Corporation Wife

by Catherine Gaskin

  From that moment on, Jeannie had wanted very badly to leave Burnham Falls. Even her short absence had sharpened perspective, and the agony of waiting out these hours had added a great deal to her growing disillusionment. She had seen her father, frustrated and sick because he had to accept help from Amtec; she had seen the generosity of Amtec’s action being high-lighted with the glare of publicity. And she knew, also, that it was not merely her own hardened attitude she was bringing from the city; these things had always been here, but until the episode of Patrino and Reitch she had ignored them. What she had won from that and from this forty-eight hours while Chrissie was missing was a little honesty, and much enlightenment. She knew now that her thoughts and regrets for Burnham Falls had been tied up with the improbable hope that somehow Jerry would come back to her ‒ that any encounter with the town would be an encounter with him. Now she knew the falseness of that hope. What she had been searching for was mostly the lost innocence, the sweet enthusiasm of the young years ‒ the years of dreaming before the age of reality and responsibility. She didn’t want Jerry any more. She had grown past him at the moment she had given up dreaming. And she didn’t need Burnham Falls.

  So she could leave Selma and Ted and Chrissie behind to live on in the way they had always lived. There were good years ahead for Chrissie, and if Chrissie were lucky she could always stay in Burnham Falls without feeling any need to leave it. But Jeannie felt no sense of loss now in her own departing. The peace and security and love she had had would always stay with her; she no longer felt it was necessary to stay tied to the source of it, she was not dependent on it any more. What strength these years had given her would not diminish.

  Finally she fell into a light sleep, and didn’t waken until the train had pulled into Grand Central.

  The early morning streets appeared washed and clean, and the light was breaking into the deep canyons. She rode home in a taxi to her apartment on Second Avenue with the windows rolled down, feeling the wine-sweet October air on her face. There was a wonderful sense of familiarity about the city, a sense of welcoming, of returning. She felt no longer a stranger, and alone. She read the name on the driver’s licence mounted on the glove compartment ‒ Abraham Cohan. She had not exchanged a word with him beyond giving him the address, and she would probably never see him again, but quite suddenly, in these moments, he was her friend ‒ as the city was her friend.

  Back in the apartment she showered and lay down on the bed. There was still an hour to sleep before she need get up and prepare breakfast, and press the blouse she would wear to the office that day. She fell into a deep sleep almost immediately, and it was the telephone that aroused her. Before she picked it up she knew.

  His voice warmed her. He was calling from Long Island.

  ‘Good morning, Charles,’ she said. ‘Everything’s fine.’ And it was.

  Nineteen

  It rained all that Monday in Burnham Falls. It rained almost continuously through the day, a light rain which fell with a monotonous dull sound on the carpet of leaves. Laura lay in bed late, listening to it, hating it. When at last she got up, close to noon, she stood at the window for some minutes, looking out. It was an ugly, sad day; the frost had come sharply last night and now the leaves and bushes were withered and brown. The whole scene had a sodden, mournful look. It seemed that the winter was very near. Laura clutched the draperies as she stared out, and shivered. What she saw seemed to be an immediate projection of her life ‒ routine monotony of days that dragged by, and were the hue of the brown matted leaves piled in the flower-beds.

  Jane Humphries called, reminding her of the P.T.A. meeting the next day. Laura promised that she would be there, and hung up abruptly, not wanting any more of Jane Humphries’ discreet probing. They could all think what they liked about her week-end absence; she had no intention of making any explanations.

  After that call the real depression of the day set in. Laura wandered about the house, picking up a magazine, then a book, leaving them both down again unlooked at. To-morrow was a P.T.A. meeting ‒ and to-morrow was Tuesday. There would be no more early morning rides on Tuesdays down the parkway to New York. There would be no more sense of excitement on waking in the mornings ‒ of counting off the days. From now on the weeks could be without end, and it would not matter. Phil Conrad had closed the door on her, had taken away that lovely, shining world. There was no one else to show her the way back into that world. If she wanted it, she had to go and get it for herself.

