Corporation Wife

by Catherine Gaskin

  ‘Aw ‒ well, I’m hungry.’

  Nell looked round from the sink. ‘You’re always hungry! There just isn’t any filling your stomach these days. If you must eat, take it from the stuff that isn’t set out. And get yourself upstairs and washed and changed into something decent. You’re not fit to be seen.’

  He flushed and looked across at his mother. ‘Do I have to, Mom?’ he demanded.

  She nodded. ‘Yes ‒ a clean shirt, at least. You don’t have to put on a tie. You should have done it long ago … hurry now.’

  ‘Aw … who the hell’s going to see me!’ He shuffled unwillingly towards the door, his shoulders hunched and his head bent slightly forward over his tall body, in a way that was exactly Steve’s. He took a handful of nuts as he went by the bowl, spilled some, and muttered in disgust as he bent to pick them up again. Harriet suddenly noticed that his jeans, which had been too long for him three months ago, were showing a long stretch of ankle. His face was still dark and flushed, and she wanted to put her arms about him and cradle his head, but Gene was too old for that … at least he was too old when he was watched by Tim and Jeannie. He fumbled awkwardly with the nuts as he put them back. She gave him a quick smile as he moved towards the door, but his eyes were lowered again, and he didn’t see it, and so he went, uncomforted and uncheered. Now she associated his loneliness with Steve’s, and she felt she had failed both of them.

  Empty-handed, she stood staring at the activity around her, the final bustle in the kitchen, as if she was not part of it.

  She came suddenly out of her trance to see Jeannie, knife poised in her hand, looking curiously at her.

  ‘I think I heard a car outside, Mrs. Dexter.’

  ‘A car?’ She blinked. ‘Oh … yes!’ She started to leave. ‘Selma, bring the ice out right away, please.’

  She went into the hall with a welcoming smile already fixed on her face.

  II

  Harriet paused in the door of the living-room for a moment before she went back to the kitchen to tell Selma to start more coffee going. She narrowed her eyes a little as she watched the group, wondering if the evening had gone as well as it seemed, or if perhaps she had passed through it in a kind of bright daze that did not permit the overtones to penetrate. Looking at it as detachedly as she could, it seemed, on the surface, well enough.

  A group this size fitted comfortably into the big living-room ‒ they sat about in the deep chairs and the two long sofas, and there was little movement among them, except the raising and lowering of the coffee cups and the brandy glasses, or when they broke into laughter. They were absorbed in the woman at the piano. Harriet wondered how she could have known Maggie Jeffries for more than a year, and not suspected her comic gift of mimicry. She sat now at the piano, improvising mostly ‒ or so it seemed ‒ her glass of Scotch within reach. The only person who appeared not to be enjoying the show was her husband, Harlan. It had started because Maggie had drunk more whisky than usual, and had sprouted courage to ignore Harlan’s black looks when she started tinkering at the piano. Harlan was the youngest director at the Laboratories, and Harriet had never heard him utter a word that had not seemed rehearsed and considered. Maggie escaped his influence only with the Scotch, suddenly revealing a small genius of the intimate, cabaret style singing. Her voice was quite bad, but oddly fascinating. Only Harlan’s nervous glances at Ed Peters marred the group’s concentration on her.

  But for once, Ed Peters looked relaxed, though Laura, sitting on the sofa opposite him, was not. She seemed to Harriet a trifle thinner but that only accentuated the lovely hollows under the high cheek-bones. She was more beautiful. Her long white hands, scarlet-tipped, fidgeted with an unlit cigarette, and presently Phil Conrad, sitting beside her, noticed it, and leaned towards her to light it. He immediately turned back to watch Maggie. It was then that Harriet realised that Laura herself was not paying attention.

  Across the room, Steve noticed her standing by the door, and gave her a little smile and a nod that indicated satisfaction, even pleasure. She thought that Steve had changed in a year, since he was now aware of things that had before never concerned him. He had counted and measured the successes and failures of this evening just as carefully as she. But so had she changed, and everyone else in Burnham Falls … and then her gaze moved to Clif, sitting opposite Laura. She knew he had deliberately seated himself there, claiming that it was a legitimate pleasure at his age to stare at beautiful women without giving offence; even Ed Peters had smiled when he had said this. Clif had not changed, Harriet thought ‒ or perhaps his change had been to stand even firmer in the customs and ways that had been Burnham Falls before Amtec came. He had cast himself in a role of unnatural rigidity, and this was his change.

