The heaviness and lassitude came from being pregnant ‒ because not even the fierce heat of the New York summers had ever affected her this way. At the end of March, she had known she was pregnant. At first she had felt satisfaction ‒ a kind of earthly joy in her achievement, and the achievement it would be to bring the child to full term and bear it triumphantly. In her happiness, she had to keep reminding herself that this event was not unique, it was happening every day everywhere in the world. Already, even in those early weeks she associated herself intimately and personally with the foetus in her womb; it had never been for her a mindless nothing, but already a personality to feel and communicate with. The shock came when she discovered that she was not going to carry the child with great ease. She almost didn’t believe the exhausting sickness, the afternoons spent lying on the bed. It enraged her to find that her healthy, strong body had betrayed her in the one function she had counted on it to perform with no trouble. She even found it difficult to remember what it had been like before ‒ Sally Redmond at Columbia who had excelled in physical training, who swam a controlled, swift Australian crawl, who danced tirelessly half the night ‒ what had happened to her? She wondered fretfully why this child, conceived in love, eagerly desired, should be so difficult to carry; she had always believed that when her time came to have children, it would be done with no more fuss than a cat having kittens. It seemed a denial of the child to be ill because of it. She had so much wanted these months to be happy, peaceful ones, so that the child would be strong and beautiful. She knew now she must love the child much more because it was not an easy one.
She tried to let no one except the doctor see that the pregnancy bothered her too much ‒ not even Tom. She was vaguely ashamed of her weakness in a sphere where most women functioned superbly. So many of the young wives who had come to Amtec Park were pregnant ‒ nonchalantly, confidently pregnant with their first, second or third child. Two houses along the street was Andrea Dawkins, whose slight, childishly immature body made Sally feel like an Amazon, and who was matter-of-factly pregnant for the fourth time, and not in the least troubled by it. Idly Sally wondered if life in a corporation was the ideal climate for breeding ‒ the deep implications of security were there, the sense that life would flow on evenly and prosperously for ever, managed and guided by a paternal, solicitous company. Almost like the advertisements in Fortune, Sally thought. The group medical insurance had a maternity clause, so that a child coming into the world didn’t appear to cost money. The philosophy of fear was discouraged. Growing families meant each man had a bigger stake in keeping his job. Who would want to leave the charming, bright houses of Amtec Park, who would want to take his family away from the nursery crèche, or the beautiful modern school they were building in this lovely valley. It was very serene and peaceful, and, in serenity and peace, women bred children. And why not? Sally asked herself.
She collected her small bundle of papers, and took them with her into the kitchen. The kitchen, with its yellow Formica counters, was her favourite room in the house. It was everything that Amtec had promised ‒ well equipped, well planned, solidly built, and for Sally, after the dark, cramped kitchen of the Brooklyn apartment house, and the tiny cupboard that had served as a kitchen in Greenwich Village, this room was still almost a bright unbelievable dream. She took active, positive pleasure in the dishwasher, the size of the refrigerator, the garbage disposal, the special shelf for the mixer, the toaster and the juicer. She liked the cheerfulness of this room ‒ and she liked the colour of the oranges on the yellow table.
She got herself a glass of iced tea, and took it to the counter that ran along under the big window. While she sipped it, she fingered through the pages she had brought with her, stopping to read a paragraph, a sentence here and there. What she had written wasn’t, in places, as bad as she had imagined ‒ here and there a word or phrase lifted it momentarily to a different level, a little foreign, uneven light was shed on the otherwise tranquil flow of the sentences. Yet those brief touches of originality or unusual value made the rest of it noticeably ordinary; it would almost have been better if they hadn’t been there at all ‒ and yet for the sake of them she had to keep on with it. She shuffled the pages, counting them like a miser, feeling the sweat break again on her hands as she made a final count, and realised how few they were. Was this the total result of more than a year’s work? She felt guilty and panic-stricken. In a year of nothing more to do than cook and clean a house that practically cleaned itself, she had only a few chapters to show. Where had the time gone? What had she done with it? Fearfully she touched the pages.
Her mind slipped back through the last year. Moving in here hadn’t been difficult ‒ this house with its shining new paint and empty closets, had just been waiting for someone to start living in it. They had unpacked their bags, settled their brand-new furniture, and that should have been the end of the interruptions. But other things had crept in ‒ things she had never reckoned with in the picture of living in Burnham Falls, certain things and practices she had been unable to stand out against. There was the matter of the sewing … all the wives of the young members of Amtec had been proud of the economies they had effected in moving … making their own curtains and drapes had been one of them. Tom had privately told Sally that in his opinion they weren’t economies at all, but even he had kept quiet when Julia Anderson had insisted on lending Sally her sewing-machine, and Sally, unfamiliar with the whole process, had had to buy a book on sewing, and learn how to do it. After two months, she had hung new drapes at every window in the house, but she didn’t even admit to Tom that she could have bought nicer ready-made ones for about the same money. One of the by-products was that Sally got a reputation among the company wives for being energetic and capable, and suddenly she found herself on the committee that was being formed to raise funds for an enlargement to the Burnham Falls library.
