“But Cindy doesn’t. It’s a lot of work and it costs a lot.”
“Just the same.”
“I suppose they both like being able to do it. But next year—” Dubiously she measured the small room with her eyes. “We’d have to have some sort of outdoor picnic.”
“In midwinter?”
“We could pretend your father and mother were married in June, 1905, instead of January, 1905.”
He counted fingers.
“That would have made Thorn a five-month premie—he wouldn’t like that.”
She said, “No, he wouldn’t,” and went back to the bedroom ahead of him. He washed, chose one of his three ties, and strolled over to the windows. They were in the rear of the house and he looked out at the backs of the other four-story apartment houses, identical with each other and his own, that ranged chunkily around the interior “garden.” The afternoon light was fading from winter-dry grass and red brick walls, outlines were softening, sounds muting. He liked this time of day.
Martin Heights was one of the pioneer “Garden Developments” on Long Island, reasonably priced to begin with and then low-priced during the black depth of the depression when he and Abby had moved into their $42.00-a-month living room, bedroom, kitchen, and bath. In fifteen years, the initial strictness about community rules had waned and then died. Baby carriages were now permitted anywhere within the enclosure instead of only on the crosswalks, and children’s bicycles and scooters and toys leaned against every available yard of brick wall. But the redness of the brick had dimmed, the shrubs had grown; only about one in three of the young maples planted at rigid intervals twenty years before had taken firm root and flourished, and now the casual spacing of the stripped trees let one forget that a purposeful landscape architect had originally put them there.
Not bad, Gregory thought. You’re supposed to chafe against anything so suburban, but I rather like it. Here and there a single window, or a string of windows, was already lighted and this pleased him also. During daylight, the unblinking panes, in their undeviating horizontals crossed by verticals, gave the square a hard precision, but at twilight, the softening began, and he was always responsive to it.
He looked forward to the family evening ahead. It would be uneventful but free of strain; he would not have to devote most of his energy to combating an inner frozen shakiness, as he would at any other large social gathering. He never thought of himself as antisocial, but he shrank from meeting new people and always had; a pitiless knot of shyness began to tie up inside him at the very idea of walking into a room where he would find strangers. He never knew what to say; exploratory chatter was notably not one of his gifts.
He assumed that this must stem from something buried deep in his earliest childhood but he did not often struggle to unearth it. Children developed one way or another; his sisters and Thorn were quite the opposite, but as far back as he could remember himself at all, he was painfully uneasy with new people. By the time he was seven or eight, he had heard himself called “a timid little thing” many times, and when he was twelve—
Once again he was at Thorn’s sixteenth birthday party, the bespectacled kid brother in knee pants ignored by the crowd of guests who were all as old as Thorn. He was desperately anxious to join in, to seem as carefree as they, when suddenly, prompted by he knew not what, he addressed himself to Thorn’s special girl. In his piping voice, he loudly announced, “Next week I’m going to have a puppy,” and Janie Hyatt said, “You don’t look pregnant,” and the whole room rocked with laughter.
He was again running out of the door, away from that laughing, away from the eyes, away from the strange faces—
Gregory Johns came back to the present. Being happy with Abby had helped him conquer most of his shyness; he rather thought he could have outgrown it completely, had it not suited him to remain its victim. Once, years ago, he had offered this hypothesis to Abby; she had looked at him with wise and merry eyes, and said, “Nobody ever wrote a chapter at a big party.”
One of the many sound good things about Abby was that she had accepted him as he was and never sought to change him. She seemed no more gregarious than he, though he was sure that if she had married a man who liked to go out a great deal, and to entertain often at home, like Thornton, her adaptability would have made her like it too. As it was, she seemed content with his family and the Barnards and a few neighbors in the same street—the Smiths, the Feins, and especially the Zatkes, whose apartment was just the other side of their living-room wall, and whom Abby had come to regard as another kind of family.
