“We’ll use the Model Home.”
“Good God.”
“I’m sick of beaches and rocks, and the parlor’s no good either,” she retorted, giving me, as she often had, the sense of discontent, or of emotional fret, rather than any real joy of life. Her buxom good looks were qualified by a certain sullenness about the mouth, the corners of which were often twisted down in that grimace so common among her sex. “Daddy remembers what he did on the dikes, but I wouldn’t trust my mother not to snoop around after pretending to be asleep. It’s nerve-racking. So is all this hemming and hawing. I want to go to bed with you.”
“Greta, could we?”
“Why not? It’s locked every night and there’s not a soul in the development. Not even a watchman. And don’t start about abusing hospitality—my father doesn’t even own the house any more. It’s been sold to some people who won’t move in till summer. So I’m not going to let it go to waste. It’s completely furnished, including the bedroom. The bed’s made. It’s even turned down.”
Logistics no less than casuistry were among the arts in which I was now schooled. Greta managed to purloin a key from her father’s study, of which she had a duplicate made, restoring the original to his desk. She bought a set of peppermint-striped sheets and pillow cases to match those on the bed in the Model Home, which would naturally have to be made again after use. I had no doubt that for as long as we might have occasion to alternate linen in this dream nest she would have fresh ready when we stole in.
We walked the mile or so from her house to the subdivision, some mention having been made of Wigbaldy’s possible need for the Oldsmobile that evening. Not that I would have accepted it. While I was now fairly demoralized, as well as aflame with the prospect of an hour in his daughter’s arms, the thought of using his car to debauch his bourgeois paradise was a perfidy at which I drew the line. I carried the sheets, of which I had been given custody, in a bundle said to be a package of books I was taking to a sick friend. We cast a last look along the inhabited street up which we had come before turning in the pillared gateway of Green Knoll, under a shingle reading “The American Dream,” and striking up dark Willow Lane toward our lair.
We crept in by flashlight, extinguishing even that once we were safe within the harbor of the bedroom. We undressed in darkness, dropping our clothes on the floor in our haste to be together.
Greta’s zest during that long-pined-for hour came as no surprise to one who had tasted it in less conducive circumstances. We lay peacefully enough for some time afterward. Not as long as we might have wished, though. The traffic on the far street had not disturbed us; they were but sounds of the rude world, sweetly invading our reverie. The noise of one car seemed to detach itself from the general hum, however, till it was clear that someone had turned into the subdivision.
“Just driving through,” Greta murmured, shifting a ponderous thigh against mine. “They do it all the time.”
The vehicle drew to a stop before the Model Home. Some suspicion of the use Wigbaldy might have had for the Olds tonight began to dawn on me. The motor was shut off and, weak with horror, we recognized Mr. Wigbaldy’s voice as he shepherded some clients up the stairs. Sounds of words and laughter mingled with the footsteps as a key was inserted in the lock.
“My God,” Greta whispered. “What’ll we do? Oh, my God …”
I could not manipulate my tongue into the variety of positions necessary for speech—not that I had any constructive suggestions to offer. We sat bolt upright, yet paralyzed. Then we popped to our feet and began to scramble about in the darkness for our individual clothing, only to have a light from a corridor switch send us back into bed, where under the covers, lying on our backs, we tried to wriggle into such garments as we had managed in the interval to snatch up—I into some underthing of Greta’s, as it happened, and she into mine. In my panic I tried to keep clear a portion of my mind with which to evaluate the prospects; in particular, how much time we might have in which to make ourselves presentable. That depended on which of two available routes through the house Wigbaldy took his clients on. One was through the dinette and kitchen first, which would give us time to dress, possibly even escape. My knowledge of his tactics led me to fear that he would begin with the sleeping quarters so as to “climax” the tour with the electrically furnished kitchen so impressive to the ladies. A woman’s voice in the imminent corridor saying “Look at this wallpaper, Art. Isn’t it artistic?” confirmed this surmise. Apparently the visitors were to have their climax first.
