“This is a pretty big step,” he said. “Are you sure of your own mind? Don’t you want to think it over?” Then with a feeble attempt at humor, “Lots of auld lang syne riding on this, old friend.”
She was moved, but moved to pity, not to a change of heart. That was no longer hers to change.
She wrote the children, braving their condemnation for her faithlessness to their father, their embarrassment over her geriatric folly. That she not seem still more ridiculous than she did, she had to reveal to them her affair of long ago with the same man. This was not someone new to her. To confess herself a one-time adulteress to her children was preferable to having them think she was so depraved as to fall illicitly in love for the first time at her age. All three approved, her daughter applauded, even reveled in the revelation of her former affair. Poor Toby! What treacherous little beasts children were! It made her wonder about the example she was setting her daughter. She had had misgivings about that marriage, and about what its breakup would mean to her grandchildren. Their encouragement brought with it a pang. It showed how pitifully apparent to them over the years had been her need for warmth, her lack of love. It was an acknowledgment of how little time she had left in which to find a crumb of the true staff of life.
She announced her intention to her brother Thornton. As she had expected, he was scandalized. If she persisted he might well disown her. Thornton had never married; that was how awesome a step he considered holy matrimony to be. He inveighed against divorce. Those of his friends who got one were scratched from his address book. He needed only sandals and a robe to seem like Moses down from the mountaintop bearing the tablets of the law, a list of Thou Shalt Nots inscribed in stone by the fiery forefinger of God. She was not fond of Thornton—he had been a prig from his youth; but she was afraid of him. On matters of devotion and duty he spoke with the voices of both their dead parents, all their ancestors. Yet even the scorching she got from him did not deter her. Thornton was like a firefighter setting a fire around a fire to contain it and let it burn itself out. But her heart’s fire blazed on unchecked. Opposition only fanned its flames.
Thornton’s opposite was the lady lawyer recommended to her, a specialist in divorce. Separating people was not only her profession, it was her passion.
“Go for it!” she urged. “Never too late to make the break. I know men. Totally inconsiderate. I say being born male is a birth defect.”
“It is my intention,” she said, “to remarry immediately.”
She was not only a fool, said the other woman’s look; she was an old fool, of which there was none like.
Toby might have made things extremely unpleasant for her if he had been so inclined. The law, had he invoked it, was on his side. He was the injured party. He might have charged her with desertion, adultery, and have turned her out without a dime. Might have advertised in the town paper, “My wife having left my bed and board, I will no longer be responsible for debts incurred, etc.”
He never threatened her with such actions. Instead there would be an equal division of their common property. The house and its furnishings would either be sold or else he would buy it from the estate at the assessed value. She would be financially independent.
“You must be provided for in case this marriage of yours should break up. I owe that to the mother of my children,” he said. It was as if he were her father, doing his duty by her but washing his hands of an errant child by settling a competence upon her.
“It won’t break up,” she said.
“One never knows. Ours did. After fifty years.”
“Forty-nine,” she corrected him. “It only seems longer.”
He made one condition, to which she agreed: that she will everything of hers that had once been his in part to their children.
He was being fair. What was unfair was his fairness. His irreproachable uprightness was inhuman. It disarmed her. If he had threatened her, railed at her, she could have defended herself.
Nothing so tried the patience as a saint.
“I’ll go by way of—” And he mapped his route. Since growing old they always did this whenever either of them set off alone for someplace. Thus if he or she was not back when expected the state police could be told where to look. He was off now to see his lawyer to draw up the settlement.
She watched him struggle into his coat. Painful arthritis in his left elbow made this difficult for him. But he would refuse her help now. She had forfeited her right to help him. Neither did she straighten his hat, as she had done all their married life. He always got it on slightly crooked. It made him look as if he were headed one way while the rest of him was going off at a tangent. Oh, dear, what would become of him without her to look after him?
She watched him make his way to the garage. He was the picture of rejection. He looked like one of those homeless old men who, bent beneath the weight of their overcoats summer and winter, tramped the highways aimlessly, endlessly. He not only looked like one: his pride, or rather his humiliation—his tattered pride—would never permit him to ask one of the children for a home in his solitary old age.
What would become of him? He could not look after himself. He had never been able to. A more helpless, more dependent man could not be found. Perhaps he would sell the house and go into one of those senior citizens’ retirement complexes where the elderlies’ wants were all attended to. That thought gave her a wrench. It also held up to her, as in a mirror, an image of herself. In the hunch of his shoulders, in the hang of his head, in his slow gait she saw her own age reflected. Two-thirds of their years they had spent together. She could be sure that in all that time he had never had a thought unfaithful to her. She wished she could think he had. Then she wished she could unwish the wish. It was unworthy of her.