She had no family of her own now, except for distant cousins. She had grown up in a small town on the Cape; her father had been a lawyer who doubled as summer renting agent for Wellfleet and Truro, and her mother, also an Abigail and always called by all three syllables of it, had been as Puritan and reserved as if she had come down intact from her eighteenth-century ancestors. Abby had gone to Pembroke College in Providence, expecting to be a teacher or librarian, but after two years, she had left and gone to New York. She had enrolled in a short story course at Columbia, and there they had met when she spoke to him after one of his stories had been read and discussed in class. “It’s awfully good,” she had said; “it could be the first chapter of a novel.” “I’m writing a novel,” he had answered and they had stayed in the hall outside the classroom, talking for a long time. He was never, even then, ill at ease when he spoke of writing.
Gregory turned away from the window. He could hear Abby tugging and pulling at the warped door of the cabinet in the kitchen and he went in quickly.
“I keep forgetting to plane that thing down,” he said.“Here, let me.” He pulled at it with short jerks; it flew open and banged at his shoulder. Abby lifted out a long white box prettily tied with loops of red and silver ribbon, and he remembered teasing her on Christmas mornings, for straightening out and rolling up discarded bows and bindings.
“I’ll remind you about planing it tomorrow,” she said. “And don’t forget your letter.”
“What letter?” Immediately he thought, My world government piece, and felt sheepish. To have risen early, while the family was asleep, with the idea for the short editorial strong in his mind, to have sat freezing on a kitchen stool while he wrote it, to have liked it better than anything he had ever sent in to the committee—and then to have been on the point of leaving it behind on his desk!
Pre-school mind, he amended ruefully, and fetched the letter. He followed Abby through the door and thrust it at her. She was talking to Mary Zatke in the small square hallway that served their adjoining apartments, and took it absently, but he knew she would see that it was mailed. He remembered Barnard’s postcard and gave that to Abby also.
“—at your mother-in-law’s?” Mary Zatke was asking.
“No, at my brother-in-law’s.”
“Well, tell me all about it tomorrow.”
“There won’t be much to tell,” said Gregory.
CHAPTER TWO
IF THOSE FIVE O’CLOCK CHIMES could have drifted all the way down Fifth Avenue to the noble arch at Washington Square and then on for another few miles southward, they might have brought a moment of cheer to a tall fair-haired man in an office at the lower tip of Manhattan.
As it was, the only sound that came to him was the restless drumming of his own fingertips on the desk blotter before him. It was a muted tattoo in an odd rhythm, made by running the tips of four fingers rapidly over the blotter and then striking his ring finger twice against it before beginning the little arpeggio all over again with his pinky. He had repeated this accented pattern dozens of times and did not know he was doing it. All he knew was that he wished to hell the evening ahead were over. It would be so dull. So absolutely goddam dull.
As his fingers flew, his eyes remained fixed on the top page of a memo pad at one side of the blotter. Nothing was written there, but in neat printing across the top ran the legend,
“From the office of G. Thornton Johns.�
�� Below that, in two banks of smaller capitals appeared
LIFE FIRE
HEALTH MARINE
ACCIDENT BONDING
BURGLARY LIABILITY
COMPENSATION AUTOMOBILE
The stacked words caught his attention and his flying fingers came to rest. He picked up a pencil and began to draw a descending line connecting the top corners of the final letters in the first bank, and then the top corners of the initial letters in the second bank. He could not get a true V and wished, for the hundredth time, that “burglary” had two more characters in it, to maintain the symmetry of the arrangement from the four-letter word at the top to the twelve-letter word at the bottom. Four, six, eight, eight, twelve was no good, he thought, and began to count the letters on the right bank; the right bank was even worse. Four, six, seven, nine, ten—he shoved the pad away disconsolately.
