The Tunnel of Love

by Peter de Vries

  “Cornelia’s not here, old man,” he told me. “I just got back myself from a lecture tour. I can’t tell you where she is, but I expect to hear from her. I’m leaving again the first of the week.”

  “Is Carveth there? Maybe he can tell me.”

  “He’s up at a planning committee meeting for Tanglewood, old man.”

  “How about Emory?”

  “Popped off to Rome on a Fulbright. Got it all of a sudden and arranged for a year there, while his assistant takes over. He’s studying Papal history.”

  “Well, when you say she’s not there do you mean she’s in New Haven?”

  “Oh, yes. She’s packed up and gone.”

  I sat a moment in the booth after hanging up, wondering what to tell Augie. I decided not to tell him anything that night, since he couldn’t do anything about it anyway. I would take counsel with myself tomorrow, when I could think more clearly. He was waiting for me near the booth when I came out.

  “Everything’s O.K. Don’t worry about it,” I said.

  “You talked to her?”

  “Yes. There’s time to work something else out. Come on, have a drink.”

  I had three or four myself in an effort to recapture my earlier vinous mood. I danced a couple of polkas with my wife. Everybody was having a good time. I remembered nothing much from midnight until the next morning when eight o’clock struck, like a hammer on my head. I was reassembling the night’s impressions in the shower, later on, when I placed what was weighing on my mind—Augie. I spent the next two days mulling over whether to tell him the truth. After all, there was nothing he could do about it. But maybe there was and I couldn’t think of it. Or maybe he would want to know, or should. What a responsibility. I stepped over to a mirror to see what an effect this was all having on me. I looked very discouraged, and not a little bitter. No, it was too much to shoulder alone: I would tell him.

  “I’ve been trying to decide whether to break this to you,” I said to him, “and I figure you probably should know. I didn’t talk to Cornelia. She’s already settled in.”

  “God,” he said, clutching his head, as though he were a newel post about to come apart.

  “Not necessarily,” I said. “Now let’s take a good, hard and calm look at this thing. What are the chances of—well, the Sophoclean windup to it? I take it you understand what I mean—you’ve read Sophocles?”

  “Easy does it.”

  “To begin with, there’s only a fifty-fifty chance that Rock-a-Bye will be the one to call you first. Right?”

  “They said something about thinking they’ll have something for us soon,” he said in a dry falsetto.

  “Secondly, even if you do draw Rock-a-Bye, the chances of Fate doing what we’re afraid of are mathematically so—”

  “And the time’d be just about now . . .” he went on to himself. “And the way they make a special point of doing everything in their power to match . . . Christola.”

  Here I began to rummage for the moral in Augie’s life. Did it lie in this burgeoning irony, that the very virtue he had come to present might at the last make him vulnerable to calamity? Was the point that he had not been a complete rogue, only half a one? That if he had really told everybody to go to hell he wouldn’t be behind the eight ball now? I had hoped it was the reverse: that it was in the fires of illicit fatherhood that he was to be shriven for the respectable. I had to believe that.

  “Well, anyway, there’s nothing you can do about it,” I said. “There’s a kind of relief in that—in pure helplessness. Nothing to do now but wait and see.”

  “Yes,” he sighed. “I guess you’re right. It’s in the lap of the gods.”

  Nineteen

  IT was a viewpoint from which I would have distilled more comfort had I not the sense of its being partially in my own lap. From being merely privy to Augie’s affairs I had progressed to a condition of intimate involvement in them, so intimate that the same quivers of apprehension charged us both. We were emotional Siamese twins, to the extent, at least, of being in a three-legged race for whose duration we were fraternally lashed. And one of the length of whose course we had no foreknowledge. It was, therefore, with a simultaneous plummet of fear and wave of relief that I heard Augie say, having called me at my office from the suburbs, “I’ve got news for you.”

  “Make it brief and end on a note of hope.”

  “One of the agencies just called. They’ve got something for us. It’s a boy.”

  Tracing with my eye the spirals of the phone cord, I asked: “Which one?”

