Corporation Wife

by Catherine Gaskin

  ‘How will you get back? You’ve missed the last train.’

  ‘The same way I came ‒ hitch-hike.’

  ‘Wait for me, Josh. I’ll walk a bit with you.’ She gestured towards her slippers and dressing-gown. ‘Just let me slip on a skirt and sweater.’ She looked at him appealingly. ‘Wait, please, Josh, wait!’

  ‘O.K.’

  She dressed with feverish, clumsy-fingered haste, listening for sounds of movement in the next room. She was afraid, as she thrust her feet into shoes, and jerked at the zipper of her skirt, that Josh would not wait. When she came out, the room was empty, and Josh’s bag was gone. She looked towards the open door to the terrace, and the lake, glimmering dully through the trees.

  ‘Josh? Are you there?’

  There was no reply, but she fancied she saw something moving along the path to the lake. She picked her way among the stones still lying about on the terrace, and started for the lake. Under the trees it was quiet and dark, with only the lightest breeze moving through the upper branches. ‘Josh?’ she called softly. ‘Josh?’

  But at the edge of the lake, where the trees broke, she saw only her father. He was standing on the jetty, where the boat was tied up, smoking a cigarette. Josh had not come to say good-bye. She turned and hurried back, past the lodge to the road.

  ‘Josh! Are you there? Wait for me! Josh!’

  There was no sound at all in the darkness of the road ahead. She broke into a run.

  In the two miles of road that twisted among the trees Harriet several times thought she heard Josh’s footsteps, but she called loudly, and there was no reply. A stitch in her side forced her to drop into a walk. It was hard to say how much of a start he had, but the knowledge that it was only a few minutes, and that he was burdened by the bag, kept her hurrying. But Josh was an athlete, and walking was nothing to him. At each bend in the road, where the moonlight touched it, she expected to see him; when she came to the place where the white guard rails separated the road from the sheer drop to the lake, she at last caught a glimpse of him.

  ‘Josh! It’s me, Harriet! Wait!’ He didn’t turn; he didn’t appear to hear her. She started to run again, and the pain gripped her sharply as she struggled for breath.

  About two hundred yards from where the Downside road touched the main road, she saw the headlights of a car approaching. Josh, she knew, was already standing there. The headlights flashed quickly among the trees, slowed, and stopped. After a second she caught the sound of a door slamming, and then she saw the onward rush of the lights.

  She did not go back to the cabin. Instead, she went on to the main road, walked along it for half a mile, and then turned off on the dirt road that wound and twisted the three miles to Mal Hamilton’s house.

  She went in past the newly-painted white fence, limping slightly because her heel hurt from a blister; the house was totally in darkness. A little sob escaped her, because it hadn’t occurred to her that Mal might not be there. Naively, she had never thought that he would do anything with his evenings but spend them at home. Then she saw the glow of a cigarette on the dark porch.

  ‘Mal!’

  She heard a muttered word, and saw the rapid movement of the cigarette; then the screen door swung open.

  ‘It’s me, Mal! … Harriet!’

  He peered down at her intently. ‘You little fool ‒ you crazy little fool! What are you doing here?’

  ‘Josh has gone, Mal! He’s joined the Air Force, and he’s gone! He’s quarrelled with Dad.’

  He took her by the arm, and drew her gently inside the porch. There was no light, but she could distinguish the form of a camp bed against the wall. He led her to it, and motioned her to sit. He sat beside her, and handed her a cigarette. Jerkily, she told him what had happened.

  He was silent for some moments, then he said, ‘So you walked here … why, Harriet?’

  Her voice broke, and the tears, which she had been holding back since the car door had slammed on the highway, started down her cheeks.

  ‘Mal Hamilton! … Who’s being a fool now? Is everyone going to treat me as a child for ever? Why do you think I came?’

  Suddenly she tossed the cigarette down, drew nearer to him, and put her hands on his shoulders, gripping them tightly. ‘Why do you think I came?’ she repeated urgently, close to his ear.

  She had wanted to feel his arms about her, and now they were stronger, more expressive than she had imagined. All the loneliness and hunger she had glimpsed in Mal Hamilton was here, in the grip of his arms, in the rough, caressing movement of his hand over her hair. He kissed her only once, hard, and passionately, and she responded knowingly to it. Then he drew back a little from her.

