by Belva Plain
Objects on the beach were growing larger. Some children had come out to play with an enormous ball. The dog was still there, running up and down with a lopsided bounce. Claire and the boy went up to the house. She heard the boy taking charge, heard him at the telephone and in the kitchen, talking to Esther. She sat down on the stairs. She felt empty. The little dog came in and lay down on the bare floor where it was cool. Meat was roasting in the oven. The house looked normal, as it did every day, as it had looked only thirty, maybe forty-five minutes ago, before everything changed.
Esther began to cry, a high, terrified wail, keening on one note. From nowhere out of a quiet morning, the empty street filled. People came to stand on the lawn and murmur. Cars drew into the driveway. Men came to question Claire. Someone led her to the sofa and brought a cold drink. She looked at the clock. It was noon. Dad would be leaving the hospital for the office just about now. On his desk he kept an oval photo of herself in gown and mortar-board at the Smith commencement. Next to it stood a large color picture of Hazel and the children, wearing Sunday clothes and nice smiles. The telephone was placed to the left of these in front of a comical wooden figurine of a surgeon which someone had given Dad years ago. He would pick up the telephone.
“Claire?” he’d say.
“Yes, it’s Claire,” she would answer. And then what?
Oh, how could Hazel have done this thing and why did none of us know? If I’m a doctor, I ought to understand, oughtn’t I? Then perhaps no one can know what lies inside another, and to say you ever can is a pretentious lie. In the most ordinary people, and some might claim that Hazel was such, for she had no particular distinction, in each of them lie secrets. Such secrets! Old childish hurts that make us what we are, powers that are never exercised, visions of what life ought to give.
The answer is, of course, there are no ordinary people.
Chapter 28
The odd thing was that Martin knew so clearly what was happening to him. He understood his own progression from first numbness to most awful pity and self-accusation—(If I had gone back upstairs to talk to her that morning instead of going to work)—through sleeplessness and then sleeping-to-escape, through all of these in a long slide to the somber place where at last depression closed around him darkly, like a curtain.
He had thoughts of falling, of crashing down the cellar stairs, or worse, of opening a door and stepping into an elevator shaft. He could hear his own screams borne away in the wind of the fall. He had nightmares of interminable stairs—stairs again!—only this time going up and coming out at the top to stand on a beam ten inches wide. He was alone, ninety floors above the beams: thin as wires, they were. He woke in a sweat of terror.
He dreamed he was addressing a meeting in some great city, in some enormous, echoing hall. He mounted the rostrum. Hundreds of dark suits and white faces waited respectfully. There were coughs, chairs scraped and programs rustled. He opened his mouth. No sound came. People were staring at him. Oh panic and shame! From the back of the room came the first embarrassed, nervous laughter. It spread, that tittering laughter, that high and hooting laughter, it ran all up and down the hall. Oh God! He woke with a pounding heart.
His children turned to him at table, searching his face. Their eyes asked: Why?
“Eat your vegetables,” he would answer kindly, “if you want to grow tall like Enoch and me.”
It wasn’t fair to link Enoch with himself in the rank of adults. He was only sixteen, and seemed younger. Martin tried to remember what he had been at sixteen, but was unable to. There are times when the past closes over like waves, is hidden and drowned.
Oh, drowned.
“You spoiled my doll’s hair!” Marjorie wailed at Peter, “and I’m going to tell Mommy!”
Shocked, Enoch looked toward Martin. But Peter spoke first, scornfully.
“Mommy isn’t here anymore. Mommy’s dead, don’t you even know that?”
“Well, when she comes back, I mean.”
“She isn’t going to come back. Don’t you know what ‘dead’ is?”
Enoch choked on his food, put the napkin to his mouth and left the room. Martin heard him go clattering up the stairs. Should he go to the boy with comfort of some sort? Words were needed, many words, and there were none. To die in bed of pneumonia, even to die in a crashing car or plane was acceptable. But to will to die! How to explain to his son that mother had wanted to die?
Nevertheless, he got up from the table and went upstairs. Enoch lay on the bed, his face twisted by weeping denied. Martin laid a hand on his shoulder.
