by Belva Plain
“I don’t know. I remember hoping for her sake that he would.”
“But there was Hazel! He couldn’t have stayed.”
“Some men would have, even so.”
“Not my father. He’s steadfast.”
“Mine was too, in his own way. Are you shocked over what I told you about him, Claire?”
“Not shocked. But, tell me, has it made any difference to you?”
“What do you mean?”
“That you might feel you have to prove you’re not like him?”
“I should wish to be like him in every other way. He had a fabulous mind and was one of the kindest men I ever knew.”
“Well, then, as for the other, it’s no crime, Ned, or shouldn’t be.”
“A lot of people wouldn’t agree with you.”
“I’m a scientist. We look at things without judgment, without cobwebs. My father taught me that, I think.”
“You’re very proud of your father, aren’t you?”
“He’s a great doctor. They send patients to him from all over the country. It’s so strange that I can’t mention him here! Or do I only imagine I can’t?”
“You don’t imagine it. There’s a locked room in the house. It’s in my mother’s head, and you mustn’t ask for the key.”
“Dad’s got a locked room, too, now that you put it that way.”
It seemed to Claire that she had never spoken as easily to anyone in all her life.
Of those few, swift weeks, only disjointed scraps remained, frames in a moving picture running backward and too fast, as on returning from a journey, we forget the lecture in the museum of antiquities, recalling instead a shabby restaurant where a girl sang “Plaisir d’Amour” in a heartbreaking voice; remembering a family grouped on a railroad platform with a basket of tomatoes and a feeble yellow dog.
In Ned’s small car they toured the south of England. She was to remember wet ponies in a downpour on Dartmoor; a flat tire on the road to Stonehenge; a dinner by firelight in a room with a seven-foot ceiling. She was to remember—later they would laugh about it—hearing footsteps outside of her door one night at an inn and hoping it was Ned. It had been.
“I had my hand on the doorknob,” he said, “but then at the last minute I lost my nerve.”
For a long time Claire had been concerned about herself. Many of her friends were married, some were living with a man and a few “slept around,” which last would have been repugnant. She had had proposals enough, both for living arrangements and for marriage. In each case the man had been personable, intelligent and kind. Yet none had reached her and she needed deeply to be reached. She was a romantic in spite of herself and she knew it.
So, when the day came, she was ready.
It was a day on a Devon hill, an afternoon of bee-hum and heather, with great cumuli boiling in the sky. Flat slabs of glacial rock thrust out of the earth, making wide, warm beds on which young lovers must have lain together for unrecorded centuries.
Claire spoke through the wind-rush and the hum. “Ill remember this place. Sometimes I do that, promise myself to remember a place or a time, and I always do.”
Ned didn’t answer. He was playing with a blade of grass, twisting it around his finger. Then he looked up. There was something in his eyes, something radiant, eager and at the same time reverent, which she had never seen in anyone before. So how could she have known what it was? Yet she recognized it.
“Have you ever?” he asked softly. “Claire, have you ever?”
“No.”
Imperceptibly he drew away, but she put her arms out and pulled him down. “I shouldn’t have told you that I want to, Ned. I want to very much.”
“And you never have before?”
“I never wanted anyone before.”
“You never loved anyone before?”
“Never.”
He stroked her hair. He took her face between his hands and kissed her eyelids, kissed her mouth … Everything was at the zenith: the season, the day and the years of their youth. That was the beginning.
“You’ll marry me, Claire,” he said when he brought her back to London.
“Is that a statement or a question?”
“A statement, of course.”
The blood ran high in her veins. She felt light, triumphant, flirtatious. “How do you know I’ll say yes?”
“The same way you knew I was going to ask you,” he said, laughing.
There was so much laughter in him! He took such pleasure in small events: a game of Scrabble, a walk in the rain, an amusing conversation with a barber. He was astonishingly observant Once after a ride on a bus he remarked on a couple who had sat across from them.
“She hates him, didn’t you see?”
“Why, how can you know that?”
“All the time he was rattling the newspaper she never took her cold eyes off him.”
“Really? Why do you suppose she does?”
“Oh, I’ve no crystal ball! Still, he was an earthy man, with that full red face; likes his ale, I should think, while she was beaten, so drab and shrunken. An implausible pair,” he said compassionately.
“Ned, you’re amazing!”
“No, I just like to observe. Now over there, that house, the one with the smashed Georgian portico and the peeling paint—there’s a story behind that. Divorce or some family scandal or bankruptcy.”
“How on earth can you tell?”
“Because. This is a wealthy row and it’s the only house on the street that’s run down. There has to be a reason.”
“Ned, you ought to write! Really write a novel or a biography or something. You describe things so vividly, you’ve a gift.”
“It’s not that easy. But someday, maybe.”
Life with Ned would be sunny, filled with the vigor of the unexpected. Whatever came, he would manage it and make some good come out of it In this most curious way he reminded Claire of Jessie and she told him so, assuring him that he would like her mother. It never occured to her to ask herself whether Jessie would like him.