To describe Thornton Johns merely as a tall, handsome, fair-haired man is to ignore those particularities of contour and coloring which would set him apart from other tall, handsome, and fair-haired men. He would have stood three inches over six feet if he were bald, or if his hair lay spraddled or pasted flat to his scalp. But slightly over an inch was added to his six-three by the vigorously upstanding cropped hair on top of his—elsewhere—closely cut skull. This haircut gave considerable distress to his barber, who would murmur, without a halt in the rhythm of his rapid snipping, “Crew cut—she ain’t such the rage now, Mr. Johns.”
“Yeah, I know, but I like her.”
He did not like the tow color of his hair, fearing that someone might take it for white or gray. No one ever did. So lean a face, so bright an eye, so vigorous a body gave no associative hints of middle age. He still looked the ex-college athlete, which he was, and if occasionally he had to frown at the bathroom scale in the morning, he had the requisite will power to cut out carbohydrates and butterfats for enough days to make frowning unnecessary.
Now, however, Thornton Johns was frowning. His lower lip was caught at the left of his mouth by vexed teeth and there was a scowl in his eyes, which were blue, and noticeable in that they gave the hasty observer an impression of being triangular. This was because their upper lids had a down-slanting fold at the outer corners, a characteristic no other Johns child could boast.
It may have been the continuing pressure of incisor and canine on his lower lip that suddenly told him he was working himself up to a state, and he at once relaxed, told himself not to be a sorehead, and immediately felt better. Just the same, the evening ahead would be dull. He liked parties and he liked his parents and he liked his family but when it came to combining all of them something terrible happened. Were all parents so sentimental about their wedding anniversary? For a full week leading up to every January 17th for as far back as he could remember, he had wondered precisely the same thing. But year succeeded year, his parents’ sentiment grew, and more and more small fry in the Johns family grew with it, becoming big enough fry to be expected to attend. Eighteen for dinner is what it would be this time. And, as usual, at his house.
“The gathering of the clans—or rather, the blathering,” he had called it at the luncheon today and it had got a laugh. It was easy to get a laugh at the Premium Club, easy for him anyway. Everything seemed to come out with a funny twist the moment he stepped on the small dais; his vocabulary changed; odd turns of expression came to him without effort. Long ago he, and others, thank Heaven, had discovered his unexpected ability to ad-lib, and at most of their meetings he was Chairman, Master of Ceremonies, Proposer of Toasts, and Unofficial Host to visitors or newcomers.
It made him feel good when he saw appreciative faces turned up to him and heard the low contagious sound start in their throats. It made him stand straighter and feel like somebody. Since he had turned forty, three years ago, his morale seemed to need such boosts more frequently. Sometimes he felt as if sarcastic movies were forever being made about hucksters, and a play called Death of a Salesman was getting rave reviews in its out-of-town tryouts. It was opening on Broadway soon, but he might not even see it. Sometimes it was frightening to be a salesman.
But when that ripple of laughter came up at him, he forgot his jitters about the future. Today he had been at his best. “Fellow Insurance Vendors,” he had started dourly, “I’m in a grouchy frame of mind.” Even that had made them smile expectantly. “Tonight I’ll be feeding and entertaining seventeen people at my own expense and not one hot prospect in the bunch!” They had roared and for the rest of his talk they had lapped up every word.
That was thin comfort now, with the inundation less than two hours off. Cindy dreaded the evening too and had talked darkly this morning, as she did every Thanksgiving and Christmas, of giving up their nine-room apartment and moving into a tiny one, “like everybody else in your family.”
He was the only one who could play host to the whole gang at once; a momentary warmth coursed through him. His attention was caught by a long narrow envelope beside his memo pad and he reached for it. It was of heavy paper, almost cardboard, terra cotta in color, and tied around with a flat half-inch tape of the same tint. He yanked at one end of the band; the pleated packet opened fanwise and he drew out some two dozen folded documents, green-bordered and crisp as new dollar bills at a teller’s cage. Roy Tribble ought to have more coverage, he thought, my letter about it is perfectly sound. Even second-string radio stars are managing to get into television on the side and that means added income. Was it not a cardinal principle of life that added income should mean added coverage?
