How did things stand in Avalon, and what of Augie Poole? He was far from being without interior resources of his own, as I very soon came to see. One evening I went over to his house to borrow an ice crusher and found Isolde in tears. Now what? Everything had seemed under control. Augie had kicked in with another five hundred dollars, which I’d taken to Cornelia the day before. Augie was laying low, as was proper since he was under very strict surveillance now in the Crib’s final checkup before approval. Cornelia had told me she’d gone to the Rock-a-Bye people, as I’d urged, and they were fine; all confidences were honored and nothing demanded, but anything putative fathers felt they could give was appreciated. Hence the extra five hundred, the original thousand being regarded as covering medical expenses as such. Augie walked the chalkline, holding hands with his wife in public and being knightly in many other ways and at all times. Then, happening to glance in the window after ringing the bell to get the ice crusher, I saw Isolde drying her eyes as she rose from the couch and came to the door. My heart sank: all the beans had been spilled.
“Oh. The ice crusher. Audrey did call about it, I forgot. Come in.”
“I hate to . . .” I stepped inside, closing the door.
“No trouble. I’ll get it.”
She went into the kitchen. No Augie in sight. I thought I heard a creak in another room. Was the ex-satyr in hiding?
Isolde was in the kitchen long enough to touch up her face as well as get the grinder, without very good results.
“What’s the matter, Isolde?” I said, taking the ice crusher.
“You know.” She dove into the couch and buried her face in the cushions.
“Augie?”
The head bobbed. “I suppose you’ve known about it all along.”
I set the ice crusher on a table. I reached down and touched her hair awkwardly. “Augie’s basically a good egg. . . .”
“Good!” She tossed around into a sitting position, her hair flung up at me as if in reproach. “Is that all you can say? Is that all you can say for the most wonderful guy a woman ever had? To do a thing like that.”
“To do a thing like what, Isolde?” I said, confused.
“Sell his ideas of course. What are we talking about? Give up his career and settle down to being a hack idea man. A gagman! So he’ll have the kind of family-man, steady-income quality the agency wants in a husband. He’s doing it all for me.” She broke into fresh wails, giving me time in which to collect my thoughts.
It didn’t take me long to get the pitch. The old bastard, I thought, angrily navigating the room. Making moral capital out of what his sins had made inevitable. Getting on deposit a lump sum so big he could draw on it indefinitely—pretty sly. Why, it would keep him liquid till the day he died! For when would the time come when his wife must now not be grateful to him?
“Where is he now?” I asked, wondering if he was around here but too ashamed to come out.
“He’s in his studio.” Isolde gave her nose a tweak with a hand-kerchief. “He’s pretending he doesn’t care, the lamb. Did he seem to you to be cut to pieces?”
“Not exactly. Well, in a way.” I veered bewilderedly in my loyalties. I had a sudden flash. Was he even more saintly-like-a-fox than seemed? There was the likelihood, my intuition told me, that Augie had come to realize at last that he didn’t have what it takes, and would have sold his ideas anyway. So it was next to nothing that he had managed to parlay into martyrdom. Maybe this was speculation, but it was valid speculation, and I felt Isolde had a right to any consolation it might afford. Therefore I said:
“Baby doll, don’t cut yourself to pieces. Because there’s this about it. Eventually—well, let me put it this way. There comes a time in every man’s life when he realizes he isn’t wielding a rapier, but only laying about with the kitchen poker—”
“Oh!” she brought out in a reproving gasp, and turned away. Then she said: “But of course that’s the way you’ve felt about him all along. This is what you’ve always wanted.”
“I was only—”
“I know. Trying to make it easier for me. I’m sorry.” She stood at the window and worried a handkerchief through her hands. “I wish I didn’t nave to take this from him. I told him I wouldn’t have it, but he insisted. He almost got angry about it. But I sure wish I didn’t have to take it from him.”
“You may have chance enough to pay him back,” I said and, picking up the ice grinder, beat a hasty retreat.
I couldn’t get home fast enough.
