have to learn. You can't treat the Washington cops like you treated your London bobbies."

  "I'll learn. I will be careful. Oh, please do take me out tonight. We could find a side-road, if there are such things in this part of the world."

  He said that she should have a learner's permit. He said that there was hardly any gas in the car. He said that he had meant to work. Finally, when he saw how much she wanted it, he agreed to take her. Although he was selfish, his honest desire was to make her happy, although his ideas of what should make her happy were not always the same as hers. When he bought her presents, for instance, he consulted his own taste rather than hers. He bought her great purple orchids, and she did not tell him that she liked the little butterfly ones better. He thought she ought to like heavy and

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  ornate jewellery, and he never discovered that she preferred small and delicate things.

  Christine got on quite well with the car, although Vinson made her nervous by being nervous himself and shouting: "For God's sake, watch it!" when she was doing no wrong, She was not sure whether he was afraid for her or the car.

  Resigned to the fact that she was bent on driving and not being forever the helpless little wife in the passenger seat, he got her a book which told her all the traffic rules. When she had driven with him a few more times she prevailed on him to take her up to get her permit, although he did not think she would pass the test. His possessive love for her did not embrace too great a faith in her capabilities. The estimable Miss Cope was a ghost of the past.

  In the great white Municipal Building she was sent into the examination room, while he had to wait on a bench outside. He bade her farewell with glum tenderness. It was rather like going to the dentist.