The Husband

by Sol Stein

  Finally she said, “Is there a chance you’ll be back, Daddy?”

  He looked at her lovely face, now red-eyed and tear-stained, a puffiness he hated to see there, and wondered how much he could lie to her and whether he should.

  “Anything is possible,” he said hesitatingly, “but I wouldn’t give it too much hope.”

  She knew he was saying no. He felt better for it because it meant he had not really lied.

  “Uncle Jack says you’re going to divorce us, Daddy.”

  Damn Jack.

  “Jack is a lawyer, Maggie dear. Don’t pay too much attention to what he says.”

  She seemed puzzled. Peter, flooded with feeling, took her face in his hands.

  “Maggie,” he said, his cords not working right; the sound of her name came out garbled, unclear.

  “Yes, Daddy?” she said, trying to help along.

  “You—know—I love you?”

  He hadn’t intended the questioning inflection, but she knew, oh, she knew.

  “And Jonathan, too.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “You see,” he said, wishing to Christ he could be articulate for ten consecutive seconds, “Mommy and I have a problem between us which we’re going to have to, you know, solve. Solving it may—well, it means, probably means I will be living with someone else.”

  “Is Miss Kilter going to be your wife now?”

  Why was he fudging? She was being so direct.

  “It’s too early to tell yet.”

  “Will Mommy have another husband?”

  “Have you asked her?”

  “I can’t ask Mommy questions like that. Besides, she cries whenever I ask her anything.”

  Peter swallowed.

  “The important thing, Maggie love, is that a father never, really never divorces his children.”

  And as he said it, he had his first knowledge that it was the biggest lie of all.

  “Listen, how about that ice cream soda now?” Peter asked.

  “We’re not supposed to,” she said, visibly delighted by the prospect.

  “Let’s see now,” he said, “we could meet in Howard Johnson’s. It’s just two blocks—”

  “I know where it is, Daddy.”

  “I’ll be waiting in a booth.”

  She squeezed his hand.

  This time there was a quick knock-knock on the door. Mr. Anderson appeared, displeasure reigning on his countenance. “I’m afraid you’ve taken advantage of the rules, Mr. Carmody. I regret that.”

  “What do you mean?” The instant Peter said that, he knew. The intercom on the desk had been left open.

  Peter was livid. “You eavesdropped on my private conversation with my daughter?”

  “It’s a precaution we take. Warranted, it would seem.”

  “Why, you son of a bitch.” Peter regretted not the words but that he had spoken them in front of Margaret.

  “That will be all, Mr. Carmody. You may leave now.”

  “I will not be told when or where to leave my own daughter.”

  “I wish you hadn’t decided to be difficult.”

  “I’m not being difficult. You’re being inhuman.”

  “I’m glad Mrs. Carmody warned us of your eccentricities. Officer?”

  The policeman must have been standing just beyond the open door. He looked large and stupid.

  “What the hell is going on here?” asked Peter. Margaret, frightened, was instantly at her father’s side.

  “Nobody wants any trouble, mister,” said the policeman. “I’m taking your little girl home.”

  Margaret moved around behind her father.

  “Who called the cops?” Peter shouted at Mr. Anderson.

  “Please lower your voice,” said Mr. Anderson.

  “I’ll shove your teeth down your throat. Who called the cops?”

  “Nobody’s shoving nothing,” said the cop, taking Margaret’s arm. “Mister, you better get out of here peaceably or I’ll run you in.”

  “For what, having an ice cream soda with my daughter?”

  “For breaking the law,” said the cop.

  “What law?”

  It was insane, the policeman pulling on Margaret’s arm, he holding onto her.

  The policeman unhooked his billy from his belt.

  “Not in school,” said Mr. Anderson, his alarmed eyes counseling the law.

  “No!” said Margaret.

  The policeman pointed the billy straight at Peter’s face.

  “You take off, mister, or I’ll get a squad car here in two minutes flat.”

  In his mind’s eye, Peter saw himself punching Anderson, ducking the cop’s billy, grabbing Margaret and running with her through the door and down the stairs and out and away, only to be stopped by the policeman’s billy crashing down, then a court, a judge, and jail, perhaps no visitation rights at all because of violent temper; he couldn’t win.

  In seconds, Peter was out the door, without even—ashamed—saying good-bye to Margaret, rage thumping in his chest and brain.

  *

  He walked the streets of the city, refusing to believe he could not control the events of his life, that his daughter was not his own, that his conversation with her had been listened to, that Rose had written the letter, that Rose had requested that a policeman take Margaret home, that the web of his life was loose strings, all the connections disintegrating.

  “Scotch,” he told the barman as he settled on the stool. “Double.”

  The tavern was filled with construction workers. He was the only one in a suit. The others stared at him. Fuck them, he thought, bolting the drink and gesturing for another. The experienced barman served half a dozen beers down the line, taking his time before bringing Peter another double. This one, Peter noticed, just reached the line on the shot glass, not near the rim, as had the first one. He might have trouble getting another soon. He had enough trouble. He paid off the barman and went out onto the street, which seemed peculiarly ablaze with sunlight that hurt his eyes, and he didn’t have his dark glasses with him. Why was it so bright so near the end of the day?