  ‘Harriet … I’ve had women before. And if I need to, I can go into town right now and find one. It doesn’t have to be you. I don’t have to use you.’

  ‘I want to, Mal. I want you.’

  He pushed her dishevelled hair back from her face. ‘It can’t be me, Harriet. I can’t let myself be the man you choose to prove that you also can quarrel with your father. In any other way, I’d want it to be me, but not this way.’

  He gently disengaged her hands, and stood up.

  ‘Come inside. I’ll get you some coffee.’ He did not wait for her reply, but went to a door at the end of the porch, which opened on to the kitchen. The light streamed out, and fell across Harriet’s face. He did not look back. She sat there, her head bent into her hands, quivering and bewildered. The feel of his arms and his kiss had been real enough ‒ but so had his rejection of her. He had stripped her morally of every argument, and left her pain and humiliation. Perhaps this was the final and most valuable thing that Mal Hamilton had to teach her.

  His voice reached her. ‘Come inside, Harriet. If anyone passes on the road, they can see you in the light.’

  She stood up and went to the screen door, pressing her face against it. ‘Are you afraid someone will see me?’

  He shrugged. ‘It’s your concern, not mine. Burnham Falls doesn’t expect any better from me. You have to live here … Suit yourself.’

  She stepped into the bare kitchen, bright with new paint. The naked electric light bulb shone harshly on the shiny walls, and on Mal’s face, gaunt and austere. His lips came together in a hard line.

  ‘You don’t care at all about Josh going, do you?’ she said.

  He poured the coffee into two mugs. ‘Why should I? It happens to everyone, and it’s time it happened to the Carpenter family. Your father can’t go on tying you and Josh to him with golden string for the rest of your lives. If Josh wanted to go into the Air Force ‒ then he’s done the only thing.’ For the first time Harriet heard some warmth in his voice when he had spoken Josh’s name.

  She nodded dumbly, and took the mug from him. It was hot, and she sipped it carefully, looking round her to avoid his eyes. There were no cooking utensils visible except the coffee-pot; the kitchen hardly looked as if it was used at all. Beyond the kitchen was the empty dining-room. The walls and ceilings and floors had an untouched look of newness about them. She saw the reason for the camp bed on the porch. He had not used any of these rooms, leaving their clean freshness for whoever would buy the house. Then it occurred to her that perhaps he had bad enough memories of the house not to want to use it. But she knew that if that was the reason, Mal would never tell her. Mal gave very little away ‒ least of all himself.

  She finished her coffee, and he washed the mugs, and put them away, with his clean, economical movements.

  ‘Come on. I’ll drive you back.’

  He switched out the light, and she followed him meekly. The old truck he drove refused the starter a few times, then roared into shuddering life. Harriet clung to the door as they bounced over the five miles to Downside.

  At the place where the main Downside road forked with the road to the lodge, he stopped the truck.

  ‘You’d better walk the rest of the way, Harriet. Then it’s up to you whether you tell your father where you’ve been. For m
y part, I don’t care ‒ I don’t owe Joe Carpenter anything, and he can think what he damn’ well likes. What you decide for yourself ‒ that’s what’s important. Goodbye, Harriet.’

  She hesitated. ‘Good … good-bye, Mal.’ Then, with her hand on the door handle, she suddenly leaned over and kissed him. ‘Forgive me, Mal.’

  The truck rattled off down the road, and she turned back to the cabin. From far away she could see all the lights were on, and the door was wide open. Her father stood there, waiting.

  ‘Is that you, Harriet? Where in heaven’s name have you been? I didn’t want to rouse the countryside, or I would have called the police. I saw the lights on the road …’

  She stood squarely in the light, and faced him. All of Mal’s anger and harshness suddenly filled her.

  ‘It doesn’t matter where I’ve been. Josh has gone, and you let him go. I won’t forgive you for that.’