If only John had called her those three years ago! Then the burden of her guilt toward Toby would have been worth it. The saddest of all expressions: if only…
He hesitated, stopped, turned around and looked up at the house. “Poor man! To lose his wife,” she then recalled his saying of John. For the sake of her belated and sure to be short-lived happiness she was making of him the same lonely object that he had generously pitied in the other man, her lover. Was he hoping that at the last minute she would call him back? Was he thinking of returning, asking her to reconsider? If he did, what would her answer be? A moment ago she would have known, now she was unsure. Oh, let him turn again, get on with it, she prayed. Let him decide for me. But when he did just that she was frightened—frightened of herself.
She felt her purpose falter as the weight of her years settled upon her. It forced from her a sigh of resignation. It sounded to her like her last breath.
From the door she called him back.
Now what? his carriage seemed to say as he plodded up the walk.
“Please, Toby, forgive me, if you can,” she said. “I’m sorry. It won’t happen again. I’ll stay. If you want me.”
He nodded wearily.
Well, she asked herself, what warmer welcome back was she entitled to?
Her brother would say, “I’m glad you came to your senses.” Her daughter would be disappointed in her, would think she was a fool to throw away her last chance for a little happiness. Her sons would think she had nobly sacrificed herself. There was nothing noble in it. Her heart longed for what it was too old for.
“I’ll try harder,” he said.
Then it was her turn to nod wearily.
Around her neck she felt a collar tighten. He and she were teamed together to the end by the yoke of years.
But whereas before she had told herself that she might still have quite a long time left to live, she told herself now that at least it would not be for long.
Mortal Enemies
HE MIGHT BE OLD, his eyesight not quite what it once was, his hand shaky, but he could still shoot. He had killed that wood-chuck with a standing shot at a distance of a hundred yards. The one animal he would kill with no intention of eating it. Varmints!
>
You knew you were alive for another spring with the arrival in the mail of the seed catalogs. You sent off your order: old reliables, newly developed strains. The snow melted, the ground thawed, the grass greened, the trees budded. You emerged from hibernation. So did the woodchucks.
He could picture them waking to their inner alarm clocks, lean and hungry, rubbing the sleep from their eyes, yawning and stretching, issuing forth and finding Burpee’s catalog on the stoop. Their mouths would water as they leafed through its full-color pages. Paws lifted, they would pray in chorus that Farmer Thompson had come through the winter and was planting their garden.
You turned your plot and raked it smooth, lined the rows as straight as music paper, planted, fertilized, mulched, watered, weeded. You sweated, you ached. The peas reached out their tendrils and climbed the stakes, blossomed, the pods appeared, swelled. You could hardly wait for them to ripen. Came the day when you decided that tomorrow you would pick your first. You could taste them already. Overnight a woodchuck tunneled under the fence and got them. Those it did not eat it wantonly destroyed. You had been through it times out of number and still you were outraged afresh. Varmints!
For the past few years he had had to give up gardening. Using the turning fork hurt his bad hip. Getting up off his knees had become painful. His name remained on the mailing lists for seed catalogs but the garden plot had gone to weeds. Yet as surely as the woodchucks came aboveground so his old hatred of them resurfaced. He would have exterminated them if he could. Varmints!
This one had moved in some days earlier, settling at the edge of the lawn, and in its self-satisfied survey of things in the morning seemed to think the place belonged to it. It was this that he resented, this impudence.
He had lain in wait for it. They rose early to do their mischief while the world slept. The head appeared like that of a turtle from its shell. Slowly the body emerged. This was an old one, big. Many a garden it must have feasted on. It stood upright on the mound of earth thrown up in digging its hole, looking about. It pleased him to allow it a last moment of smugness. Slowly—for they were alert to the least movement over a long range—he raised the rifle to his shoulder. He aimed, drew a deep breath, released half of it, and squeezed the trigger, timing the shot to go off when the gun barrel wavered back on target. The animal was shaped like a bowling pin and when the bullet struck it toppled over like one.
He leaned the rifle against the wall. Once more it had served him well. He labored across the lawn, a hitch in his gait from favoring that hip.
“Varmint!” he said as he stood over the dead animal. But this time the satisfaction he had always felt before in having eliminated another of the pests did not come to him. He regretted what he had done. He wanted everything to go on living. What they had in common had made peace between him and his old enemy.
The Dead Languages
FOR A YEAR, since his retirement, he had lived the life of a hermit, his days as alike as if spent in silent prayer, going nowhere, seeing nobody, he who had always loved company, conversation, loved to travel, to exercise his French and his Italian. He was at his desk by eight in the morning, and often he worked past the evening news hour. He, the old newspaperman—byline, Bancroft award—curious about everything, hardly knew what was going on in the world anymore, absorbed as he was in his book. The daylong clackety-clack of the typewriter (he was too old for a word processor) was like that of wheels on rails. He was the engineer, howling through the crossings, drawing behind him his finished chapters like coaches, and now pulling the whistle to announce his arrival at the end of the line. It was from his wife that he learned of the sensational multiple murder that had happened not long ago, right in his own back yard. This was not the first time she had spoken to him about it, she said impatiently. But he never listened to anything she said. She’d might as well be talking to a fencepost.