  “Rock-a-Bye.”

  And so out of whatever reserve of fortitude, caution, poise, or maybe just capacity for outrage, with whatever we had between us to give that this might yet take, we prepared to face the final step. The agency expected Mr. and Mrs. Poole the next afternoon at one o’clock sharp. By noon both of them were in such a swivet that they asked us to drive over with them. It was Saturday and I was home, so we all piled into our station wagon, which would better accommodate the five we expected for the return journey, or even the four of us going out, than the Pooles’ coupé. I drove, and sitting beside me Augie chainsmoked. “The nervous father,” Isolde laughed from the back, where she and Audrey sat with bunting and other gear. Augie essayed some sign of amusement too. “Probably have to carry me in,” he said.

  It was not true—we had to carry him out.

  Rock-a-Bye headquarters was a long, narrow, one-story building of white clapboard, set in a square of clipped privet. We were greeted in the reception room by a smiling gray-haired woman named Mrs. Larch. Audrey and I stayed behind in the reception room while the Pooles went back together, ushered by Mrs. Larch.

  I lit a cigarette and walked the floor. Audrey smiled at me from a chair. Both were pleased by the stew their husbands were in.

  “You look funny,” she said.

  “I feel funny.”

  “This happens every day.”

  I let it pass. I was twisting out the butt of my cigarette in an ashtray when Mrs. Larch thrust her head in and cried, “Come quick!”

  I shot through the door ahead of Audrey and pursued the trotting Mrs. Larch up a broad corridor and through another door beyond which a nurse in white was throwing water on Augie from a paper cup. Augie was spread out in an overstuffed chair with his head back. The nurse was dipping her fingers into the paper cup and baptizing him as a housewife does her ironing. Mrs. Larch took the cup from her and dashed the contents into Augie’s face. His eyelids began to flutter, and I looked elsewhere.

  Disposed nearby above a silk coverlet reposed a blue and gold parody of the features being sprinkled and slapped, unless strain had laid both Augie and me open to hallucination. Yes, that must be it, I told myself sternly, taking in the tilted blue eyes and the blond hair with reddish glints. I blinked, as though to clear my head of a mirage. With a sudden cavernous yawn on the infant’s part, the mirage did vanish. Or had that been an illusion?

  Behind me they were feeding Augie brandy from a regular glass.

  “Are you O.K., sweets?” Isolde said, chafing his wrists as Mrs. Larch tipped his head toward the brandy.

  He nodded and tried to get up. Mrs. Larch persuaded him back with a firm push of her hand on his chest and said, “Let’s move him to the front, there’s a sofa there he can lie on.” Augie made a gesture of protest, but she signed for me with a shake of her head to ignore him, and I took him by the ankles while Mrs. Larch grasped him under the arms, and we bore him to the front.

  “These make the best kind of father,” Mrs. Larch stated. “You can keep your casual husbands.”

  “In other words there’s nothing unusual about this,” I said, walking with my back to my burden. “You keep brandy on hand.”

  “You’d be surprised what we use brandy for,” the nurse said.

  “What are some of its other uses?” I chatted.

  “Are you all right, lamb?” Isolde asked. She walked flanking Augie, like a handler talking to his prize fight
er in cartoons you have seen of boxers being borne from the ring.

  “Certainly I’m all right. Let me down.”

  “All the strain, and now the excitement.”

  The collapse of an iconoclast is not among the more impressive sights in the world. Pain has been called a natural anaesthetic, once it gets unbearable, and I suppose some such process made me begin to giggle now that this thing was getting really awful. Presently I shook with laughter. I laughed so hard I damn near dropped my end of Augie. I had to pause to secure my grip on his ankles. He kicked and squirmed. “Let me down,” he ordered.

  We let him down only on the sofa, where he promptly sat up. The nurse gave him the rest of the brandy. We watched him as he finished it. I felt I could have done with a spot myself but didn’t dare ask for it.

  “What are some of its other uses?” I persisted, when I’d got my voice under control.