“Don’t hold it back,” he said. “It’s always better just to let it out.”
But Enoch struggled. Like my mother, Martin thought. Like me. Everything held in to the bitter end—disappointments, grief, desires—all held in. So history repeats itself.
“Why did she do it, Dad?” Enoch whispered.
“Let’s not talk about that, shall we? She simply swam too far out and probably didn’t realize.”
“Don’t treat me like a child, Dad, will you? Everybody knows it was on purpose. Please don’t treat me like a child.”
“You’re right. I won’t then,” Martin said softly.
“Then tell me why. Don’t you know?”
“Son, I don’t. I wish I did.” Well, it was half a lie, but only half. Truly, he didn’t understand. How could that business have mattered so much, weighed against this boy and those two downstairs? How could anything have mattered that much? Yet it had. “Son, I don’t know,” he repeated.
From the yard came the long dry rattle of a locust The evening sun, dark and sickly yellow, glared at the window. Martin wiped his forehead. Fall would be welcome. A chill gray misty morning might be more cheerful. Any change might be more cheerful.
“Let’s go down and finish dinner,” he said. “We have to eat. We can’t afford to get sick.”
Yes, the dinner hour was the worst. Esther had thoughtfully removed Hazel’s chair. It stood now between the windows, facing Martin. And he knew that his puckering mouth and racing heart were symptoms of a panic state. He sat quite still, knowing that in a minute or two it would pass and ease. He studied his plate. Surrounding the mound of string beans, potatoes and meat ran a key design in gold. There were sixteen repetitions around the rim and, in the center of the plate when the food was pushed away, there was another design, some sort of geometric enclosed within a circle. A mandala. Buddhist. O jewel in the heart of the lotus. Something like that. He shut his eyes.
The weight of everything! These poor three! And Claire, too, adult as she was and on her way, but still a responsibility of his. That young man, Mary’s boy, would be arriving soon, and then that would need coping with, God only knew how. All these lives, all such a weight upon him, as if he had to lift them, pushing them up a steep enormous hill.
Things bothered him that never had before. Esther hummed in the kitchen, with a tuneless maddening drone. He wanted to scream: Quiet! You’re driving me out of my mind! In the early mornings, gardeners arrived to mow the lawns all up and down the road. Lately they had introduced a wicked new device, a leaf blower with a sustained blaring howl. Then came the garbage truck and its infernal grinder. Wherever you went in this frantic world you heard metal grating and power vibrating; cars, planes, radios, lawn mowers attacked the ears, the head, the very soul of a man. He could have gone out and smashed them all. And he longed for an empty place, anywhere at all, with no one or nothing in sight, just wind and trees.
Hazel’s dog came whining. It was always sniffing at her closet, although Claire had removed the clothes. Claire had been so tirelessly strong and sensible during those first terrible days, caring for the children, the house and telephone and all the letters to be answered. He had made her take Hazel’s new fur coat, scarcely worn, and a pearl necklace. The rest of the jewelry was in a safe deposit box to be kept for Marjorie. Not that there had been all that much! He worried that he had not been generous enough with Hazel. She had so rarely
asked for anything. He ought to have insisted. She’d been such a simple woman. Simple! Oh, my God. So his thoughts ran, like a fox pursued, darting, hiding, running to cover and dashing to escape.
But he must pull himself together. He must. If only he had someone to talk to, someone to hear everything from the beginning! There was no one. He certainly couldn’t talk to Claire, not to his daughter. He thought of Alice, his sister, so much like himself, or so she had been when they were young. Flesh of his flesh; she would, if she were here now, put her hand on him in mercy and love, without judgment Yet had she really been all that much like himself? So long ago it had been; still he could recall in her a strain of Puritan abstinence. He thought of Jessie. Curious that he should think of her now! And yet, in those long days when they had first known each other, there had been no mind more responsive to his own.