  Her gaze moved on … Marion Jennings, probably even more brilliant than her husband, who was one of Amtec’s best men … she was waiting to get her hands on Burnham Falls High School to prove what she could accomplish with her theories on education … placid, content Ginny Armstrong, sitting beside Harry, amused, but darting glances now and then towards Ed Peters, and wondering how Maggie could have the gall to shed her inhibitions before not only Ed Peters, but before a Broadway producer. To-morrow, Harriet thought, Amtec Park would buzz with the news that Maggie Jeffries had let go at the Dexter party. The strange thing was that Phil Conrad, instead of backing away defensively from an amateur, seemed to be enjoying himself. Everyone in the room, including Ed, was taking his cue from Conrad’s face. So long as it was relaxed and even faintly amused, the party was a success. It had taken Harriet some time to grow used to the idea that social success for Steve was almost as important to his future with Amtec as what he produced in his laboratory. Steve himself had learned reluctantly, but finally.

  Her survey was finished, and she was satisfied, and her eyes returned to the empty chair where Mal had been sitting. He had been gone now for more than twenty minutes ‒ she knew it had been that long because she had been uneasily conscious of his absence. She knew also that going for more coffee was merely an excuse to seek Mal. For the last ten minutes she had struggled with the desire, and now she could not help herself. She was going because, while he was in her house, she could not bear the thought of being out of range of his voice, of not being a part of whatever concerned or interested him. She had to know what he was doing, what he was thinking and saying. She had to get herself noticed by him. It occurred to her, as she left the living-room, that she was no more sophisticated than Gene and Tim in the way she competed for his attention. Her cheeks burned a little at the thought of it, but still she didn’t go back to the living-room.

  She pushed open the kitchen door, and found him there, as she had expected. A sudden hush greeted her entrance, and they all looked towards her expectantly.

  ‘Oh … I …’ She ran her tongue quickly over her dry lips, suddenly out of countenance in her own kitchen. Mal was leaning back against the sink, with a coffee cup in his hand. He greeted her with a quick smile, but she still had the uncomfortable feeling that until she had opened the door, he had forgotten her existence. Nell was putting plates away in a high cupboard, Selma preparing another tray with the coffee things. Gene sat at the table, eating a wedge of cake; Tim was behind him, and had obviously been engrossed in what Mal was saying. Jeannie, still wrapped in the white apron, stood by the stove, also eating cake. The kitchen was spotless and swept, the dishes all put away. On the table was the package of left-overs she had told Nell to wrap for Selma. Nell had the kettle on, the waiting teapot beside it. Now, with the work done, this was the start of their own party. Harriet had the distinct impression that she was an unwelcome interruption.

  ‘I think we’ll be ready for another round of coffee in a few minutes, Nell.’

  ‘It’s just started perking,’ Nell said, glancing at the coffee-maker. She closed the cupboard, and climbed down off the stool. ‘And how’s the company out there?’ she said irreverently. ‘Getting drunk and spilling liquor on your dad’s good tapestry c
hairs?’

  Harriet sighed. ‘Not enough to notice.’

  ‘I’ll notice all right when it comes time to clean up,’ Nell answered. She cut herself a wedge of cake, and took a fork out of the drawer. She glanced at Gene. ‘Another piece?’

  ‘Yeh.’ He held out his plate.

  Harriet looked from Gene to Tim. ‘You should both be in bed,’ she said weakly. She was conscious that Mal was watching her, and she felt awkward in the role of mother to these two grown children. The gap between herself now and as he had known her in Los Angeles was ruthlessly and effectively bridged in the persons of Gene and Tim.

  ‘Mom … not just now,’ Tim said. ‘Mal was just telling us …’

  She had the courage to look at him fully for the first time. Out here the light was bright and unshaded, not like the flattering dimness of the living-room. Half-defensively she had so far avoided turning full-face towards him, aware of the slight sag of weariness about her mouth and eyes. But she couldn’t go on playing a game of pretence; she lifted her face towards the light.

  ‘You sneaked away,’ she said to him. ‘What was the matter? … Dull party.’

  ‘No … not at all.’ He put down his cup on the sink, and instantly Jeannie moved to refill it from the battered old percolator in which they had brewed coffee for themselves. There was something conspiratorial in her quick movement, implying that if the rhythm was broken, he would escape them and go back to the group in the other room. It was then Harriet noticed he had been using one of the ordinary kitchen cups. He looked so comfortable, so much a part of things, and absurdly she was the outsider.