  “We rub it on the gums during teething,” Mrs. Larch told us. “Matter of fact, we sometimes put a drop in baby’s formula when it won’t sleep at night.” She laughed. “You might remember that when you’re walking the floor some night, because I can see this is one daddy who’s going to take his job seriously.”

  “I think I’ll report you to the state authorities, serving liquor to minors,” Augie said. We were all glad to see him kidding again.

  The nurse brought in the baby.

  “What, what a dumpling,” Isolde said.

  “He’s asleep,” Audrey said, over the nurse’s other shoulder. “Sweetest thing I ever saw. So aloof and kind of amused.”

  The nurse beamed at it. “I don’t suppose you want him.”

  “Why, have you others?” Augie said.

  “Oh, sure, take your pick,” the nurse said, really going along with this joke. “Who’d want him? Angel.”

  “Yes. I think we’ve done you proud,” Mrs. Larch said. “He even looks a little like you.”

  “Water.” Augie held out the empty glass which I took and filled from a cooler that was pointed out to me in a small adjacent office. “Little chaser,” Augie said, taking it. I walked over to the group of women clustered round the child. I thrust a hand in and chucked it under the chin. “Kitchy kitchy coo,” I said, a delicate chill going up my spine.

  We had to wait while Mrs. Larch took the parents into the small office for a few final formalities. She closed the door, but I couldn’t help overhearing snatches of conversation that were none of my business.

  “As I’ve said to your wife, Mr. Poole,” Mrs. Larch said, “we can tell you that the mother is a fine intelligent woman with artistic background, like yourself. We try to match all those things, you know—intelligence and all, as well as physical similarity. But of course any woman can make a slip. The wrong company—you know.”

  When we got away at last, I drove home as though I was trying to claw my way out of an opera. “When the duke discovers that the child he has adopted is none other than . . .”

  “Not so fast,” my wife called from the back seat where she and Isolde sat with the new addition. “Do you want to kill us?”

  I had work to do and lost no time.

  “I see what they mean about a vague resemblance,” I said. “He does have Isolde’s coloring, sort of; her complexion. And of course those blue eyes.”

  “Augie’s too,” Isolde said.

  “Mm, yes. Yes, I see what you mean.”

  “I thought that was what Mrs. Larch meant—that it was Augie he looked like.”

  “Oh, really? Perhaps so.”

  “Those slant eyes and that hair that isn’t quite blond or quite red,” Isolde said.

  “Don’t be deceived by reddish hair in a baby,” I said. “Remember, dear, how we thought every one of our kids was going to be redheaded, till we realized it’s because it’s so thin and the scalp shines through it?”

  Augie snapped a cigarette nervously out of the window. “I never saw a baby they couldn’t see resembled everybody on both sides of the family. Babies look like everybody because they look like nobody. You can’t tell anything about a baby that age. Let me hold the nipper awhile.”

  I thought we were handling it rather nicely. Now if the women could continue in their sentimental and rather touching belief that Augie had gone to pieces out of excitement, and meanwhile just go on dithering so over the infant they couldn’t see what they were looking at, why, everything might yet be all right.

  But Augie himself was far from confident. He started to take me out on those long hikes again, to hash things over. I did my best to reassure him. “Stop and consider the odds against such a thing,” I said, and when I said stop I meant just that. I led the way to a large rock, where I sat down to nurse another boiled foot. The sun was sweltering, and I had spots in front of my eyes as thick as shad roe.

  “You know damn well the odds are just the other way—we’ve been through that,” he said.

  “Shall I try to call Cornelia again? She may be back now.”

  “No. I’d rather be in doubt.”

  “Well then be in doubt. Don’t be so stubbornly sure.”

  “It struck you that way, the first look. You admitted it.”

  “Why didn’t it strike the women that way?”

  “Because they weren’t looking for it.”

  “And we were. So we ended up seeing things. You always end up seeing what you’re afraid you will.”