They were now inches from the open door. With what remnants of sanity remained to me, I speculated that surprise might be as disrupting to the intruders as to us, and that they might, after noting that the bed was occupied, be relied upon to beat a hasty retreat, leaving us some interval in which at least to dress. If we kept our faces concealed we might, God knew how, escape recognition. So I whispered “Lie still” to the still writhing Greta, and pulled the sheet over our heads.
I heard Mrs. Wigbaldy’s voice. “Now this is the master bedroom here, Miz Walton,” she said, feeling along the wall for the switch. “I want you to notice—”
A ghastly light broke over our heads as we pulled the sheet higher, wrapping it around our ears. We lay on our stomachs. A collective gasp came from the arrested party.
“Well, God verdam …” said Wigbaldy, after what is termed by writers of romantic fiction “a long moment.” “What is me dit?”
He drew back the sheet, enough to answer the question. The discovery was dramatized by a cry from Mrs. Wigbaldy, who was no doubt aided in her identification of the bodies by the female clothes, familiar to her, strewn about the wall-to-wall carpeting. Greta herself was now emitting sharp little squeals of horror and protest which were muffled by the pillow in which she had buried her face. I reached around and jerked the sheet back over our heads. “Can’t you go away, please?” I said. “We’ll discuss it later.”
I was aware of Mr. Wigbaldy shooing his prospects toward the kitchen, but Mrs. Wigbaldy came a step closer to the bed. She was a short broad woman, with an extremely wide middle narrowing steeply toward her shoulders, in shape not unlike a brandy snifter. She bent down and through the bed sheet shrieked into my ear the single word:
“Prude!”
This good woman, at best only half Americanized, had a number of such imprecise terms of which that example comes most readily to mind. She knew it only to be an epithet relating to conduct in matters of sex, and took it to mean a wanton indulgence therein, unable to imagine a system of values in which an opposite attitude could possibly be deemed a fault. She flung many another denunciation my way, curses cut short when Mr. Wigbaldy, having seen to the safe disposal of his guests, came back for what was now a hysterical wife. Hauled forcibly from the scene, she shouted that I was a skunk and a rat and a number of other things including “Slut!” and that she would have me for a son-in-law as speedily as the law permitted, and no nonsense about it.
Thus that specter was materializing which had of old haunted me as I had stood staring into the windows of borax furniture stores, with the added sting that the dinette and bedroom “suits” which had so oppressed my spirit must now be broadened to include the walls within which they stood. For there was presently—after somewhat more sober discussion with the rather more realistic Wigbaldy—talk of our taking one of the “homes” in Green Knoll, Greta and I, with the down payment as a wedding present. “From me and the missus,” said Wigbaldy, with shattering good will.
The next week was a week in hell. There was no religious excuse for wronging the girl in this case since we were of the same faith or, what was even more to the point, lukewarm about the same faith. The horror was of those dream houses and what they typified in the way of a progressively more standardized culture, which one assumed some rapport with on the part of the girl since her father built them. What one saw was fifty years of stupefaction flat as the plains of Illinois, with its boredom at mealtimes and children to perpet
uate it all. Imagine my surprise then at the answer I heard when, sitting in the parked Oldsmobile in sight once again of breaking waves, I asked a question generated by prolonged view of the petulant profile.
“What’s the matter, Greta? Don’t you want to go through with it?”
“It’s not that so much as living in one of those awful houses.”
She sat forward, chin on fist, in the manner of The Thinker, while I waited in amazement for her to continue.
“I know you like luxury and security, Don, but …” The rest came out in a distraught gasp—“A development!”
“Darling, you mean—?”
“I hate them! I’d rather live in a tent.”
I writhed on the seat, raking my hair with joy. One had for months been so busy fumbling at clothing in plotted assignations that it hadn’t occurred to one to make the acquaintance of the girl with whom one was thus enmeshed. Conspiracy had monopolized all our thoughts.
“You mean you hate those houses too, and those awful breakfast nooks?”