  The second tavern he picked was one where he could sit at a table out of sight. He didn’t want people staring at him. Not now. He tried to enunciate his order carefully.

  He was not a drunk. He simply needed another drink.

  He imagined the lecture he would deliver if Jonathan, some years hence, caught with a marijuana cigarette, would say he wasn’t an addict, you don’t become addicted to marijuana, it was a clarifying experience, the pressures were on him, school, girl friend, problems. Marijuana cleared the air; he needed it. Would Peter understand?

  Generations do not understand each other’s vices. These new kids, the dropouts, the hippies, even the non-hippies who did the college bit—didn’t they make sex and love and live with each other with a casualness that would defeat too-quick marriage, cut down divorce? Or was that an illusion? Or would they get divorced more often but more easily?

  It wouldn’t be the same.

  Because his glass was empty, he ordered another drink.

  Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. True or false? The ends remain the same—power, accomplishment, freedom to say no or yes. It was the means that changed from generation to generation. And not the kinds of lies—lying was mankind’s great tool for making do when the truth was useless—but the form the lies took. The lie about divorce was once necessary to conceal the fact that fallible men fouled their own most intimate arrangements, and if insight came, what a human being wants is a second chance.

  Okay, divorce is no crime, not anymore, but the children business? What grim architect of marital warfare decided that children were the ultimate weapon?

  Children were God’s objective. Man’s, too, when he found out immortality was a fake storefront: how go on if not through children? Part of me will live after me, feet walking the earth rather than pie in the sky. At least, they’ll think of me when I’m gone, or will they? Do they? Som
e. Sometimes. Not much assurance there, he thought

  “I want one more double,” he said, making the waitress a witness to his resolve.

  Children weren’t just for putting flowers on the grave, for wearing one’s face around life, for keeping the name on mailboxes somewhere. The trick of children—a colossal trick worthy of God—was that they were really not children but independent people, independent of their parents often before they were independent of the customs, clichés of living—the umbrella called society. And as independents, some of them were lousy. I mean, let’s face it, he thought, one could have kids that were just half good, or no good, or bores, or untalented, or mean or stupid. It’s not likely they’d be very stupid or very mean if the parents were smart and the upbringing somewhat decent, but the world was littered with successive generations that seemingly had greater differences than similarities. Wasn’t genetics itself a kind of freak-out, skipping a generation for important traits, or was that part of the master plan? Didn’t the Indians have the grandparents teach the children most of the time? Was that a clue?

  But some of those independent people—new name for children—were quicker, smarter, better, more talented, wiser, yes, by age twenty or thirty or forty, wiser than the parents whose passion play conceived them in the first place. Look at the kids, and their parents! If what mothers and fathers wanted of their children had propelled so many generations, what a fantastic centuries’-long self-delusion, what utter crap.

  Baby animals found their independence so fast—they had to, their lives were so short. But humans took so long, needed someone to cajole food into one end of the alimentary canal and in due course wipe up the remains at the other end, and cuddle, love, care for—though wasn’t an old blanket more lovable? Once out of babyhood, children weren’t children; they were new people. If marriage fails and you get divorced, it increases the chance for independence of the new people. How’s that for a home truth?

  The newsreel of Peter’s mind was flickering in black and white images of hostile experts, all wearing eyeglasses, badges of intellectual success, pooh-poohing his asinine insights.

  The psychiatrists won’t buy it. The social workers won’t buy it. Not now, anyhow. Some day, to do someone else some good. This history of thought and science is the history of abuse and disgrace, of closed minds flapping their wings in the face of anything not in the literature,

  “You can’t fight City Hall,” he said to no one in particular, as he left a dollar for the waitress, paid at the bar and hailed a taxi in the now near night.

  Elizabeth was home.

  He gave her the short version of what had happened. She wanted details. He wanted a drink. Cautiously she poured him one.

  “Little on the short side,” he said, noticing the inch of liquid over the ice cubes. He took the bottle from the table and, with his unsteady hand, poured in more than he had intended. “I’ll drink slowly,” he said.

  Elizabeth tried to get his mind off the afternoon by snaring him in chitchat, but the conversation was all one way. She wasn’t even sure he was listening.

  She tried the phonograph. She knew enough to avoid his favorites—Stravinsky, Schönberg, Bartók, cacophony. She tried Haydn. He wasn’t listening. He said the noise bothered him.

  She noticed he was pouring another drink.

  She prepared some pasta in a way he particularly liked, but Peter swirled his fork in the plate without eating until she gave up and suggested they go to bed.

  She helped undress him. She kissed his passive mouth. To no avail. It was the first time he had ever failed to respond to her.

  When she returned from the other room and got into bed beside him, she thought for a moment that he was asleep. Then the lids of his eyes opened. She tried to touch them closed with her fingers and realized that he was crying without tears. Her head on his chest, she could hear the thumping inside.

  She couldn’t help, so she lay back on her pillow and must have dozed off after a time, because when she awoke with a start, Peter was slumped asleep in the chair at the opposite side of the room.