He riffled quickly through the documents and then threw them on the desk. He didn’t feel constructive about Roy Tribble or anything else; morning would have to do. He rose, went to the window, and looked out at the dying afternoon. Below and beyond him he could see the Battery and the confluence of New York’s two great rivers. Movement, flow, direction—a man wanted to be going somewhere instead of feeling impaled on the sharp stake of routine. He watched the fat twin funnels of a huge steamship moving slowly down the Hudson; England, he thought, Paris, skiing in Switzerland, sun-bathing on the Riviera. He turned slightly to the left and saw a rusty dirty old freighter nosing out of the East River. South America? The Azores? The West Coast of Africa?
He needed a vacation; it wasn’t like him to be beefing about he knew not what. A week’s fishing would fix him right up. Even when he was a boy he had learned there was no better way to get over things—scoldings, bad marks, or any other misery—no quicker way than to drop everything and go fishing. “Let’s go to the dock, Gregory,” he’d say and the kid would rush to the cellar for their tackle. As long ago as that, Gregory never let anyone say “Greg” or use any other nickname; in a shy, unspectacular fashion, he was independent even then, never bothering about what anybody thought of him, never trying to be popular at school by going out for the teams. Fishing was the only sport Gregory was good at; when he was no more than eight or nine he’d learned everything he could teach him about bait and hooks and spinners and reels. On a thousand summer days they’d fished for perch or lafayette off the dock at Freeton or, when they could sneak a rowboat and get out into the channel, for flounder or fluke or small bass.
The smell of summer was suddenly in the room with him; melting tar between the wide dry planks of the dock, the faint saltiness in the wind blowing off the bay, the marshy odor of low tide and flats. It was funny, he thought, how often his mind turned back to boyhood as he grew older. Everything had been simple then; he was the older brother and Gregory his special charge in a family of girls, and the feeling of being the kid’s hero was wonderful. A shadowy imitation of that welled up even now, whenever Gregory turned to him for advice and help on some business matter—it was still pleasant.
Five years ago, with Gregory in uniform at a Washington desk, it had seemed natural enough that he, the businessman of the family, should fill in for a while on business matters at home. Gregory had quit his literary agent, and his small affairs were in a mess. Nobody as careless as M
arilyn Laird should have been anybody’s agent, it turned out, but once the bolloxed-up accounts were straightened out, once the incomplete records and inaccurate files were put to rights, the rest had been easy. There was nothing particularly hard about familiarizing himself with Gregory’s book contracts and asking around until he knew about publishing practice in general, on royalties, rights, options, and the rest of it. It was a welcome relief from insurance anyway, and a hobby had been born.
A man needed hobbies just as he needed vacations. It would be even better if that week’s fishing weren’t a solitary affair. Cindy had been talking about Florida a good deal lately but that wasn’t what he meant either. He looked again at the freighter below him; she wasn’t nosing along any more; she was out in open water, full steam up. It was years since he had taken a winter vacation—
A harrowing memory of day before yesterday’s check to the Collector of Internal Revenue ripped through him. He abandoned his post at the window, went back to his desk, and put a despondent finger on the buzzer. Beyond the frosted glass of the closed door, an open drawer was thumped home and a chair on creaky casters was pushed across linoleum. The door swung in and a caressing voice said, “Yes, Mr. Johns?”
He didn’t look up at her. There were times when it was better not to meet that cool glance. For two years he had known she would look at him so and in no other way, turning to him the face of an indifferent angel while she spoke in a low voice that assured him he was her one concern, and often that knowledge did not disturb him. But this was not one of the times. This was one of the quite-opposite times, when she became a symbol of all the unreachables in the world. Her name was Diana.
He looked at his desk sternly. “I won’t wait for the draft of the Tribble letter after all,” he told his memo pad. “I won’t have time to revise it.”
“You won’t?” Surprise, regret, understanding—all were in the two syllables.
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