Tom ought to have been the one. Damon and Pythias, David and Jonathan: yes, up to a point, they were. Trust and loyalty lay between them. Kindly Tom would claim to understand, but he wouldn’t understand. For he had never wanted very much. Smallness contented him in all things. But he, Martin, had wanted everything—an exquisite love, exalted knowledge, the warmth of a family, all the color and music of the earth. He had been born wanting them.
His hands bore down on the arms of the chair where he sat through that first dreadful week; the pressure was wearing the cloth away. There came a spell of rain. It sluiced through the gutters and splattered on the roof. It dropped in gusts from the trees and churned the Sound. And he sat on, listening to the many sounds of rain. Was there a motif of water in Ms life? Storm and flood had torn him too early from his mother’s womb and killed those other children, whose faces in old hazy snapshots were so real to him. How had his parents survived their loss? He thought, too, of the story of the scalded child, which, of all his father’s tales, he had never forgotten.
How Hazel had loved water! Sometimes they’d gone in the winter to walk on the beach; he, hating the cold, had done so for her sake only. But she would tie a babushka under her round chin and laugh at herself. “I look like my own great-grandmother on the farm in Hungary.”
“I hate this house,” Martin said aloud, “and all this water. I’ll never go near water again.”
Friends came to help. How many friends they had! People brought food and offered to take the children. It was astonishing how good people were. And still there was no one to talk to. The words they spoke were mechanical, as were his answers. None of them came near the heart of things.
Back in the city, he thought: Everything is loose, life has come loose. I must tighten it up again. I must. Do things with my children. I’ll take them to the zoo, he resolved, buy books and read together. So his mind ran.
He could sit at his desk across from a tense and frightened patient, listening and replying, but all the while, at the bottom of his mind, were his children: I robbed them of their mother. He was offered reassurance: children forget. But that was certainly not true. Anyway, Enoch was no child. He suffered, Martin suspected, daily, hidden lacerations. His mother’s son. Mine too, Martin thought.
In the elevator, on the street waiting for the light to change, his teeth were clenched and his jaws ached with the tension. Would he be able to manage everything? The office, the looming responsibility of the institute, the house, the children? Yes, of course he would. He would have to. Yet an evening came when, from his chair in the den, he heard them quarreling fiercely over a bag of doughnuts, which their mother would not have allowed them to eat before dinner. He knew he ought to rise and go in to stop the uproar, but he only stirred in the chair and didn’t go. Let Esther handle it as best she could! It was suddenly too much for him to cope with.
The telephone rang. “Just to remind you,” Leonard Max said, “we’ve got the Devita woman at seven-thirty in the morning.”
Martin had been going regularly to the office and the hospital, working automatically and well. But perhaps he hadn’t really been working all that well? And all at once he knew he wasn’t prepared to operate in the morning. He heard himself saying, “I don’t think I can make it. You’d better get someone to help you.”
“I can get O’Neill, I’m pretty sure,” Leonard said quickly. Too quickly? “Martin, maybe you should take a rest. People have been saying maybe you should.”
“They have?”
“After what you’ve been through, a few weeks abroad would do a lot for you.”
“I couldn’t leave my family to go abroad, you know that.”
“Well, then, how about a rest at home? Sleep late, relax, spend some time with the kids. You could say you’d gone away on vacation and nobody would bother you.”
Falling, falling.
“Yes, I could do that,” Martin said. Leonard Max was hearty. “You’ll be back better than ever.”
“Thanks, Len,” Martin said, hanging up.
He’s thinking that I’ll never be back, I can tell by his voice, so comforting, so cheerful. I’m finished, everything’s ebbed out.
He got up and locked the door, then put a stack of records on the turntable, three hours’ worth of Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms. He pulled the curtains shut, so that the room grew soft and dark. Like the inside of the womb, he thought scathingly, and lay down.
It was surprisingly easy to hide. For a week he feigned the flu. Claire kept telephoning, but he warned her away from his contagion.