  But Augie was not convinced. “So now I set out across the high wire,” he said presently as we rose to resume the walk. “Because if there’s any resemblance, time will bring it out. Not blur it.”

  “Don’t even think of it,” I said, grasping his arm—more in the need of something to hold on to than to steady my friend.

  Because now we needed everything we had. This would take all our nerve and caution, all the faith and courage we had between us and that high reasoning we had pledged in our earlier walks and talks, everything we had thought and said and stolen from Thomas Wolfe. For while our position had been cooked to a cinder by the turn of events and we had suddenly to reverse the direction from which we drew our strength—having to exchange the philosophical peace implicit in the idea of a patternless anonymity for the solace of apparent Design—a great deal of what we’d settled on was still true. The lines fit anyway, and that was a God’s mercy, because if we’d had to work out an entire new routine I don’t think I’d have been able to face it.

  “Think that you turn out in the end to get what was always yours,” I said, galloping along a step behind him. “That out of all the manswarm—”

  “Cut it out about the manswarm,” Augie said. “The important thing is to watch the women. Watch them like hawks, to see if they suspect.”

  “Well let’s start back,” I said. “It’ll be getting dark soon.”

  Dark brought the added risk of his being moved by the stars to some cliché about Infinity, whose infested reaches and galactic turmoils I so deeply deplored. Even allowing for the likelihood of “pattern,” and subtracting such histrionics as there were in my Weltschmerz, there remained a legitimate irritation with the Cosmos which, if I had to put it in a word, I would describe as the basic indignity of being constantly required to look up into bottomlessness. It’s not the kind of thing to which I am by temperament suited, though everyone, of course, to his own taste.

  We got home before dark, all right, and when I did I found a letter from the new president of the P.T.A., outlining some projects she had been turning over in her mind for the coming season, soliciting my earnest and active co-operation, and expressing the hope that we would all put our shoulder to the wheel to make this a banner year.

  Twenty

  AUGIE seemed now, rather than the contrary, to have acquired a certain dignity. An added stature, if you will. We might once, for his truancies, have called him “small.” There was nothing small about the scale on which he was now cast. The thing is, he had become invested with a sort of classic Greek irony. He had adopted his own son, and if this does not
cloak a man in the Grecian absolutes then nothing in this world will.

  Watching Augie go down the street in his too-short topcoat (and the soft hat, pulled down over one eye, to which he was partial that season) you would not have suspected that here was a man who walked in the cool Sophoclean symmetries. Pushing the pram in which reclined the cargo that made it so, he would have struck you that much less as a character headed for rhetorical doom. But he knew he was and I knew it. The child grew daily more the spit of his trundler, with the jolliest impersonation of his father’s grin. Strangers pausing by his pram, and neighbors also ignorant of the adoption, invariably remarked on the resemblance. “Chip off the old block,” they would say, slapping Augie on the back. Now there was no need for us to watch our wives like hawks—that was how they watched us. Audrey was the first to suspect, or the first to come out with her suspicion. One evening I was aware of her looking at me over the rim of a magazine. I picked one up and got behind it myself.

  “It’s Augie’s, isn’t it?” she said.

  “Augie’s?” A thin smile clung to my lips, like a postage stamp insecurely pasted to a letter.

  “I didn’t see that was why he behaved the way he did at the agency because I didn’t want to see it, I guess—one of those things your mind shuts off. But it’s getting clearer every day. It’s true, isn’t it?”

  I refilled my highball glass and then went into the kitchen for some ice. “I won’t say it is or isn’t,” I said, returning. “I’ll say, suppose it is? Result: the Pooles have now got what they’ve tried—how long is it now?—to get. Leave Augie out of it for a minute. Just think of Isolde. What used to stand in the way of their getting their heart’s desire was the fact that he was irresponsible. Now it’s because he was that they have.”

  “How do you figure that out?”

  “It’s the fruit of his lechery—”

  “If we can’t discuss this without using words like the fruit of his lechery then let’s drop the whole subject. How do you reason all this out—that they’re getting their heart’s desire thanks to his wrongdoing?”