Then there had been the cooking. Sally had been a good enough cook of the simple, no-nonsense kind of dishes that her mother had put on the table. When she and Tom had been to their first two dinner and supper parties in Amtec Park, she knew she would have to change that. First of all, in Burnham Falls there were none of the bake shops that seemed to be round every corner in New York, with the cheese cake and strawberry pies waiting in their refrigerated cases; so Sally bought the ready-mix cake packets in the supermarket, but these didn’t quite satisfy her, and she began to hunt through the recipe books and to spend whole afternoons making cakes and biscuits that Tom ate almost in a sitting. It seemed to Sally just like going back to learn to boil water again as she strove to reproduce the look of the coloured pictures of the salads and dishes and pies that she found in the recipe books. Tom protested about the fuss and bother when she tried out the dishes first on him, but when it came their turn to give a supper party, he glowed with pride at the praise for the food and the table decoration. Sally was even proud of herself, but at the back of her mind there was a little lingering regret for the days of the cheerful, spontaneous wine and bread and spaghetti served on cracked plates to their friends sitting round on the floor.
Was that where the time had gone, she wondered? Had she given it to sewing and cooking and proving to herself and Tom and everyone around them what a successful wife she was being? And a lot of it had been unnecessary because she knew quite well that Tom loved her too much for her to have to prove anything to him; if the drapes had been failures and the cakes had never risen he wouldn’t have thought it any fault of hers. And if it was writing she chose, instead of cooking and sewing, he would approve of that also. But along with this went the knowledge that she did Tom’s standing with Amtec more good when she got on the library committee, than when she sat stewing over a few tatty sheets of paper that in three years might be a novel, or might end in the waste basket.
She looked up from the paper, and noticed that Marcia Webster had gone out into the garden and was coiling up the hose. That meant it was getting late, because every evening Marcia coiled
up the hose and put it out of the way before David, her husband, drove the car past the side of the house to the garage. So few of the men ever walked the half-mile or so to the Laboratories. Sally moved back from the window, and instinctively, in a defensive gesture, she took the papers and slipped them into a drawer. Marcia had already strolled over to have coffee and cake with her twice this week, and might do so again if she saw Sally sitting idly by the window. So far the same defensive instinct had stopped Sally from letting anyone but Tom know about the novel. What you announced you were going to do, you had to prove … at least, if you were Sally Redmond you had to. And she was not quite that certain of herself.
Suddenly, as she closed the drawer, she was conscious of a kind of helpless rage inside her, a feeling as strong and violent as the passions that took hold of her father from time to time and turned him briefly into an unreasonable tyrant. It was a rage against the pretty tidiness of this room, against the three cakes and the biscuits she had baked that morning in expectation of guests over the week-end, against the library committee, and the Thursday Club, and the gardening club someone two streets away was organising; it was a rage against these time-takers, against these sappers of the energy she needed to get a few ideas on paper, even, for a moment, against the baby that made her ill and dulled her wits. Damn them! … She had to save something for herself out of all this. Angrily she took the pages out of the drawer again, and went back to the desk in the living-room.
She was still sitting there, covering sheets with her untidy, rapid script, when Tom arrived home.
He came over and dropped a kiss on the back of her neck. She looked up at him, a little dazed, for the moment hardly seeing him through the crowd of ideas that had suddenly pushed themselves upon her. She was flushed and hot, a little triumphant.
‘I didn’t hear the car,’ she said.
‘Too busy, by the looks of it. Had a good day?’
‘A-ha,’ she nodded. ‘So-so … I should be asking you that question.’
‘Well, we didn’t make a major break-through, if that’s what you mean. Nothing much happened … at least not around where I was.’ He tossed his jacket on to a chair, and threw himself full-length on to the sofa.
‘What a dull job!’ Sally wrinkled her nose. ‘Do you mean no one discovered how to go round Mars backwards to-day?’
‘No, and if they did, it would probably be in another department, and I’d read about it in the paper … What’s for dinner?’
‘Something from Ladies Home Journal.’
He made a feint of throwing a cushion at her. ‘What ‒ ice cubes sprinkled with parsley?’
‘I thought we’d splurge … it’s lobster tails. Darned expensive!’
‘Good! Let’s go eat now, shall we?’
‘What’s the hurry?’
‘Well ‒ Alan Taylor suggested we go bowling with them. Two other couples are driving over to Middleton to that big new bowling alley.’
A little quiver of annoyance went through Sally, but she kept her voice even. ‘Oh, Tom ‒ it’s so hot!’
‘Well, it’ll be air-conditioned there. Much cooler than here!’
Sally turned the pen slowly in her fingers. Her left hand was still resting on the desk, touching the little bundle of papers; they felt warm and familiar under her hand, like a friend that had been long absent. There hadn’t been nearly enough time to get down all the things that had seemed so suddenly released by the rage that had swept through her; for an hour afterwards she had experienced a marvellous sharpening and clarifying of her thoughts, a new twist and motivation that had made this dull chapter abruptly spring to life. She knew, in her present mood, she could have written with ease for another four hours, and some of this feeling might be captured.
