by Sloan Wilson
On a snowy evening in early March he went to a place called the Hi-Ho Club and at the end of the bar saw a dark-haired girl with ivory skin and a figure almost like Sylvia’s. She appeared to be about twenty-five. Usually, Ken had found, women that good-looking were waiting for somebody, but this one returned his glance, and when he offered to buy her a drink, she accepted. For an hour they danced to the music of a jukebox, jammed amongst a group of sailors and their girls. Speaking in a slight Italian accent, she told him that her name was Rose Gilatano, and that she had just become separated from her husband. Her cheek felt wonderful against his, and her hips were responsive. A little after midnight, he asked if he could take her home, and she said that she had her own car, but she would be delighted if he would care to drop in for a nightcap. He said he’d like that, and they danced one more number, her body feeling so good that he decided he was in love again.
When they left the Hi-Ho Club they were quite drunk, and were surprised to find that it had been snowing hard all evening. Already the drifts were more than three feet deep. Not many people were on the sidewalks, and the street lights cast golden circles in the snow. Walking by her side down an alley, Ken had a rare moment of complete elation. Morality or no morality, he thought, I have established contact with something; I am alive for the first time. The snowflakes settling on her black hair looked fragile and beautiful. In the shadow of a garage he caught her by the arm and started by kissing the snowflakes.
Her old Ford stood in the middle of a deserted parking lot, with the snow banked around it. There was no watchman or attendant and the only light was in the window of a warehouse across the street. It was an ominous, eerie place, and he placed his arm around her as they approached the car. Just as he put his hand on the cold handle of the door, it was violently pushed open in his face, and before he knew what was happening, a large man jumped out and knocked him down in the snow. He lay there dazed, gradually becoming conscious that the man and the girl were arguing shrilly in Italian over him. “Enrico!” the girl kept saying. “Enrico, Enrico!” Then the man raised his fist and delivered a crushing blow to the girl, who went down. Ken struggled to his feet, and the man rushed at him, with something shiny in his upraised hand—a wrench, Ken saw, a large crescent wrench. Ken ducked with the skill of a practiced athlete, and brought his left arm across in a vicious hook, but the man wasn’t there—he was dancing back with the wrench held high again. They faced each other, crouched forward like boxers, Ken a little bigger than the stranger, but unarmed. Suddenly the man was at him in a rush. Ken put his arm up, but the wrench numbed it, and grazed his head. Before he knew what was happening, he was down again, with the man kicking him. Ken rolled, spinning in the snow away from him, springing to his feet, already crouched; and this time, he butted his head under the wrench into the man’s hard chest, driving him back with the disciplined fury of a man who had been drilled to do that as a bread-earning football player for years. The man fell on his back, immediately pulling himself to a sitting position with the wrench upraised, and Ken, jumping high in the air, landed on his stomach with both knees. The man dropped the wrench and lay limp.
Ken hurried to the girl, and helped her up. She was crying. Her nose and lips were bleeding, and he handed her a handkerchief. While she used it, she saw a welt on his forehead, and with a whimper of alarm, insisted on feeling his head and face with her extraordinarily delicate fingers, as though she were blind. Forgetting the throbbing pain in his head, he kissed her, tasting the blood on her lips, and she said, “Let’s hurry home.”
In spite of their wounds, Rosa Gilatano gave Ken the first good night he had ever had in his life, and the last one he was to have for many years. In the morning he awoke, still elated, and looking out the window of her tenement, he saw that the snow had piled six feet deep. It had been a real blizzard. That seemed only mildly interesting until he remembered that he had left a man unconscious and perhaps mortally injured in the snow many hours before. With a sense of inevitability, it occurred to Ken that he was turning out to be not only a rapist but a killer.
He awoke Rosa, and in terror they drove back to the parking lot. The drifts had piled waist high.
“Don’t go near,” she said. “Someone will see.”