“I remember your father,” he told her. “I saw him once or twice. It was a long time ago and I was very young, but I remember liking him.”
“He’s a wonderful man,” Claire said soberly.
“And you are your father’s girl, aren’t you?”
“I suppose so. He’s a wonderful man,” she repeated.
It never occurred to her to ask herself what her father would think about this whole affair, either.
They parted in London with Ned’s promise to be in New York in the fall. So closely had they grown together that the parting was a tearing. It crossed Claire’s mind, although she did not say so, that it had probably been the same for her father and his mother. For a moment she thought how strange and sad that was; then immediately, as befits the normal, healthy selfishness of youth, she forgot it.
In the tropics there are certain plants which grow half the height of a man during a single night. They reach for the sun. So can a man and a woman reach for one another. Those whom this incandescence touches are not necessarily unusual people; it is only the heat of their yearning which is unusual.
Chapter 26
Pink dots, like the crowd faces in a photo, Martin thought, observing the audience while he waited on the platform for his turn. The first speaker had addressed this Pan-American conference in Spanish, the translation coming over earphones. The second was speaking now in accented, fluent English. A blackboard hung behind him, and when he stepped back to a chalk a diagram, Martin, craning to look, could see through a part in the draperies the slanting rooftops along the San Francisco street, as it pitched sharply downhill.
He looked back over the audience, wishing that Claire were there to hear him. But she was still in England, or had possibly just got home. Hazel was sitting with some other wives about six rows back. Catching his eye, she smiled slightly and shyly.
He had expected to be nervous as his turn approached. Because he was himself
intolerant of error, including his own, he needed to be sure that what he said was beyond challenge. He hoped—he thought—he had here today a gleam, albeit a small one, of something new, an original fragment to add to what was known about the convoluted mystery of the brain.
Now his name was spoken. He was being introduced. He stood to meet a few seconds of applause, and waiting for it to cease, felt a merciful calming of his heart and a flow of confidence. His mind cleared of blur. He looked out at all the faces tilted upward like plants turned toward the light.
“I shall make three points,” he said clearly, “beginning with the nutrient arteries to the midbrain. It is generally understood that—”
In plain, crisp words he made his three points, observing with a fraction of awareness that one listener’s forehead was knotted in thought, another looked dubious and a pair were nodding toward each other as if to say: Yes, he’s got something there; do you agree?
So he came to the end, and feeling a warm internal glow, sat down to long applause. He had done well.
Later in the lobby, a little crowd gathered with compliments and handshakes.
“You speak the way you write,” one man told him. “You don’t waste words. I like that.”
Another said, “You had something of your own to tell. It was no mere rehash, no cut-and-paste job.”
And Hazel cried, “I’m just so proud of you, Martin! So proud! Even though I didn’t understand a word.” She added generously, “I wish Claire could have heard you.”
They walked out into full sunlight, Hazel observing that it was their first day in the city without fog. The fair light, the excitement of the morning and the alluring, unfamiliar streets filled Martin with euphoria.
Everything, everything had come together! He thought of his work bearing fruit. He thought of climbing a long hill to stand now at the top and be crowned.
“Too bad we can’t start for Carmel now,” Hazel remarked.
“I can’t get the car till tomorrow morning. But you can have a swim in the hotel pool this afternoon, you know.”
She had been a counselor at the Y during girlhood and was a strong swimmer, unlike himself who had learned by splashing around in a swimming hole. It was a pleasure to watch her in the water; he always admired professional skill, whether at chess of piano or anything else.
“You don’t mind one or two stops on the way? Marjorie wants a Japanese doll, and I saw one in a window. I can’t for the life of me think of anything for Peter, though.”
“A chess set,” Martin said promptly, the image of chess having just passed through his mind.
“Oh, do you think?” Hazel was dubious. “He’s only eight.”
“I’ll teach him. It will exercise his brain.”
For Peter, who was tender-hearted, jolly and surely not unintelligent had as yet not much ability to concentrate. Neither does Enoch, Martin thought, with a dimming of euphoria. He writes poetry, he dreams. Does well enough in school, but not the way Claire did. Oh, not fair to set her up as a measure!
“Here’s the place,” Hazel said. “I won’t be long.”
He stood at the entrance and watched her. After great effort, she had lost ten pounds, and this loss revealed angles in her face which had been hidden by that roundness of youth which had so touched him when he first knew her. Yet perhaps he liked this more; it gave strength to her face.
She wore a becoming dark-blue linen dress. It occurred to him that her clothes had been different lately. She had become acquainted the previous winter with the Roman wife of an American doctor. The woman belonged in one of Hazel’s glossy fashion magazines, in some photograph of a beak-nosed, thin aristocrat from a papal family, sitting in her marble palazzo wearing a plain expensive dress with some splendid jewel at the throat She was certainly not a beautiful woman; yet she was arresting. Possibly Hazel had been learning something from her.