  Thinking of this, with a kind of desperate hope, she went swiftly to her dressing-room, and opened up the closets. There were the two mink coats hanging there, a mink jacket and a chinchilla wrap. In the little safe were the jewels both Larry and Ed had given her. She laid her hand tentatively on one of the coats. There was money enough here to keep her for quite a long time if she wanted to go back to study in earnest with Goodman, if she wanted once more to start the rounds of the producers’ offices. It would mean living in a walk-up, probably in Greenwich Village, or somewhere on the upper West Side. It would mean watching her money, riding in the subway instead of taxis, of noticing the price of food in the supermarket. It would mean being all the things she hadn’t been since those days before Larry had taken over her life, before he had started the process of coaxing into being and nurturing a creature that hadn’t existed before. It was possible that she didn’t know how to be once again that early Laura. She wasn’t used to doing things for herself any more; she wasn’t used to asking ‒ for parts or for anything else. She didn’t know if she had the courage to enter the producer’s office and sit meekly waiting.

  But worst of all, she didn’t know that when she was given a part, she could play it. She hadn’t ever been sure, and she wasn’t sure now, that she was an actress. Without Larry to bolster her, without the cushion of Ed’s money, was she able to tackle the grim world that was part of the shiny one? She didn’t know that, either. Larry had created a thing of fragile, spun-glass beauty ‒ and without talent none of it mattered. She let the sleeve of the coat drop limply; she was afraid to take the chance.

  At mid-afternoon Clare and Elizabeth came home from school. Laura was conscious of their presence in the house in a way she had not been for a long time. It seemed an impossible burden that she was partly responsible for the way they grew up; she realised that she hadn’t the slightest notion of what they thought, or how they felt. They were also a part of the world of Burnham Falls that she had kept steadily at bay, refusing to admit that it had reality in her case, or that she could be expected to be a part of it. Now she knew that Ed not only expected it, but he could demand it. He was demanding that she reach out and embrace this alien world.

  Hesitantly she went towards Elizabeth’s room, cherishing the meagre hope that perhaps in this one contact she might find a beginning. The very violence of Elizabeth’s bewildered adolescent emotions might make a starting place. But the steady loud beat of the rock-and-roll music greeted her. She stood before the closed door for a moment, and then turned and went away.

  It was after four o’clock, and it was still raining. The only words Ed had addressed to her that morning were a reminder that Handley Parker and his wife would be joining them at the country club for dinner. She remembered Handley Parker; he was from the Budget Department of the Amtec head office. He and his plump wife spent their lives in an almost perpetual tour of the Amtec plants all over the country, and Laura had once thought that he looked a little like the long twist of paper from a cash register. Unwillingly she started the motions of preparing to meet them.

  This routine was also familiar, the act of creating the face, the look that she wanted. But to-night it had no magic; even with no trouble she would be the most beautiful woman in the dining-room of the club ‒ probably the only one. There was no challenge to meet, no excitement. Mechanically she went through the ritual ‒ the careful removal of the make-up she had worn through the day, the shower, the splashing with cold water, the talcum, the lotion on hee
ls and knees and elbows. It was all done as before; it had very little meaning.

  She zipped herself into a foundation garment, and put on stockings and high-heeled satin bedroom slippers. Then she slipped on a terry robe and called Gracie on the house phone to bring her ice and pitcher and gin and vermouth.

  ‘Wouldn’t you like me to mix it, Mrs. Peters?’

  ‘No, bring it all here. I want to do it myself.’

  She drank two martinis sitting at the dressing-table staring into the mirror. It was last night’s face she saw there, the one that had looked back at her from the mirror in the hotel bathroom. It had faint cracks running down from each side of the nose; it had the smallest of lines under the eyes. That wouldn’t have mattered if it had possessed life or eagerness. But there was no life in it at all. It was the face she would have to take to dinner with her to-night, the one that would appear at the P.TA. meeting to-morrow. It was the dreary face of the suburban housewife that she was now going to be.