‘Do we have to go, Tom? Couldn’t we make it some other night?’
He shifted a little on the sofa. ‘Well … I more or less accepted … found myself saying we hadn’t planned to do anything else, and Taylor’s sort of counting on me to make up a team.’
As Sally said nothing, he added, with a kind of urgency: ‘Couldn’t you come, Sal? He particularly asked for you to come … and he is the head of my department.’
She laid down the pen. ‘O.K. ‒ we’ll go! Let’s go and eat the lobster.’ She rose briskly. ‘And maybe you’d better pour me a good big Scotch.’
II
Milly’s Squires’ face had taken on some animation; the tilt of her eyebrows was questioning and curious. She stood with her hand on the door knob, staring into the half-dark room, where the Venetians had been drawn against the late afternoon sun. Clif Burrell looked up from the paper he had been staring at, but not reading.
‘Well, Milly ‒ what is it?’
‘Mr. Hamilton to see you, Mr. Burrell.’
‘Hamilton?’ Clif’s eyelids flickered rapidly as he considered the name. ‘Mal Hamilton?’
‘Yes.’ Milly was excited. The lustre of Mal Hamilton’s scientific genius might have dimmed a little for Burnham Falls since the Laboratories had set up in their midst, but Mal was still a sort of legend, and Milly had gazed at him wide-eyed.
‘Oh, fine! Ask him to come in, Milly.’
About to turn, she paused. ‘If you don’t mind, Mr. Burrell, I’ll finish copying out those references in the morning. I should get home to Mother right away. She’s had a couple of bad nights this week, and she’s not feeling well. I don’t like the way she looks at all.’
‘Of course, Milly. Run along now ‒ and give your mother my regards.’ He didn’t look at her directly. They both knew that copying up the references from the books he had borrowed from the courthouse library was just a convenient fiction of work to be got through. There was very little work now in Clif’s office, and most days Milly sat steadily reading a paper-back propped up against the typewriter. Clif knew that if Milly had had more energy or ambition she would have found another job.
‘Thank you, Mr. Burrell. Good night!’
‘Good night, Milly.’
In the outer room Clif could hear Milly’s demure voice. He got to his feet expectantly. Even against the high door frame Mal looked tall. Clif went towards him with outstretched hand.
‘Well, Mal! George Keston told me you were back! How are you? Nice of you to drop by.’
Mal put his hat on a side table covered with irregular stacks of books, few of them law books. He gripped Clif’s hand warmly. ‘Well ‒ I didn’t just “drop by”, Mr. Burrell. I was invited to dinner with the Dexters to-night, and Steve said I might call here and pick you up, since you were going there also. I hope it’s not too early … I got through at the Laboratories sooner than I thought.’
Clif smiled. ‘Not a bit. I’m very glad you came. I didn’t expect to have a chance to see you so soon. George Keston’s been talking about the possibility of you coming for more than a year. We’d just about given you up.’
Mal took the chair Clif indicated, a high, wheel-backed chair polished and lustrous from long use. He took his time looking about the room, the untidy room with its smell of old cigar smoke and the books piled on to shelves that covered the walls. There were wood ashes in the grate, and the room hadn’t been painted for many years. Clif remained silent during the scrutiny.
Mal came back to him, not quite apologetically. ‘You don’t mind my staring about, Mr. Burrell? I once looked into this room when I was a kid of about twelve, and there were more books here than I had ever seen in a house before. I promised myself that by the time I was twenty I’d have read just as many ‒ and more. Of course I hadn’t … but twenty seemed a long way off then. I wouldn’t like to look now and find how few I’ve managed to read in all the years since then …’
Clif waved his hand. ‘Nobody reads all they intend to. Those books … haven’t read all of them myself, and forgotten most of what was in the rest. It’s sad what happens to knowledge … but sadder still to think that a boy like you actually wanted my books, and I was just blind enough not to know it. Towns like Burnham
Falls don’t often get boys like young Mal Hamilton, and they should recognise and nurture them. And I’m as guilty as the next …’
Mal half-smiled and shrugged. ‘Burnham Falls doesn’t owe me a thing, Mr. Burrell ‒ nor I it. I got help here … not more or less than I would have got elsewhere. I pushed and elbowed my way along with about all the grace of a young hog rooting for food. People didn’t like me … and looking back, I don’t see why they should have.’
Clif leaned back in his chair, grinning a little in appreciation. ‘Here I’ve been thinking that you’d be sleek and fat, and full of smooth speeches on how the poor-but-honest boy made good. Steve’s shown me some press clippings about you from time to time … you have an impressive record of success.’
He shrugged again. ‘No more so than Steve. Mine came earlier, and it’s a different kind. But look at Steve himself … good position with a big company who can afford to give him whatever he wants for research. He came in on the top with Amtec, and that’s a damn’ good place to be.’
Corporation Wife Page 16