  ‘You forget,’ he continued, ‘that I have a split personality about Burnham Falls these days. There’s just as much of the old I want to see as the new.’

  Nell looked pleased, and tried to hide it. ‘Go on now ‒ you never had much use for Nell Talbot in the old days. Could never get a word out of you …’

  Mal laughed. ‘Because I was scared stiff of you ‒ for all the hand-outs you gave me from the ice box. I remember I’d just eat and run …’

  Harriet listened, but did not hear the banter that passed. They were all getting in the way, she thought. There was never a moment for her to face Mal without people in between. She felt cut off from him, lost. And then she wondered if he wanted it to be this way. Each time she encountered him, there seemed to be an audience about him, jostling each other for his attention. He seemed to do very little to achieve it, but it was there ‒ and she must remain one of the crowd. And it was even worse now, because she was on the fringe of the crowd. She looked despairingly at her children, and knew there was no way to break through. She sought for something to say, but there was so little time. Selma was preparing to take the fresh coffee into the living-room, and she would have to go too. A sense of dismay crowded on her. She looked from Jeannie’s bright, expectant face to the eager faces of Gene and Tim, and then to Nell’s habitually disapproving expression unsuccessfully struggling against her pleasure in Mal’s presence in her kitchen. This was where the real party was going on, Harriet thought ‒ it was here, not in the front room, with the brandy glasses and Maggie at the piano. Here, they were settling down to enjoy themselves in a way that wasn’t possible in the other room. They seemed so free, and strangely young ‒ even Nell, who was old.

  Selma straightened her apron, and patted the black dress over her full hips. She picked up the tray. ‘Shall I take it in now, Mrs. Dexter?’

  ‘Yes, Selma … please,’ she said reluctantly.

  There was no further excuse to linger, and Mal did not even appear to notice that she was going. Almost before she left the kitchen the easy fellowship had settled in again and her coming had left hardly a mark.

  It occurred to her as she returned to the living-room, that of all the guests there that night, only Mal was in a position to dare to leave the group in the living-room and go on his own way.

  She wished it weren’t moonlight, because it made everything so stupidly unreal, and gave her sleepless fantasies a value they would never have had in the broad light of day. The whole room was moon-touched, distorted. She saw the shapes of the furniture, her slip lying over a chair, Steve’s shoes on the floor beside the closet but this was not the old-fashioned, familiar room that Joe and Claudia had inhabited; it seemed like a stage set, and she was a waxen dummy, and the man beside her in the big bed a stranger. She knew she was like this because only this way could she consciously permit the thought of Mal to intrude here. But he was an intrusion, a guilty one.

  Finally, because the thoughts would not go away, she knew she must take them elsewhere. She sat up and slid one leg down to the floor. The old bed squeaked a little, and she heard a check in the even rhythm of Steve’s breathing.

  ‘Whereya going?’ he mumbled.

  ‘Can’t sleep … going down for some milk.’

  She didn’t look back at him, but reached for her dressing-gown from the chair beside the bed. Before she touched it she heard Steve’s movement behind her, and felt his hand on her thigh. Then his other hand grasped her waist, and he pulled her back gently. She lay sideways across the bed, and he pushed himself over next to her.

  ‘Don’t hurry away … not yet.’ He nuzzled his face into her neck while his hands urged away her nightgown. He had such sure hands, always, Harriet thought. For a second her body stiffened as she felt his hands ‒ an instant’s, fierce rejection because Steve was not the man she wanted to possess her. But his hands were skilful, and her guilt was an insistent, aching thing that had to make atonement. She gave herself completely to his hands, and the pressure of his lips against her breasts. Then she turned wildly and pressed herself against him, her legs cradling him, urging him.

  She spoke his name aloud, to make his presence more real, to wipe out the other name. ‘Steve …’

  When he slept again, she went down to the kitchen. There were no traces of the party left; all was in order, and silent. She put the old coffee-pot on the stove, heaped fresh coffee into it, and went and sat at the table waiting for it to perk. Her body was slack and weary; she had spent herself with Steve, and had found no release, though she believed he had not known it. Her head slumped forward a little over the table. She was afraid to look up because when she looked up again she knew she would see the image of Mal leaning against the sink, gesturing slightly with the hand that held the cup, and around him again would be the circle of interested, admiring faces.

  ‘Oh, God,’ she whispered, ‘how long do I have to live like this?’ As she got up she seemed to stumble a little.

