One of the figures there was familiar. Gaunt, white-haired, dressed neatly in a jacket and tie, peering at me through thick glasses. I went over to Samuel Fisher and we shook hands. There was no longer any reason not to.
“I suppose you saw it in the papers,” I said.
“Yes, early this morning. I’ve been waiting since then to see him and I’m still tangled in red tape. If they got rid of some of this clerical help and hired more doctors and nurses they’d do better for themselves.” He looked at my hand. “You weren’t hurt badly, I hope.”
“No, it’s just a scratch. I was lucky.”
“Very lucky. I’m glad of that. After I spoke to you the other day I was sure I had failed completely to make my point. It was a comfort to find that I hadn’t.”
There was something breathtaking about such self-assurance. I said: “I hate to deprive you of your comfort, but I’m afraid your arguments had nothing to do with the case. They never entered my mind when I grabbed him.”
“They didn’t have to. They must have been there all along. The properly dutiful man doesn’t have to call on his sense of duty every step he takes. He acts in a godly manner with total unselfconsciousness.”
“Well, it’s nice to be called godly, but don’t you think that it’s the human instinct to save a man’s life if you can?”
“Yes. That is the God in man. It shows especially when love is not part of the act. That’s what I was trying to tell you, and what I was afraid you failed to understand.”
I said: “You seem determined to drag God into this. Suppose I let Avery fall? After all, I had every right to, didn’t I, considering what he is and the risk I was taking for him. In that case, would you say that it was Satan guiding me?”
“I’ve already told you that there is no such thing as Satan, Mr. Egan. There is only the absence of God which leaves the mortal flesh weak and afraid.”
“Which just about covers most of humanity.”
“It may, but that is not our concern. Sooner or later, every man is tested on earth so that he may be judged in heaven. And the test is only of performance, not of the motives for it. After all, said Augustine, what matters the motive if the deed is good.” Fisher nodded at the institutional walls around us. “And you can rest assured that your deed was good, even though Michael did come to this in the end.”
“Would he think so?”
“It doesn’t matter what he would think. Life itself is the only thing with meaning. No man has the right to make himself meaningless. That is the ultimate blasphemy.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “If I loved someone who wound up in here—”
“Mr. Egan,” Fisher cut in sharply, “do you think I have any more love for Michael than you do?”
“That was my impression.”
“Well, you’re wrong,” he said with flat finality, and since it was clear from his tone that he would just as soon drop the whole subject of Avery I let it drop and we talked of other things. In truth, as Fisher would have pointed out had I raised the question, it was not his duty to either talk about Avery or love him; it was his duty to visit him in his sickness, and he was doing it. There was something admirable in that attitude, if for no other reason than that it was stripped of all cant and hypocrisy. And while it was an attitude which might seem to me cold and forbidding, that could be because I was used to living neck deep in our warm, oozy, national morass of cant and hypocrisy, and was not quite prepared to meet the cold, forbidding Puritan bedrock long buried out of sight under it.
When Barbara reappeared in the waiting room I didn’t bother to introduce her to Fisher, but said good-bye to him, said, yes, I would visit him again sometime and bring my friend with me, and led her out of the building. This was not rudeness on my part—my manners can be as good as the next one’s when the occasion calls for it—but I could hardly see Barbara’s stubbing her toe on the Puritan bedrock at this particular time, and, possibly, hearing the clarion call to duty. Women are not always averse to martyring themselves for their husbands, especially husbands who are suddenly and totally dependent on them, and it was not part of my plan that Barbara should fall into this trap or even come near it. That was the last thing I wanted.
When we were settled in the car and on our way I said to her, “How did it go?”
“All right.”
“Did you sign the papers?”
“Yes.”
“What were they about?”
“About putting him on charity. They asked me what money I had, and I said only some of the insurance money, so they put him on charity.”
“Is that all?”
“That’s all. But they said he won’t ever come out of there. He’s very sick. That’s what they kept saying—sick. I know they mean crazy. Why don’t they come right out and say it, if that’s what they mean?”
“Because they’re being polite,” I said, and that was all that passed between us until we were home and I asked her on the stairway if she wanted me to come into her room and talk to her awhile. She looked as if she needed something to get her out of her mood. She seemed to be as remote from everything going on around her as a sleepwalker.
“No,” she said, “I’d rather be by myself.”