It was a case to make him lay aside his book (it was all but finished anyway), come out of retirement, and rejoin the world of the living—and the dead. A seventeen-year-old model boy, honor student in the local high school, was charged with slaughtering his family of four: his father, his stepmother, his older brother and his three-year-old half-brother. With his father’s 9mm Walther he had pumped fourteen shots into them. As the last person known to have seen the victims alive, he was routinely questioned. He had broken down and confessed to the crime before the night of it was over. He was said to have been motivated by the ambition to inherit the family estate, valued at some hundred thousand dollars, and with it establish a worldwide enforcement agency for the protection of wildlife. The father and the dead brother had been avid hunters.
Ordinarily the argument would have gone like this:
Defense attorney: He did it because he’s crazy.
Prosecutor: How do you know he’s crazy?
Defense attorney: Because he did it.
Now, on the eve of the trial, the boy’s lawyer told reporters that he was not going to enter a plea of insanity. He claimed there was no evidence to convict. What about that confession? Forced.
Interest in the case was widespread. He knew without asking his former editor that, being on the scene, he would be wanted to come out of retirement and cover it. He still kept his old press card, and the name of his paper was enough to gain him a seat in the front row of the press corps.
He had been in the county courthouse many times over the years, for this had been his legal residence while it was still only his summer home, but never before above the ground floor. He had gone there to renew his driver’s license, search his deed, apply for a passport, but having been excused from jury duty on the grounds that he alone could do the work he did, he was seeing the courtroom now for the first time. The sight was not reassuring. It was vaulty, full of echoes, and the only air conditioning was a pair of noisy big standing electric fans. The attorneys’ backs would be toward you as they questioned the witnesses. Taking notes was going to be a strain.
Even the most lurid of trials had its dull sessions. At times on those somnolent summer afternoons with the fans droning hypnotically, jurors and even members of the press corps nodded. He was too old a hand for that, but he was also old enough not to concoct interest out of nothing and file a daily dispatch to his paper. That hard-earned byline of his was not to be wasted. Often when court was adjourned in the afternoon, he walked past the cub reporters queued up for the courthouse’s one telephone, grateful for his age and the status it had gained him, his freedom to judge for himself what was newsworthy.
It was his editor on the phone:
“Where the hell were you yesterday?”
“What was that?”
“WHERE THE HELL WERE YOU YESTERDAY?”
“In court.”
“You’d might as well not have been. Didn’t you hear the testimony? The kid’s lawyer, the one they woke at three in the morning to represent him, was not allowed by the state police sergeant to accompany him into the polygraph room. He was denied his rights. He has gunned down his entire family and he’s going to go free. He will even inherit that hundred thousand dollars he was after. Every paper in the state has headlined it. All but ours.”
“I’ve been telling you for years that your hearing was going bad,” said his wife. “‘I hear what I want to hear,’ that’s your comeback. Now maybe you’ll do something about it.”
In the doctor’s office he was placed in a soundproof booth wearing earphones. He could see the audiologist through the window.
“Raise your hand if you hear this sound,” she said.
Pleased with his performance, he raised his hand as eagerly as a bright schoolchild, until he began to miss the cues.
“Say the word ‘grass.’ Say the word ‘soon.’ Say the word ‘park.’ Say the word ‘dark.’”
This went on for half an hour.
“You have lost about fifty percent of your hearing,” the doctor told him. “A bit more than that in your right ear, a bit less in the left.”
; “What can be done for me?”
“Unfortunately, yours is a case in which surgery is not indicated. There is no impairment to the mechanism of the ears. Yours is the commonest kind of hearing loss. Degeneration of the nerves. It says here that you are retired. Did you spend your working life in a noisy environment? A shipyard? An assembly line?”
“At a typewriter.”
“That could do it. A low repetitive noise, prolonged over years, can be as destructive as loud ones.”
“Is it going to get worse?”
“Most likely. It is sounds in the upper register that you cannot hear. That and certain consonants.”
“Good thing then I’m not Polish,” he said. He didn’t think it was so funny either.
“How could it have happened so suddenly?” he asked.
“It didn’t. It has been coming on for a long time. You just didn’t become aware of it until it reached a certain point.”
He told about the day of discovery when he missed the crucial testimony at the murder trial. Surely that indicated something acute, not chronic, something treatable?
“Think back,” said the doctor. “Can you not see yourself cupping your ears, puzzling over what you’d heard, not quite catching the words, asking people what they’d said?”
A mirror had been held up to him.
“Sometimes my hearing is better than at other times,” he volunteered hopefully.
The doctor said nothing for what soon came to seem a long time, meanwhile regarding him steadily. At length he asked gravely, “Are you sure of that?”
Initially he was irritated. Who better than he knew the ups and downs of his hearing? But having said with some indignation, “Of course I’m sure,” he regretted it when the doctor said, “Quite sure?”
It seemed to him that, just as when he was in the test booth, the doctor was moderating his volume. He thought of the accused boy in the polygraph room attached to monitors as he had just been, and he wished that he was represented by counsel.
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