  The pre-dawn greyness was finished, and full daylight was breaking now. She poured the coffee into an old mug that Gene had used as a baby, and carried it with her. She opened the front door wide to admit the dawn breeze; the screen door needed oiling. She closed it gently behind her. She settled herself in one of the chairs on the porch, and watched the light reaching into the valley, watched it start to colour the grey of the lake. The houses of Burnham Falls began to lift up out of their anonymous mass; she could name almost everyone who slept under the placid old roofs, she knew most of their histories, as they knew hers. A diesel hooted in the morning stillness, and a freight train rattled over the level-crossing.

  Six

  Sally Redmond also heard the hoot of the diesel echo through the valley. She liked the sound; it had grown to be a familiar thing in the time she had lived here. She looked towards Tom’s hunched figure in the other bed, and smiled a little to see how tightly his eyes were closed in sleep, as if he concentrated on even that with the intensity he gave to everything else in his life. But now he also looked young, and surprisingly vulnerable. Or was it, she thought, just the indulgent fantasy of every pregnant woman to see in every man the image of her unborn child.

  Through the half-closed Venetian blind the light was growing stronger. In a few minutes the sun would be up. She loved these early silent hours before the valley began to stir. She liked to sit by the kitchen window with a cup
of tea in her hand ‒ the hang-over from the Irish household she had grown up in ‒ and gaze over the roofs of the houses on the slope of the hill below her, and across to the Laboratories on the hill. Tom called it her day-dreaming time, and it was true that, with no cars on the highway and none climbing the road to the Laboratories, with the early sun so bright on the glass and aluminium, the building could almost have been the shining castle of her childhood story books.

  She eased herself out of bed carefully, and slipped into her robe. In the kitchen were the stacked cups and plates from last night, when the Johnsons had dropped over, and they had talked until after midnight. Sally ignored them now, and put water on the stove for tea. She was in her bare feet; the floor felt deliciously cool, and to-day would be another hot one in the valley. It was Saturday, and Tom would have two days at home. She hunched a little over the stove as she waited for the kettle to come to the boil, and acknowledged it was strange that she still thought of week-ends in the nature of holidays, when they had long ago ceased to be precisely that. The week-ends were busier than the other days, but it was a business they called leisure.

  She took her tea to the stool by the window, curling her toes sensuously around the chromium rungs. She was thinking now about the party that had gone on last night at the Dexters’, over on the other side of town. Through various sources the news that Phil Conrad would spend the week-end in Burnham Falls had leaked out. It was known in Amtec Park exactly which of the top echelon had been invited to meet him, and there was speculation about the feelings of those who had been left out. In Sally’s mind there was something tremendously important about that invitation ‒ an acknowledgment by Amtec of the possession of qualities that were a little more than those strictly required by one’s job. To be invited to meet Phil Conrad you had to have a little glamour, or detachment, or at least the ability not to show how impressed you were. Phil Conrad was used to the company of urbane, sophisticated people and it wouldn’t have done to expose him to the risk of boredom by company chatter. Sally, married to a junior member of one of the research teams and still years away from any of the protocol problems that last night’s party represented, still knew exactly what the situation had been. She guessed readily enough why Harriet Dexter’s house had been chosen. While she had never been in it, had never spoken to Harriet Dexter, she knew a lot about that house. It had a dignity and permanence about it that bore no relation whatever to the newness of Amtec Park, and which Laura Peters’ house, with its expensive landscaping, could not achieve. It had something to do with those huge oak trees on the lawn, and the grey slate roof on the old wing. They said the house was stuffed with silver that Harriet’s father had collected, and had some fine antique furniture. In a sense it was a more modest equivalent of the modern art Ed Peters owned. It was not surprising the choice had fallen on the Dexter house. Sally’s mind went again to those executives who had not been invited … mentally she ran down the list … the Sommerses, the Harveys, the Triffs, the Sewells. In each case she could almost guess the reason why, and it had something to do with the wives ‒ one too voluble about the welfare work she did, one too absorbed in her children, one fat and physically unattractive. A little flush mounted in her cheeks as she thought of it, and she sipped at her tea quickly. They expected a lot of you ‒ to have all the virtues of a wife and mother, and to know when to hide them, to read the right books and keep your figure. If you had a college degree to be careful not to snub the woman who didn’t ‒ who might also be the wife of the president. There were pitfalls, and you had to be aware of them. She thought of the women at that party, and had a good idea of what it had been like, because by now she had observed each of them often enough in public to know what kind of women they were. At the moment they represented the women Ed Peters thought of as suitable to entertain Phil Conrad.