  She drained the second martini down, and went to the phone. It occurred to her that Harriet Dexter could be the contact she needed, the person who might help her bridge this gap. At least she could talk to Harriet. It was always very easy to talk to Harriet; she listened so well. Larry had said it was the rarest of gifts to listen well; he had said almost no actress ever possessed it.

  Nell Talbot answered the phone at the Dexters’. ‘I’m sorry, Mrs. Peters. Mrs. Dexter won’t be home until about seven. Can I take a message?’

  ‘No ‒ no message.’

  As she put down the phone she was crying a little, the tears welling silently and slipping down her cheeks.

  ‘I can’t do it alone,’ she whispered in the stillness of the room. ‘I can’t do it alone. Someone has to help me.’

  She went back to the dressing-room and mixed herself another martini. It was a long one, and she drank it too quickly ‒ not for enjoyment. Then she rose, a little unsteadily, and went to the wardrobe to look for a dress to wear. She ran her hand along the dinner-dresses, a loving reverent touch; the feel of silk and chiffon was still real and beautiful. And then her hand fell on the olive-green jersey.

  She had worn it that first night at the Plaza when she had dined with Phil. In her mind she called it the first night because it had been the first night that she had felt Phil’s special interest, the night she had known he was attracted to her in more than the usual way. As she touched the soft folds of the dress she experienced again that triumphant sense of power, the excitement of an encounter that was about to begin. Then the feeling went dead. This was not a beginning, she told herself.

  Almost absent-mindedly she mixed the next drink, and sipped it slowly this time, thinking of Phil. Somewhere with him she had gone wrong, she had made the false move that had taken away that first power she had held. If she could have waited a little longer, if she could have held him without revealing how vulnerable she was. Her mistake had been far back, right in the beginning, on that night she had been with Phil in the Carpenter’s fishing cabin. She had been stupid and naive then; in her loneliness and insecurity she had blundered, and after that there had been nothing about her to excite or challenge Phil. Larry had warned her that she must never let down the spun-glass mask. But she had with Phil, and that had been the mistake. If it were just possible to go back, she thought … if it were possible to go back to that moment, to be what she had been before it. There was something of herself back there, that might still be retrieved, a sense of identity before it had been lost in Phil, a sense of hopefulness, perhaps.

  Her shaking fingers put the empty glass back carefully on the tray. Then she wrapped her robe tighter about her. At the doorway the heel of the satin slipper caught in the rug, and she almost fell.

  She found the Thunderbird in the garage, as Ed had said it would be, and the ignition key was in place. As she touched the starter she thought for a second of Ed, who always knew that the orders he gave would be perfectly carried out, who never made mistakes ‒ except possibly the biggest one of having married her. The engine came to life with the familiar, powerful sound that she loved. She took off the brake and the car moved out quickly into the rain.

  No one understood why she had been on the road to Downside at all ‒ much less at that time of day, and wearing only a terry robe and slippers, her face bare of even a trace of make-up. The Thunderbird had crashed through the guard rails above the lake, leaving heavy skid marks in the soft shoulder. She had died from the impact when the car hit the rocks, not from drowning.

  Laura had not known any of the priests at Downside personally, and it was hard to believe that she might have been headed there to seek advice or counsel. Some people remembered that the Downside road also led to the Carpenter fishing cabin; but the cabin was deserted, the electricity and water shut off. There seemed no reason why Laura Peters should go there late on a cold rainy October afternoon.

  Twenty

  By the end of January Burnham Falls had been tight in the grip of a freeze for more than three weeks. Two days ago the temperature had risen a little, and it had snowed heavily; then it froze hard again. This afternoon the sun had shone fitfully, but the snow still lay like iron on the ground. The countryside looked stark and bare. There were very few birds.

  The cold was intense. It seemed, Clif Burrell thought, to possess a stubborn force of its own, a physical thing that you could not ignore. He moved his feet a little to try to keep the circulation going, but he had already stood there too long, and old Cy Richards, the Episcopal minister, always took his time with burial services. Clif glanced across the open grave towards his secretary, Milly Squires, whose mother was being buried. She was weeping in an unrestrained way ‒ as if, Clif thought, she hadn’t been expecting her mother to die for the last three years. And then he frowned at his own thoughts. You’re a cynical old bastard, he told himself. A woman has a right to cry at her mother’s grave if she wants to.