  Careful not to make any noise that might awaken him, she got out of bed, slipped her feet into her slippers, and it was only when she had crossed halfway to him that she noticed the peculiar insensibility of his sleeping expression, and a jolt of alarm thrust itself into her consciousness. He looked so strange.

  With speed she went to the bathroom but there were none of the signs she was looking for, but then back at his side her eyes focused on the glass beside him. He had obviously poured himself another half tumbler of whiskey and drunk almost all of it, and then she saw the plastic medicine bottle with one red pill. It seemed stuck in the bottom of the bottle. There was another one on the floor near his foot. Where were the rest?

  The fool, not with alcohol, not with alcohol. She tried to pull him up, to get him to walk. He was too heavy for her. She tried to wake him. It was impossible. She put up hot water for coffee, hoping to force some black coffee into him, trying to remember what else there was to do, but when she returned to the living room his breathing seemed to have changed to a barely audible internal lisp, and all the muscles in his face had relaxed frighteningly.

  She tried pulling some clothes onto him, despaired, wondered who could help her drag him down to the elevator and outside to a cab, and then she did the only thing left—called an ambulance, invoking the God of her childhood, hoping against hope that Peter would live.

  Chapter Fifteen

  He felt the slight signal from the tips of his fingers first a dart of barely perceptible sensation shooting through the pervasive numbness of his body.

  He unstuck his eyes and saw the nurse busily fidgeting with a gadget at the left side of his bed. Why didn’t she look at him?

  “Nurse?” he said, glad to hear the drowned rumble of his voice.

  “Don’t move,” she ordered, then looked up at last. “I’m not the nurse. I’ll call her as soon as I’m through.”

  Peter now noticed the strap around his left wrist, with a wire leading to the nurse’s machine. Right wrist also. There were straps around both ankles, he observed now, each with a wire leading to the same machine.

  The nurse who wasn’t a nurse opened Peter’s pajama top and sloped it over his shoulders without moving him. Then she took a suction cup, attached by wire to the contraption, and placed it on his chest. Then somewhere else on his chest. Then around on his left side. And all that time the machine buzzed away.

  “EKG,” she said. “Electrocardiogram.” She was removing the straps from his limbs, unhooking him from the machine.

  Of course. He had had one during an insurance exam.

  “How’s it look?” he asked.

  “The doctor’ll have to read it.”

  “Can you give me a clue?”

  “It looks all right to me.”

  “You’d say that even if it wasn’t.”

  “Right,” she said. He wondered if she was a Lesbian.

  As the technician wheeled the machine out of the room, the white-capped nurse came in, a metal name badge over her breast pocket, her teeth flashing a smile. Peter squinted at the name badge.

  “It’s Ceracki,” she said, pronouncing it differently than it was spelled. “How are you feeling, Mr. Carmody?”

  “I felt my fingers,” said Peter.

  “That’s a good sign.”

  “Especially after they’ve been amputated,” he said.

  She quickly said, “Nothing’s been amputated,” then realized he was joking and laughed.

  “I’m very thirsty.”

  “Sure.” She got a glass from a cabinet across the room, along with a glass straw, ran some water, and held the glass for him while he sipped at the angled tube. The water was as good as the first drink after a rough day’s work.

  The thought of whiskey nearly made him gag. She thought it was her fault and readjusted the glass straw in his mouth. The effort of drinking was tiring, and he stopped.

  “Co
uld you just leave that near the bed?” he said, flicking a hand at the night table.

  She shook her head. “Just buzz when you want more.”

  He realized instantly, of course, that the usual bedside items weren’t handy because of “precautions.”

  “What’s the matter?” she said.

  He hadn’t realized his expression gave so much away. “I haven’t been a criminal before. It takes getting used to.” It was beginning to come back. The feeling in the fingers had not been the first sign of consciousness. But the other things had seemed like part of a nightmare, the few instants of wakefulness while his stomach was being pumped, the terrible retching in the emergency room. Why did he remember the screaming of the ambulance siren as after that? “What hospital am I in?” he asked.

  “Parkside Memorial,” she said. “You were transferred from Roosevelt when it looked like you’d make it and they found out you weren’t indigent. This is a private hospital.”

  “Thank heaven for Blue Cross,” he said.

  “Sometimes,” she said. “Anyway, your bill’s been guaranteed.”

  “Oh?” he questioned.

  She showed him the calling card on the large bouquet of flowers which he had assumed to be a hospital prop. The card said, “We’re with you.” It was signed, “Paul.”

  He wanted to laugh. He wanted to cry. He felt like he was going to do both at the same time.

  “Try to take it easy,” said the nurse. “The doctor’ll be making his rounds soon.”

  He thought of a young intern taking his pulse, trying to look older, official, authoritative, and failing. He was wrong. When the doctor showed up, he turned out to be the resident psychiatrist, who wasn’t young or official-looking, and his authoritativeness all lay in a Central European accent.

  The doctor delivered a little lecture about the hazards of mixing Seconal and alcohol, a little to-do about how lucky he was to have gotten medical help in time, and a few questions.

  “I didn’t mean to take my life,” said Peter. “I just wanted to stop living for a while.”