  No more words passed between Harriet and Joe on the subject of Josh. She packed and left for Troughton two days later, without seeing Mal again. At Troughton she found a letter waiting from Josh, no more than a few lines, telling her about the dust of Texas, and nothing at all about what it felt like to be living service life. He was well, and he wanted to borrow twenty dollars from her. She sent off the money, and wrote an elaborately casual letter to Joe, giving him the news of Josh, but omitting the mention of the money. When Joe wrote back, he talked of everything else but Josh. Harriet would be coming home only one week-end of each month this year, and Joe was lonely. He told her so.

  When she returned to Burnham Falls for the first week-end, the fall colours were in full flood. She wrote to Josh about them, because the letters from Texas were homesick for the northern coolness and softness. Then she took the long walk over the dirt roads to Mal’s house. The for sale notice was gone, and a strange car stood in the driveway. There were Venetian blinds on the front windows. She felt foolish standing in the road staring at a stranger’s house, so she cut through the woods at the side, and went round to Mal’s lake. It was still and cold; she wondered what he thought of California, and if anything could be more beautiful than this little lake.

  She mentioned Mal to Clif Burrell, and he needed no urging to talk about the sale of the house. ‘He held out for the price he wanted, and he got it. George Keston told me he paid back the loan, and made a couple of thousand dollars out of it. That’s not bad when you remember what the old Tyler place was like.’

  When she went back to Troughton, there was a box of preserved fruits from California waiting. Mal’s name was on the package, but there was no return address. She took the gesture as final, and accepted it ‒ and could even recognise the wisdom in it, for all the hurt it contained.

  Through the months of fall and early winter, Joe never inquired about Josh, or spoke his name. Harriet could never discover how much attention he paid to the war news from Europe, for people, knowing how he felt about Josh, forbore to mention it in his presence. Only Clif Burrell dared, with impunity, to talk to Harriet about Josh, ignoring completely Joe’s angry silence. She told him what details she had learned of Josh’s training ‒ there were rumours, she said, that he would go out to the Pacific as soon as the training was completed. In reply to this hint of trouble, Joe would talk loudly of the Japanese assurances of non-aggression.

  The Sunday the news of Pearl Harbour came, he was on the phone to Troughton almost immediately.

  ‘Harriet,’ he said, ‘I’m going to Texas to see Josh.’

  She gripped the receiver, and a cold sweat broke on her body. She felt for a second as if she were frozen, but she managed to say, ‘Yes … yes, Dad.’ And then she added quickly, ‘Shouldn’t you call and check if he’s still there, first. He may have been moved out. I don’t suppose they’ll keep them long … now.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Harriet. Josh isn’t a general. I can’t just pick up a phone and expect to speak to him. I’ll send him a wire, and take the first plane I can get. What’s his serial number?’

  Harriet did no more to dissuade him, and prayed a little that he would be in time. Two days later she had another call from Joe from Texas.

  ‘It wasn’t any use, Harriet.’ His voice sounded tired, with a thin, nervous edge that bespoke fear and dismay. ‘They’ve pulled out. His unit’s not at the camp any more, and of course they won’t tell me where he’s gone. I can’t do anything now but go home and wait. They said he got my wire ‒ or at least it isn’t here, so they presume he got it. All hell’s loose here, and I’m just a stupid, doting father, getting in everybody’s way. I’m flying back in the morning.’

  ‘Yes, Dad.’

  He held the phone for some moments in silence. She waited, sensing the struggle and the loneliness. Then he said suddenly, ‘I’m sorry, Harriet ‒ I’m sorry about Josh.’ She listened to that dead, far-away click as he hung up.

  There were weeks to wait before Josh’s letter finally reached them, the weeks that were the bewilderment of a country unexpectedly at war. There was the momentary hesitation while people drew breath, and tried to make plans. Some girls left Troughton because their fathers had gone into the forces, and the school could no longer be paid for, some left because they were almost old enough to join up themselves, and they went home to battle the question with their families. Troughton, for some reason vaguely allied to the war, tightened up discipline, and imposed its own rationing. All the students took courses in first aid; everyone was still shocked about that first defeat. Uniformed men, who had been a rare sight, became more common. And then the first heavily censored letter came from Josh to Joe. He was in the Pacific, and he had been in combat. Harriet was so frightened she didn’t speak of it in Troughton, and when the McGuire girls talked about Josh, she pretended he was stationed thousands of miles from the fighting. She had a curious belief that if she didn’t talk about Josh he might somehow be unnoticed, and come through.