  It was over at last. Milly was surrounded by people, and she was being led down the slippery path towards the cars by a tall man in his late thirties, on whose arm she lent with an air of possessiveness. Clif knew he wasn’t needed, so he searched about in the crowd until he saw Harriet. She signalled to him, and he went to join her. They started down the path together.

  ‘Well,’ Clif said, ‘there’s another one gone. She’s had a bad time these past two years ‒ I expect she was glad to go. She was a lot younger than me. It’s a pity I can’t die before I get too old and boring. No use hanging on, Harriet, when there’s nothing left to do. I’ll be seventy soon.’

  ‘Don’t play for sympathy,’ Harriet told him. ‘You’ll be ninety-nine before you’re boring, and I think you’ve been old since you were five ‒ so what’s there to change?’

  He laughed, a dry cackle which caused several heads to turn in his direction, and people remarked that Clif Burrell grew worse with age. He not only drank, but he was disrespectful, too. It was unfeeling to laugh at the funeral of his secretary’s mother.

  They had reached the parked cars. Harriet glanced up and down the line. ‘Where’s yours?’

  ‘I’m walking,’ Clif answered. ‘It wasn’t far, and the snow’s still a foot deep in my driveway. I wasn’t planning to go anywhere, so I just thought I’d let the car sit until the thaw.’

  Harriet touched his arm. ‘Then come home with me. We’ll get some whisky into us to take the chill away.’

  He nodded. ‘Thanks, I’d like to.’ One of the good things about Harriet was that she never pretended he didn’t drink, and she never lectured. He thought it was smart of her to know that he wouldn’t give up drinking just because someone told him to. He followed her along the line of cars. She stopped by a new Oldsmobile, and pulled open the door. He looked at her in puzzlement. ‘Yours? Where’s the Rolls? Did it fall apart at last?’

  ‘No, it didn’t fall apart. I just decided I’d had it long enough. Time to change.’

  He didn’t say anything. He felt rather lost inside the ne
w car. A little resentful, too. He had never thought of Harriet without her father’s Rolls; he missed it.

  The roads had been ploughed, but the drifts were piled high in the ditches and against the stone walls. The land had a naked, barren look, stripped of leaf and shelter; the hard hand of winter was on it, cruel and harsh. Clif remembered how he had loved snow as a boy, but he didn’t love it any more. Harriet drove cautiously, slowly; the snow chains on the tyres made their rhythmic whirring sound.

  Clif said, ‘Well, Milly isn’t leaving Burnham Falls after all.’

  Harriet looked across at him, lifting her eyebrows. ‘Oh?’

  ‘I suppose you didn’t know. For years she’s been hell bent on getting herself to New York, and living in the Big Town. Of course she would have been miserable, but she didn’t know it. Milly hasn’t the stamina for New York. Well ‒ everything’s changed. She’s going to marry Jeff Haggens ‒ he’s a chemist who came here for Amtec about six months ago. So now Milly’s discovered there’s nothing she wants so much as to set up house right here in Burnham Falls. I guess that’s one you can chalk up to Amtec’s credit.’

  ‘You sound reluctant.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t I be? For every Milly Squires who stays there’ll be a Jeannie Talbot who leaves. If Amtec hadn’t come to this town, I don’t doubt that Jeannie would still be here. And, by God, Harriet, we need the Jeannies … Now there’s someone whom New York won’t beat. That girl’s got guts …’

  ‘We need the quiet ones like Milly, too,’ Harriet cut in. ‘And we need the ones that Amtec brings here.’

  ‘But some of them we’re never going to keep,’ Clif answered quickly. ‘The ones like Laura Peters. You could tell right away she was never going to stay.’

  ‘But Laura’s …’

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know she’s lying there in the Episcopal graveyard, which is about as permanent as anyone can be in a place. But she doesn’t belong here, and she never did. She’s one of the ones Amtec moved here who should never have been made to move. I think she died because of that ‒ whatever way she died.’