They sat huddled in her car, staring at the undulating banks of snow, under which there could be anything. Ken’s eyes sought the spot where he thought he had left the man, and jumping from the car suddenly, he rushed toward it, plowing through the snow, expecting at any minute to have his feet strike a corpse, but there was nothing. In panic, he blundered in erratic circles, but still there was nothing. Half frozen, he returned to the car.
“Did you…?” she asked in agony.
“No.”
She leaned forward, with her hands to her face, and cried. “Enrico!” she said.
He went back to his room and sat there thinking. Obviously, there were only three possibilities: the man could have recovered consciousness and walked away; he could still be lying hidden under the snow in some part of the parking lot where Ken had not looked; or his body might have been reported to the police and picked up earlier. If the man were dead, the police would undoubtedly go to his wife, who would have to point to Ken. It was self-defense, Ken thought, with the sweat coming to his brow; I should go to the police now and report it. Putting on his coat, he walked to the police station, but paused outside it. If the man weren’t dead, it would be ridiculous to cause a scandal, to get himself involved in a mess which might cause his expulsion from college. Imagining that Sylvia would take grim satisfaction in his dilemma, he clenched his fists, turned and walked away from the police station, keeping his dark secret to himself. For a guy only twenty-two, he thought bitterly, he was building up quite a record for himself.
It took two weeks for the snow to melt, and until the parking lot was bare, Ken could not be sure a body would not be found. He read the newspapers and listened to news broadcasts with dread. It’s not worth it, he concluded. Even that elation, that moment of feeling he was alive for the first time, that he had established some mysterious contact with the life-giving force of the world, even this was not worth becoming a criminal, which was where this road apparently led. The moment he had stooped to kiss the snow crystals on the dark hair of the pretty girl, the things he had imagined might be possible with Sylvia, the dreams, illusions of love —these things had to be forgotten. With sudden insight Ken understood for the first time the pinched, wintery look of most of the older people he knew. His dead father, bent by long lonely labor, his mother haunted and querulous: this is what they all had faced, one way or another, the realization that for them at least there was no real love, and there would never be.
All right, Ken thought, I’m tough, I shall endure, and by God, I’ll make something of myself. Passing a derelict blundering along the sidewalk with red-rimmed eyes, he had a sudden lust for respectability. I shall consort with no more whores and maniacs, he thought. There shall be no more cheap bars, no fights in the snow. I am a respectable man, by God, I’m not a derelict. I shall be chaste, I shall be celibate.
As it turned out, this was more than a passing fancy. Except for one drunken night during which he celebrated reading about Sylvia’s and Barton’s wedding and seeing her picture in the Boston Transcript, which represented her as tall and virginal, Ken’s only solace was work. His professors eyed him with interest, and after he finished his graduate work, they tried to persuade him to remain at the university as a chemistry instructor, but he said no. He didn’t want the life of a college teacher, he didn’t know just what he wanted. Driven by winds he didn’t even try to analyze, he got a job as a research chemist with the biggest corporation he could. When he was sent to Buffalo, he felt the city to be immaterial. The important thing, the only important thing, was his work, and that could be done in any laboratory.
Still, life in a furnished room got lonely. When an elderly colleague at the laboratory, Bruce Carter, asked him home for dinne
r one night, Ken was glad to accept.
The Carters lived in an immaculately kept small house in a rather run-down suburb of Buffalo. Their daughter, Helen, was a thin girl who never had had many friends, male or female, and who was then finishing her course at the Buffalo State Teachers College. Except for her eyes, she was not beautiful, but she appeared to be decent and her figure, though slight, was well-proportioned. She was not the sort of girl who would start undressing in front of open windows, Ken thought bitterly. She was no whore, no maniac, she came from a background not unlike his own. Lower middle-class, dull, respectable, but something to hang on to, something that didn’t blow up in one’s face. The very fact that she appeared devoid of passion was almost an attraction to Ken at the time; she seemed comfortable and safe.