But still she smiled too eagerly, too timidly. Now she was thanking the saleswoman for the fourth, time. He kept telling her not to apologize her way through life. Of course, she denied that she did it, and his telling her so only made her defensive.
Ah Hazel, dear and loving Hazel of what are you afraid? Do you sense something that lies too deep for you to understand? There is such sweetness in you, and yet beneath, there must be so much anger, too! How can you not be angry at a world that has somehow forced you to be so good, so thoughtful and mild? Was it your people who made you like this, or were you simply born that way? You pretend. Often, simply to please me, you even pretend to have pleasure in sex when you aren’t feeling any. I never tell you I know because it would humiliate you.
And, with a kind of shock it crossed his mind that, for the second time, he had married a woman who, although for a different reason, was unsure of her own worth. Might it have been because of some insecurity in himself? There was so much one would never comprehend, even about oneself.
What if he had been living all this time with Mary? Then he asked himself why, for God’s sake, he should have thought of Mary at just this minute, while standing in this store in San Francisco between the doll counter and a shelf of toy cars? He never really thought about her anymore! He didn’t permit himself to! (She was just always there, as his past was there, his room in Cyprus with the slanted ceiling; his mother’s voice; the dark hills and all else that had made him what he was.)
Hazel handed him the packages. “We ought to get something for your sister, don’t you think so?”
“What did you have in mind?”
“I saw a little bracelet in a window near here. Alice never really gets anything, does she?”
“Fine,” he said, and suddenly saw his mother coming in at the kitchen door with her “good” hat on, its sorrowful feathers raveled and drooped; saw her, then, and Alice, now, as though they were one figure. “Get something for Alice’s girls, too,” he said quickly.
“Yes, of course.”
“And don’t you want anything for yourself?”
“I have everything,” she answered simply. This simplicity of hers was always poignant.
“Last night in the hotel arcade, you were looking at a tablecloth.”
“The Venetian lace? It was awfully expensive, Martin.”
“You loved it I could tell.”
“Well, but, can we afford it?”
“Yes,” he said, “I think we can,” and was pleased at the smile that came and went on her mouth.
From the terrace outside their room, he could hear her singing cheerfully while changing into a swimsuit. He had been concerned that she would regret having come on this trip, that her mind would be at home with the children. They were her center, as they were not for him. (Yet, hadn’t he always seen himself at the head of the table surrounded by the wealth of family?)
To tell the truth, at fifty-plus he was over-age to father such young children as the last two were. When he came home at night, he was tired, and quite naturally, they were noisy. He was sometimes impatient with them. Hazel never was. She was so patient with Claire, too! Once, not long ago, she had even spoken up when he had scolded Claire for something.
“I’m surprised,” she had said. “You so seldom criticize Claire, even when she needs it. This time she didn’t need it.”
Suddenly, now, he remembered that And he wondered whether Hazel ever thought he might favor Claire over the others. Because in his heart he did, and he knew he shouldn’t. He had such hopes for Claire! And up to this minute, every one of his hopes had been fulfilled.
She had done brilliantly, had even written a paper on genetics which might possibly see publication. For such a girl one was justified in having extravagant hopes. She qualified for the finest training, the best internship. After that a neurosurgical residency, or perhaps her interests might lie more deeply in neurological research. Whichever she might choose, there would be a place for her on his team. Father and daughter; she would™
“Sure you won’t change your mind about a swim?” Hazel inquired.
“No, you go. At the moment I feel too lazy.”
“Good. It’s what you need, to feel lazy.” She smoothed his hair. “I do worry about you, Martin. You never have any private time. Between patients and teaching, working three nights in the lab, and now this institute business—” She reminded him more and more of the way his mother had used to worry over Pa. “And writing another textbook on top of it all!” she added.
“Not writing,” he corrected. “I’m only contributing a chapter this time. The rest is a symposium.”
“Well, whatever it is, I don’t know how you do it all.”
“Go along with you,” he said, “and work up an appetite for dinner. We’re going to Trader Vic’s.”
He lay back in the lounge chair. The good warmth of the sun went through to his bones. How he loved it, and how he hated the cold! It shriveled his spirit and always had, even when he had been a child in Cyprus.
The beach, that was what he loved. Tomorrow they’d go down to Carmel, and for a whole week he’d get up early every morning, he promised himself. While everyone still slept, he’d go down to the beach and stand there looking out at the endless blue, the sea blue and the diamond dazzle. At dawn there would be no footprints on the sand except the ones he would put there. All others would have been washed away during the night. In a cleansed and pristine world there would remain only the pure curve of sea and the parallel curve of sky.
I could have been a beach-bum, he thought, and was amused at himself, knowing that that was one thing which he, the precise, the exacting, the apprehensive and conscience-laden, could never, never be.
Even here, even now in this hour of solitary peace, while the wind hummed in his ears and his eyes were bemused by two sailboats on the bay heading outward under the Golden Gate Bridge, his thoughts were traveling back east They’d made tremendous, incredible progress! After almost six years of arduous effort they’d reached the Dobbs Foundation at last, and now finally were moving in high gear.