“The very word depresses me. I want a house. I’m not saying Evanston or Winnetka, necessarily, or even the North Side, but a house, for us to be us in. To …”
I scarcely heard. Fear of the closing snare had blinded me to everything but the snare itself, to the very soul of the maid with whom I struggled within it. It was one of those simple apocalypses that open one’s eyes suddenly to the obvious. Instead of seeing oneself at one end of a table, alien to all in the room including its other occupant, one saw himself and his wife linked in a companionate amusement with everything in sight—and, yes, a good deal of what lay beyond the windows. How we would ridicule it all! What fun we would have deriding the world, until something better came along.
“Well, I mean if you hate those houses that much too, why, hell, let’s get married and move into one as soon as possible,” I said, taking her hand. “We’ve got to make a start somewhere, some way, and that seems easiest at the moment. I mean financially and all. I’m not proud. And it isn’t as though we had to stay in the damned thing the rest of our lives, is it?”
She sat huddled over herself a moment, and spoke, when she did, with a characteristic moodiness.
“I even dread marriage itself, to tell you the truth.”
I moved closer and put an arm around her. “Darling, Greta. I never dreamed we had so much in common.”
six
The discovery of a bond with Greta other than physical set up within me a partial willingness to marry without completely stilling my anxieties about entering into that state. The resulting turmoil might be likened to that produced by those electric food mixers with two whisks geared to revolve in opposite directions. My mind was like a bowl of batter being simultaneously churned in contradictory ways by such a mechanism. Until, at length, the more recent of my excitements subsided, the relief of finding my apprehensions qualified wore off, and the apprehension alone remained—as though one set of blades had ceased to rotate, leaving a single agitation. Dread became again uppermost and, cursing my luck and myself, I wondered how I could possibly extricate myself from such a muddle. It was then that deliverance came from an unexpected quarter. Perhaps not totally unexpected, since it involved a factor in my life of which I have already given due account: my health.
Late hours and, as they said then, “dissipation” had weakened a constitution none too sturdy to begin with. In the damp months of late spring I developed a cough, accompanied by a feeling of the most leaden fatigue. The condition persisted long enough for me to seek the services of that dubious healer and old friend, Doc Berkenbosch.
“It’s not brownchitis,” he announced one evening when he had called me into his office to communicate the findings from an X ray he had advised, “but it’s the lungs.” He cleared his throat noisily, as though scraping the words together from the depths of his own chest cavity. “Just the one actually, and only the apex—meaning it’s only barely started and very minor. There, that make you feel better? Och ja, boy, the Lord gives us these things to bear. ‘Ours not to reason why, ours but to do and—’” He broke off, rejecting the rhyme toward which he had inadvertently stumbled, and began to throw some mail into a wastebasket as a means of bolstering my confidence. “And He gives us, thank God, the means of detecting them in time. Take my word this is nothing, it could be a blessing. Give you a warning to slow down. Take a little rest.”
“How long?” I asked, striving to conceal the pleasure aroused in me by this diagnosis.
Doc shrugged. “These things can’t be predicted. Year maybe. Maybe eight months, maybe eighteen. Now, now.”
I had risen and walked to the window, where I stood gazing out at the tarred roofs and jutting chimneys the better to mask my emotions, as well as to gain a moment in which to ponder my good fortune. Doc came over and laid a hand on my shoulder.
“Don’t be bitter.”
“No.”
“Because your hemogoblin ain’t half bad, meaning your general condition can be counted on to help you throw it off. These little tubercles, I believe they call them, first show up on the apex. The fact you’ve got only one such spot on only one apex means—Come here.”
He drew me to a wall on which the X ray was clipped to an illuminated panel, and pointed to a spot which I could scarcely distinguish from its surrounding shadows.
“Here you have the bronchi, at the point where they empty into the diatribe. There’s the lung legion—a very slight legion, as those things go, take my word for it. Rest, plenty of fresh air, and you’ll be as good as new in a year or less. Climate is a help too. Look, why don’t you pack up and head out to Colorado for a bit? Our church has a crackerjack sanitarium out there, you know.”
“Colorado!”
“Now, now.”