He took to visiting the Carters often. On weekends Bruce, a tired pear-shaped man, polished his elderly Ford and trimmed his tiny lawn, making it neat as a putting green. His wife spent almost all her waking hours cleaning the house. From the first, Ken felt he knew everything the Carters thought, simply because they were so much like people he had known in Nebraska. They disliked modern furniture, modern houses—in fact, anything modern. Old Margaret liked cloth dogs, Teddy bears, all sorts of soft children’s toys which cluttered her room. She was vaguely apprehensive whenever she entered an expensive store, hotel or restaurant, because she felt she didn’t look right, and someone might ask her to go. She had, Ken was sure, never left a child untended, never kissed a man other than her husband and never cooked a meal with dirty hands.
Her daughter, Helen, at twenty-two, was almost an exact duplicate of her mother, but there was an appealing quality of struggle about her, as though she were trying to be more. The professors at the State Teachers College had introduced her to the fine arts, and she spent a great deal of time at the Albright Art Museum, solemnly trying to copy great paintings. When Ken danced with her, she held herself stiffly and awkwardly in his arms. But once when he visited her house unannounced, he heard the music of a radio on the small concrete terrace old Bruce had built in the back yard, and going there, was astonished to find her dancing by herself with surprising grace. She was so preoccupied that she did not see or hear him, and fearing that he would embarrass her, he walked back to the front door and called to her. The music immediately stopped. “Hi, Ken!” she replied. “I’m back here.” When he arrived on the terrace, she was sitting in a deck chair knitting, with her usually sallow face strangely aglow.
That evening he proposed to her, and with a quick intake of breath, she said, “Yes, if Daddy and Mother approve.” Her kiss was the kiss of a decent girl, he thought, one which bespoke virtue and restraint.
Old Margaret inquired about his income and extracted a promise that he would always remain in Buffalo before touching him on the cheek with her dry lips and wishing him happiness. That evening she called up all her friends to tell them “the great news,” making a special point of the fact that her prospective son-in-law had been graduated from Harvard.
They were married in the neighborhood Methodist church a month later, and flew to New York for their honeymoon, arriving at their hotel at seven in the evening. When Ken closed the door of their room behind them, he took Helen in his arms, but she was so painfully frightened that he was swept with pity for her, and found himself explaining seriously that a marriage does not have to be consummated right away, and that sex really isn’t a bit important, anyway. She seemed immensely relieved, and after pulling all the shades in the room, and putting the lights out, contrived to change into her night clothes without a moment of nudity.
During the first three days of their honeymoon Helen was as modest and chaste as a nun. On the third night Ken lay sleeplessly at the very edge of their double bed. Memories of Sylvia which he thought he had forgotten obsessed him. At three in the morning he got up, and, lifting the shade, stood at the window, looking twelve stories down at the streets of New York. To his astonishment, he had a sudden impulse to jump. It would be so easy to release the catch on the sash, to raise the window silently, and to slip out, head first, and go hurtling down through the cool, lavender night air, finding surcease on the pavement below. Shocked at his own thoughts, he turned toward the bed, where Helen’s head was dimly visible on the white pillow. On a small table beside her was a water carafe. Noticing it, Ken had an even more horrifying vision: that of picking up the carafe and hitting her over the head with it, beating her to death. The image of himself standing beside her corpse with the carafe still upraised was startlingly clear in his mind. He could even see himself putting the carafe down and raising the telephone receiver to his lips, saying to the operator, “Call the police. I’ve just killed my wife.” Impatiently he shook his head to clear it of these thoughts, and climbed back into the bed, being careful to lie without touching her. Sleep finally came.
When he awoke in the morning, Helen was already dressed, sitting in an armchair reading a Gideon Bible. She smiled at him nervously as he climbed out of bed in his rumpled pajamas. He meant to embrace her reassuringly, almost paternally, but her shoulders felt so good in his arms that he found himself entreating her, carrying her to the bed, kissing her, stopping only when he realized she was crying. Abruptly he stopped, trying to dam the rush of anger within him, saying desperately, “I’m not angry at you, Helen, it’s not you I’m angry at, it’s fate, I guess, God, I don’t know —it’s not your fault!”