“Well, Audrey,” I said, carrying the crusher into the kitchen where she was preparing for a couple of after-dinner callers we expected—people who liked stingers and frappé drinks, which is what the ice crusher was for, “Guess what your wicked Augie has done now.”
“Been arrested with a chorus girl?”
“He’s given up his career for his family,” I said, a trifle smugly. I hadn’t mentioned any of this yet, having hesitated to break the news before Augie did. “It seems the agency would feel better if he had a steady income, soo he’s selling his ideas and becoming a gagman. A gagman! You know what that means. Burying his dreams of becoming an artist. Forever,” I added when there was no response.
“Well, that’s fine,” my wife said, reaching into the refrigerator for something.
“Is that all you can say? It’s fine? Why don’t you admit ‘my boy,’ as you’ve ironically been calling him, has come through with flying colors? I hate to say I told you so, but I think you ought to give credit where credit is due.”
“I do.” She closed the refrigerator door and turned. “I give him plenty of credit, if this is what he’s really doing. But is lie giving up for Isolde any more than Isolde has given up for him?”
“What do you mean?”
“Her acting. Or have you forgotten? That was a career too. I won’t say she has a terrific amount of talent, but it’s as much as Augie’s any day. Maybe more—because Isolde at least has had a few bit parts.”
“Augie’s sold things.”
“What?”
“To us. That cornucopia full of frozen foods—probably other things in the future.”
“That cornucopia.” She smiled. “Really now. That dinky little Thanksgiving spot. You called it a one-shot yourself. No faces to draw, which is the real test of a cartoonist—you keep saying that yourself. Don’t go away yet. Oh, you’ve started the oil furnace again. One second, I want to make this point. It makes me so furious I can hardly talk. When a woman gives up something to be a housewife and mother, it’s taken for granted—that’s just Nature. But let a man make the least concession and there’s all this hoopla. It’s always the man marriage is a trap for.”
“I’ll keep my own shut and save ours,” I said, and walked with a broad smile to answer the door, for our guests had arrived.
On returning to the office from lunch the next day, I found a telephone message on my desk:
Miss McBain called at 12:35. Would like you to call her back. Urgent
What could be urgent? Probably some revisions on Father that she wanted help with. Well, that was hardly urgent from my point of view; I had a few pressing matters of my own to attend to. I was deep in a raft of correspondence I’d let pile up when the phone rang and it was Terry again. Her voice said “trouble.”
“I hate to bother you,” she said, “but something’s happened and I just had to tell you. Something terrible.”
“What?”
“Can’t you guess? Think hard.”
There was a pregnant silence.
“Does it concern me?” I asked.
“Indirectly. Have you guessed?”
“Terry?”
“What?”
“Have you been drinking?”
“No. I’m so embarrassed and—ashamed. Such a fool. I might have known.”
“Known, Terry?”
“That I was asking for it.”
“Yes.”
“You’ve guessed—the inevitable. . . . Hello, are you the
re?”
“Yes. You mean that when I was drunk and didn’t know what I was . . .”
“What do you mean when you were drunk? The thing is, I’ve told Father—”
“What?”
“—and he’s already talking about lawyers.”
“Bu-but.” I rose on rubber legs, gored on a vision of armed nuptials; except that no blunderbuss in Father’s hands could bring about our union. Blunderbuss: a mistaken kiss. “I’m already ma-ma—” My voice bleated away into a thin squeal, like Laurel’s of Laurel and Hardy when he is about to cry. I picked weakly at a kink in the phone cord. “Your father won’t shuh-shuh-shoo—”
“What on earth is the matter with you?”
“Will he shoot me?” I laughed feebly.
“Don’t worry,” she said, laughing herself. “I won’t even mention your name.” I felt a partial relief—but only partial; like a genuflecting pack beast relieved by ten pounds of a load a hundred in excess of his capacity. “You’re a brick, Terry. Look, can I call you back? Are you home?” I wanted to get off the office line.