At the beginning of the second week, on a raw November afternoon, be got up on sudden impulse from the chair, where he had listlessly been reading the news—all discouraging, nothing but strife—put on his coat and went out. He had walked blocks down the avenue when a wind came up and it began to sleet, so he turned around and went home. It was not the weather that had driven him, though. It was rather a peculiar sensation that had overwhelmed him. The world was too large, with too many people in a hurry. There was too much empty air. He knew that these feelings were bizarre, and he was frightened.
Now he had an excuse to stay inside for another few days. He had foolishly gone out too soon and was running a fever again. Claire scolded him by telephone with threats of pneumonia. He ought to be ashamed of himself, she said. He promised meekly not to do it again.
But he couldn’t maintain this pretense, couldn’t stay in hiding. He would have to force himself, find something pleasant to do. Yes, that was it, find something happy. Surely there was something colorful and happy left in the world? Christmas shopping, perhaps, before the season got too late and crowded? It was a long time since he had bought anything or even been in a store.
So, with a careful list, he set forth. He would walk downtown. Exercise, that was the thing; the healthy body, the fast walk. Make the heart work and breathe deeply.
A truck, swinging around a corner, almost ran him down so that he jumped back in terror. “Why the hell don’t you look where you’re going?” the driver swore.
A fat man got out of a taxi, fumbling in the pocket of his bulky overcoat, while traffic behind the taxi blared furious horns. And these sounded like swearing too. Everyone was so irritable, so angry!
He thought he would buy a sweater for Claire, but he wasn’t sure of the size, and wasn’t sure whether she would like a plain one or a cardigan with an embroidered collar. He stood a long time looking at the sweaters, knowing he was taking too long and unable to make up his mind. The saleswoman, a dry creature of outrageous hauteur, left him for another customer. “Well, when you’ve decided,” she said. “I really can’t—”
Oh go to hell, he shouted at her silently, full of hatred. It seemed to him that the arrogance of these expensive goods, which she merely handled and would never own, had been transferred to her person. Strange. Very strange. And he left without buying anything.
On the sidewalk in front of the store, he stood and watched the women going in and out. They were like animals on the prowl for meat with their slouching walk and their darting, avaricious eyes. Parasites and predators, he thought contemptuously, sp
ending the hours away while their husbands labored, and half of them not even grateful, he’d guess. Hazel had never been like that.
He was terribly tired. His overcoat weighed him down. Turning toward home, he walked a few blocks north and then east. Everyone seemed to be hastening in the opposite direction, so that he was constantly bumping shoulders and grazing people who were annoyed with him for having done so. He felt out of breath.
A little crowd stood before a pet shop window looking at a display of parakeets in ornate cages that were too cramped. Poor marvelous creatures! Turquiose and jade and topaz, brilliant as any jeweler’s art! A masterwork, each one, with its powerful, tiny heart and net of tiny veins; an imprisoned marvel, meant to ride the bright air. And as so often, tears came. A man leaving the shop looked at him with alarm, but being well-bred, looked immediately away.
He must go home. At the corner he tried to hail a taxi, but they were all occupied, and he began to walk. Faces wavered as he passed. He tried to focus on them, growing queasy with the effort. He began to walk faster. Something was at his back; he was being pursued. Now he was almost running. The thing was coming closer, reaching to grasp the small of his back. And at the same time he knew that there was nothing there, that he was having what the layman might call a nervous breakdown, or at least, the harbinger of one.
When he arrived at the apartment house, he was panting. He thought the doorman, young Donnelly, pink-faced and fresh out of Ireland with the class deference still in him, looked at him strangely. But all he said was, “Good evening, Dr. Farrell.” The upholstered elevator cage took him to his floor. He was safe, then, in his own apartment, in his own room.
But his heart kept pounding. Perhaps there were symptoms he didn’t recognize? After all, he was not a cardiologist. Heart attack. Taste of salt, of blood under the tongue. The chest squeezed in an iron fist. Swirls of red and yellow lights before the eyes like a Jackson Pollack picture: daubs they were, in spite of fashionable opinions! What if he were dying? He would vomit on the carpet, Hazel’s good rug. Or struggle to the bathroom and fall on cold tile, clutching the smooth porcelain sides of the tub. Pa had died clutching the dining room table.