Abruptly the tables were turned, and it was she who was comforting him, apologizing, earnestly begging him to take her, which he did, without pleasure to either of them. Afterward she cried a lot more, and neither of them could eat breakfast. That day they went to two double features and a Broadway play. Following a large dinner that night, he had such an acute attack of indigestion that the hotel doctor had to be called, and the next day he lay weakly in bed while she read magazine stories aloud to him.
A week later they moved into a small house he had bought in the town of Kenmore, a suburb of Buffalo, and Helen decorated it according to the best advice of the magazines on homes and gardens, which she read incessantly. As the months slipped by, he learned to control the almost constant irritation he felt at her. Visions of suicide and violence occasionally plagued him, but he learned to live with them, confident of his own self-control. In his work he found comfort. Because evenings and weekends at home dragged with painful slowness, he began spending almost all his time at the laboratory, gradually discovering that new, hitherto unimaginable degrees of concentration were becoming possible for him. His mind learned to store all the details surrounding a research problem in chemistry, and to feed upon them to the exclusion of all else for weeks, emerging suddenly, sometimes in the dead of night, with a startlingly complete answer. During these periods of deep preoccupation Ken was hardly aware that Helen existed, even when he was sitting across the breakfast table from her. He was surprised and sympathetic when she complained that she was lonely, and for a while he forced himself to return home early each evening to play cards with her. But his thoughts remained so concentrated on his work that conversation was almost impossible, and once, after asking him twice whether he wanted a glass of beer without getting an answer, she threw her cards down on the table and fled to her room in tears.
Gradually Helen began to spend more and more time at her parents’ house. In old Margaret, her mother, she found a loyal confidante. At first she tried to defend Ken when her mother accused him of being a bad husband, but it wasn’t long before she found herself agreeing with her, and the two women spent most of their days cataloguing his sins. He did not dress properly; he did not keep the lawn cut; he cared nothing for their automobile, for the household budget; he seemed to be “going to pieces,” Margaret said darkly. Even when Helen announced she was pregnant, he seemed only mildly interested.
Throughout her pregnancy, Helen was so stricken with nausea that it seemed more practical for her to pack up and move in with her parents, for it was clearly impossible for her to re
main in her own house alone so much of the time. Toward the end of her term, Ken became conscience-stricken and waited upon her with almost ludicrous solicitude, bringing her flowers or baskets of fruit almost every evening when he came home from work. But by that time the hostility between them had become so deeply ingrained that their conversation was stilted, and after a meager supper at the Carters’, he was grateful to return to his laboratory or to his own empty house.
In 1940 when Molly was born, Ken insisted that Helen move back with him. To everyone’s astonishment, he showed great interest in the baby, often coming home from his laboratory in time to play with her for an hour before her bedtime, even when it was necessary for him to drive back to work immediately afterward. It was at this time that the administrators of the laboratory began to appreciate his talents, and in quick succession he received a series of advancements which put him far ahead of his father-in-law and enabled him to employ a nursemaid to help Helen. The criticisms which old Margaret leveled at him became sharper than ever. He cared about nothing but money, she said, and sacrificed his poor wife to his own unruly ambitions. When the war came they criticized him first for trying to enlist and then for accepting his status as an essential worker without complaint.
Even before Molly could walk, Ken began spending his weekends with her, taking her in her perambulator to the zoo. At first Helen accompanied them on these expeditions, but as she said, the walking hurt her feet, and now that Margaret was growing older, she needed Helen’s help at home whenever possible. As Molly grew, the range of Ken’s weekend expeditions with her lengthened. By the time she was seven they had visited every museum in Buffalo, been to Niagara Falls countless times, seen the Corning Glass Works and Toronto.
The hostility between Ken and Helen did not increase-it reached a kind of plateau which never varied. Helen enjoyed the results of Ken’s success at the laboratory. When Molly was eight, he got a big promotion, and they bought a larger house in a prettier neighborhood. Helen asked for and got a car of her own, and she had hopes of being asked to join the Garret Club, which she often saw mentioned in the society section of the Buffalo Evening News. She never went to the Albright Art Museum any more, but she became so active in the local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution that she had hardly more time to spare than Ken did.