“Yes, but I won’t be here long. I’m waiting for a plane reservation to come through, and if I can’t get that I’m going to catch a late afternoon train home. That’s why I wanted to get in touch with you right away. I wondered if you had any ideas.”
“It’s too late for what would have been my main thought—not to tell your father.”
“I know.” She sighed. “But he would have found out anyway.”
“Not necessarily. Those things can be . . .”
“He’d have found out. Somebody would have told him and then it would have been twice as bad. Of course it isn’t a sort of desperate rush. It’ll be months before—”
“I’ll call you back, Terry. You know how terrible I feel about it, of course—”
“Don’t. It’s not your fault.” She heaved another long sigh. “But it is the ruination of everything. It’s just the end.”
“Courage,” I babbled. “I’ll call you back.”
My legs growing steadily number as under a prodigious dose of Novocain that was freezing me from the feet up, I sat staring at the blotter-pad on my desk. Papers materialized upon it and were removed by my secretary’s hand. It had a lace cuff at the wrist. My secretary found me, sometime later, affixing my signature to letters of which I was the recipient, and reading without comprehension correspondence I had just dictated.
“What’s the matter?” she asked at last. “You look pale.”
“I’m all right. I don’t feel so hot. Open a window, I’m roasting in here.” I lay down on a couch I had in my office and said, “I won’t take any calls for a bit.”
I heard the phone ring in the outer office and my secretary’s crisp voice, “He’s out just now. Is there any message?”
After a while I went downstairs and into a drugstore, where I hauled myself into a phone booth and dialed Terry’s number. There was no answer. I let the phone ring several times and then hung up. Back in my office, a telegram awaited me:
COULDN’T GET YOU AGAIN TO SAY GOING HOME TRAIN THIS AFTERNOON SORRY NOW BOTHERED YOU BECAUSE YOU SO UTTERLY DUMPS BUT FELT HAD TO TELL YOU AND PROMISE NOT BOTHER YOU AGAIN SOMETHING MUST SEE THROUGH MYSELF.
So she was leaving the burden of gallantry up to me. She was giving me an out, but only after I had learned the facts. I couldn’t honorably take it. I would call her back, of course, next week, and the week after that if she hadn’t returned. Mean-while what? Meanwhile how much money could I dig up and where? I couldn’t pay out anything like this called for without it showing on my bank balance. Too much to smuggle under Miscellaneous in a family budget. I’d have to touch the office for it. Pay it back a few dollars a week; go without lunch maybe; or such fancy ones; or pick up a little fruit at a Sixth Avenue delicatessen. We all overeat. There are lots of good reasons being good. Get hold of yourself is the main thing at the moment. There mustn’t be any sign of this Angst to anybody. Angst, there’s a word for you. Say it over and over to yourself till everything becomes a joke. Angst, Angst, Angst. Weltschmerz.
At home, we got the notification from the agency that Mrs. Mash was coming to interview us about the Pooles. Now the whole picture was changed. Now it wasn’t the danger of Augie adopting his own child, but of his adopting mine. Mathematical “odds” are no comfort to a man in Angst. Not this type of Angst anyway. A possibility is a possibility, and the submicroscopic mote of this one bloomed into monstrous likelihood: Terry, sent into the snow by a Biblical Father (like the girls in the cartoons we were always running), coming out to stay with the only people she knew who could take her in, the McBains, friends near Avalon who would see her through, help her get in touch with some nice local agency—Angst. Did I have the whole thing to do over again? Why didn’t I die in Grand Central, lugging the Piesporter? Why didn’t I die on the walk home in the heat, back in that other time?
No wonder I lost my voice (in more or less the same fading squeal as on the telephone) when the Mrs. Mash woman marched into the bedroom.