The prospect of putting a thousand miles between myself and the Wigbaldys contributed greatly to the courage with which I was able to face my “blow”—a spectacle of grace and spirit which all who came under its spell found inspiring, a lesson worth taking to heart. This certainly included the Wigbaldys themselves, to whom I broke the news en famille, so as to spare Greta and myself the pains of private disclosure. Our numbers did blunt the moment’s edge by somewhat diffusing the consternation that greeted my announcement, made with a certain gallant nonchalance.
“So it seems, you see, the old bellows are nipped. Nothing much, but it means putting oneself in dry dock for a bit, if you know what I mean.”
“How long?”
“That you never can tell. Sometimes those things go on for years. Not that one is really ever the … So under the circumstances I don’t feel I have the right to expect Greta to …” I said, coughing discreetly. “There, there, now, Mrs. Wigbaldy.”
“I called you a whore. That was wrong.”
“It’s no matter. We’ll just forget the whole thing.”
I was not the only one for whom the cloud had a silver lining. Even greater unexpected dividends were yielded my queer and complicated father, whose faith was finally bolstered and stabilized in the following manner.
Now the church was running a hospital for its own, not a charitable institution for every Tom, Dick, and Harry with tuberculosis; thus the qualifications of any claimant to the fabulously low rate of six dollars a week for members in good standing, as against more than triple that for nonmembers, were rigidly passed on. Since my father was the bill-payer in this case, it was his affiliation with the church that was duly reviewed—and found to be anything but shipshape. In fact he was up for excommunication, following a renaissance of his Doubt stimulated by a reading of the atheistic pamphlets of Robert Ingersoll. The last thing he had flung out to the delegation of elders come to labor with him in a last-ditch warning had been, “Don’t bother to fire me—I quit!” This made him eligible for the steep fee, rather than the nominal, unless there was a sudden and radical change of heart. Evidence of this was presently forthcoming.
A tribal scene occurred more charged with hysteria, if poss
ible, than that precipitated by Louie’s announcement of the nature and contents of my aunt’s belly. Pa tortured his bandanna and downed many a whiskey at a table thumped by his brother Jake, who said, “You see what you get for doubting God’s word? Terrible expense!”
“Which we’ll all have to chip in and help,” cried Jake’s wife, a woman ever torn between self-interest and family loyalty. “Poor as we are ourselves.”
“We go all to the poorhouse,” my mother moaned, wringing her hands.
From between cool sheets I heard the distant sound of tumult, shifting to a minor key as castigation gave way to remonstrance, swelling once more to a note of triumph as my father made his historic decision for Christ. A hymn was sung, “Bringing in the Sheaves”; then they all trooped into my bedroom to relate with beaming faces that Satan’s grip on my father had at last been broken. Another sinner had been bound to the divine will through adversity (mine, as it happened, but that was a technicality). Pa was going to the consistory tomorrow night to affirm his reversal of heart, soundness of doctrine, and gratitude to God for salvation from a fate worse than death. Testimonials to this effect were heard now from the principal, after which they all dropped to their knees to pray. “Don’t you want to join us?” Uncle Jake asked me, his face reflecting escape from the hell by which, as his wife had intimated, they too had been fleetingly singed. I replied that being flat on my back I was in a position more prostrate than theirs and could pray as well in it.
This over, I raised a hand in sign of weariness. I had no wish to break up the religious revival going on at the foot of my bed, nor the social life there either, but I had been ordered to get plenty of rest, and rest I intended to get in preparation for the arduous journey ahead of me. I softened these words with a little joke. “Now nobody will have to cough anything up except me,” I said, smiling wanly. Oh, how they laughed and hugged and very nearly appreciated me! They were all on hand to see me off on the Burlington Zephyr, on which I arrived in Denver the next day, refreshed in spirit from the hours of gently rocking solitude. A pick-up truck from the sanitarium whisked me and my luggage out past the city limits to the hospital, where, having been ushered into the admitting office, I heard the institutional door clang shut behind me and saw an orderly appear. “This way,” he said, taking my grips, and led the way into the back regions from which he had come.
The Blood of the Lamb: A Novel Page 7