  Joe was in every civilian volunteer organisation in the Burnham Falls district, and was called to serve on the Draft Board. He raised money for war bonds and the Red Cross; he did not miss Harriet so much now because he was seldom home. With men leaving the factory for the services, he had to make up the back-log of work; government contracts kept the plant moving at capacity. He wrote to Josh three times a week, and he did not complain that everyone was overworked at home. ‘The Carpenter place’ became the headquarters of the Red Cross for the district, and Joe cleared the big rooms on the ground floor of inessential furniture; he moved into two small rooms in the old wing.

  Harriet finished at Troughton in June, and wanted to go to live with the McGuires for the summer, to work for the Red Cross in New York. She had just turned eighteen.

  ‘There’s plenty of work to do here,’ Joe said, ‘if you really mean you want to work. It’s less glamorous ‒ but it’s work.’

  So she went back to Burnham Falls to work for the Red Cross ‒ work that was dull and routine, and had no compensations except the knowledge that it was useful. Occasionally she thought of Mal, but the image was fading and blurred.

  She remembered how the summer came suddenly to life the first week-end that Clif brought Stephen Dexter to the lodge. Steve was the son of one of Clif’s oldest friends, who had gone through Harvard Law School with him. He had just received his Doctorate from M.I.T., having been held back by the Draft Board to complete his course. He was now doing his officer’s Basic Training at Kempton. He was twenty-seven, grey-eyed, and dark-haired, with a lean, intelligent face, and clever, well-shaped hands. Harriet was not the only one who thought him extraordinarily good looking. He hated the sterile, mindless grind of the Army, and he was childishly grateful for a break from camp and a bed on one of the sofas at the lodge. Before dawn he was out on the lake, but he didn’t bother to fish. When he came to stay overnight on a twenty-four hour pass two weeks later, Harriet went with him to the lake in the first light. She listened to Steve talk, and she was in love.

  After that the days of the summer dissolved i
nto the endless countless hours of waiting to hear from Steve. She was afraid to leave home in case he should telephone; whenever he had only a few hours’ pass she would borrow Clif’s car and drive over to Kempton ‒ Joe was using only one car, and stringently observing the gasoline rationing. Her meetings with Steve were a see-saw between pleasure in his company, and fear that he found her dull, or adolescent. He was quietly-spoken, and efficient ‒ awesomely efficient, Harriet thought ‒ and he smoked too many cigarettes. He was bored with his training routine, and frustrated by the thought of the years ahead.

  ‘It isn’t as if they’ll put a guy like me in to fight, Harriet,’ he said once, leaning back in Clif’s car, smoking, with his eyes half-closed. ‘God knows, I don’t want to get killed any more than the other guy. But they’ll stick me in some pokey lab somewhere and forget about me. I’ll spend the war checking the work six other guys have checked, and when it’s all over I’ll have nothing but some lousy years and an ulcer to show for it.’

  But most of the time he left the Army behind him when he left Kempton; and then he was amusing, and gay in a quiet fashion, singing snatches of ribald songs that made her laugh, and trying to learn to cook at the lodge, and succeeding pretty well.

  ‘I’m a poor man,’ he used to say with mock seriousness. ‘Isn’t it the American tradition that every poor boy on his way to wealth and fame has to know how to darn his own socks and cook? The trouble is that my socks are always too far gone before I notice they have a hole at all.’

  A few hours after he put it on his uniform was usually crumpled and unmilitary-looking; his salute was sloppy. The Army hadn’t done much to straighten the slight hunch of his shoulders.

  One Friday he phoned her from Kempton. ‘I’ve got a week-end pass. Do you want to pick me up and we’ll go to New York?’

  When she went to meet him outside the camp she was conscious of herself for the first time as an adult; she was conscious of Steve’s presence as a man, of the glances of other women, of the excitement and urgency of the atmosphere about her. She belonged completely with all the other women who were meeting men in uniform, but she was special because she was meeting Steve.