I got it back the next day. But I didn’t let on to anybody. I didn’t want to be quizzed on why it had conked out. Not till I had the answers all worked out. I wanted time to think. I continued, on the whole, in bed, jotting bulletins and words of encouragement to my wife and such of my children as could read—Maude and Marco—and the story was given out that their father had been stricken with quinsy and might be laid up indeterminately, this being also the explanation phoned in to the office when Monday came and my absence from it had to be accounted for. Of my Moot Point considerations nothing remained; “escapes” never avail us when they are really sorely needed—they appease only the gray hours, not the black. I sat in a cockpit of the bedclothes and drank highballs. Tuesday afternoon I heard my wife on the phone when Blair called. “Why, he’s under the weather, Mr. Blair. Quinsy . . . How’s that, Mr. Blair? . . . Because he’s allergic to it.” (To penicillin, which he’d asked why I hadn’t taken.) When my wife suggested she call Dr. Vancouver for another look at me, I rolled my eyes as if to say, “That hypochondriac.” However, she called him.
He peered gingerly down my throat again, asking me not to breathe on him as the epidemic was still going strong and many there were who depended on his good health. I held my breath, but gagged on the stick he put down my throat, causing him to avert abruptly. He sat facing away from me till my gasping had subsided. His examination over, he rose and said, “Again I can’t find a thing. A thing, that is, but a little tightness of the anterior muscles that you might get with globus hystericus. But globus hystericus couldn’t possibly last this long, so maybe you’ve got an aphasia. I’ve never seen a true aphasia.” I glanced at my wife and then modestly at the counterpane—for a true aphasia would give us great status in the psychosomatic belt. Vancouver stowed his flashlight in his bag and snapped the tongue depressor in two and gave it to my wife to dispose of. Then he went into the bathroom to gargle.
“If there’s anything troubling you, tell me,” he called later above the sound of washing his hands. “Or if you don’t feel it’s any of my business I’ll have Dr. Printemps look at you.”
“Who is Dr. Printemps?” my wife asked.
“He’s a psychiatrist.”
The very word was like magic. I cleared my throat. They turned and looked at me speculatively. I put a hand to my throat and smiled: not able to talk yet, but it seemed to be loosening up in there. Before Vancouver left, I was able to whisper a word or two. Well, good, but it still might be wise for him to give Printemps a ring and—I shook my head and waved him off. I would be all right.
The ringing phone was a further tonic: every time it did I jumped, wondering whether Terry, if she’d returned, would be indiscreet enough to call me here; I must be getting back to New York, and calling her to forestall any such thing. The possibility of Mrs. Mash’s reappearing gave further spur to my recovery, though I devoutly hoped I had been washed out as a witness.
That evening
, my wife and I sat in our wonted living-room chairs. I drew on a cigar of the size, smaller than a panatela, known as a doll. I had a flannel rag around my throat which gave me a vaguely tragic air. She occasionally paused in her knitting to watch me.
“Now that you can talk,” she said at last, “what’s it all about?”
“I was hoping you wouldn’t ask me that. I’d really rather not go into it,” I whispered, my voice threatening to depart again.
“You’ve got to.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“Our union has been blest with issues,” I said with great good humor, fingering the rag around my throat. “No, I feel it’s fairer to all concerned to drop it.” I drew on the doll and, frowning at the coal, let a trickle of smoke out of the side of my mouth.
“I’m your wife,” my wife said, hooking up a strand of yarn with her little finger. “It would never get any farther as far as I’m concerned.”
It was of course no use resisting; her curiosity would never let me rest. I twisted the cigar out morosely in an ashtray; then suddenly buried my face in my hands and said, “Oh, my God.” I peered at her through a latticework of fingers, and saw that she was knitting steadily, her face overcomposed; a little pale.
“How do you feel about—well, extramarital affairs, as they’re called?” I said. My plan was to pay out as little rope at a time as I could, till she was satisfied. “Kinsey has shown us that the majority—”
“You mean Augie’s been sleeping with another woman?”
I nodded. “Yes.”
“That’s all?” Her manner was suspicious. “That sent you into such a tailspin?” I would have to pay out more rope.
I rose and, flapping my hands at my sides, said: “I suppose it’s no use trying to hide anything. The woman is with child. That was it.”
The Tunnel of Love Page 17