“All right, but if you want to talk things over I’ll leave my door open. I don’t have to go on the job for an hour yet.”
I went into my room and sat down on the edge of the bed and lit a cigarette with great deliberation. I had a lot to think over; I didn’t want any of that thinking affected by the tension I was under or the excitement rising in me. Questions of practical moment had to be faced at last. Questions of how one arranges an anulment, when does it take effect. Of how soon Barbara would be ready to talk over arrangements with me. Of what expenditures arise in marriage, and what income there would be to meet them. A whole series of earthy questions that had to be considered, while all the time I found my thoughts returning only to my immediate paradisaic situation, examining it, savoring it.
Then this is what happened.
Barbara came into my room still wearing the dark glasses. In one hand she carried a large cardboard box tied around with string. In the other she carried a brand-new suitcase, a handsome piece of lightweight luggage which almost matched the new summer suit she was wearing, a suit I had never seen her wear before. Her very high-heeled shoes were also new. On her hands she wore new, white lace cotton gloves. Over her arm hung a shining new, white plastic handbag. On her head was a new and unfamiliar summer hat, the whisper of a hat, made of a small twist of cloth and some veiling. And when I saw her I said immediately, inwardly, grotesquely out of my past experience, My God, do they always have to put on a costume for the big act!
She set the cardboard box and the suitcase on the floor and opened the suitcase. It was almost empty; obviously, whatever she used to wear for Avery was not fit to go into it. She opened my closet door, took out the dresses and shoes from the closet, and thrust them into the suitcase. She was careless about this. She was careless about most of her possessions, but that, I had known all along, was something that would be easily remedied by the School for Wives I was running.
When she turned to the dresser and started tossing her cosmetics, the unnecessary aids to her beauty, on top of the dresses I said, “Where do you think you’re going?”
“Away.”
“Where to?”
“That’s not your business.”
She remained serene and untouched, she kept tightening the caps on lipstick cases, checking others to see if they were empty, tossing the chosen ones into the suitcase. I stayed where I was. I had the feeling that any move I made would put her to flight the way it would a doe warily visiting a drinking hole. The weapons I must use were argument, persuasion, appeal, and they came to my mind only as the most dreadful clichés, the stale phrases made to blight every such scene as this. Under no conditions, I told myself, must I use them. At least that much of my self-respect could be salvaged.
But we
belong to each other.
Don’t you think you owe me a little more than this?
You can’t do this to me.
Ah, but she could. In fact, she was doing it while I watched.
“Are you going home?” I asked politely. “I mean, back to Florida?”
“I wouldn’t ever go there. I hate it there.”
“Well, don’t make a mystery of it. You can tell me where you’re going. I’m not trying to stop you, am I?”
“Oh, if you must know, I’m going to Indiana.”
“Indiana? Who do you know in Indiana?”
“Nobody.”
“All right, we’ve cleared up that much. You’re going to Indiana, but you don’t know anybody there. You’re just going to see the scenery. After all, everybody says there’s nothing like Indiana in the summer.”
“Well, if you don’t believe me,” she said. She stopped packing the suitcase, opened the handbag, and thrust an envelope at me. Bus tickets were in it, the complicated string of them that led, city by city, away from me to some place called Fairmount, Indiana. She let me look my fill at the tickets, then took them from me, carefully fitted them into the envelope, and put it back into the handbag. “I don’t really know anybody there,” she said. “I just have to go there. And I can’t tell you about it, because you’ll only make fun of me.”
“No, I won’t, Barbara. I’m not in the mood for fun.”
“I’m sorry about that, Egan. Honest to God, I am. But it’s not my fault, is it? I tried to tell you all along how it was.”
“Is that what you were trying to tell me? I got a different message altogether.”
“Because you wanted to. I guess you can’t help it, Egan, because that’s the way you are. You’re always telling somebody what you want, and then you think that’s what she wants, too, but it isn’t. Like getting married. I don’t want to get married to you. I’m married already, and that’s enough.”
“Oh,” I said, “then it’s what happened at the motel, wasn’t it? But I told you about that. I tried to explain to you—”
“You did explain. You did it ten times over, so please don’t do it now, Egan. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Was it that bad?”
“I told you I don’t want to talk about it. Anyhow, if you think that’s why I’m going away, it’s not.”
“Then why are you going? And why to some place like Fairmount, Indiana? You can tell me, Barbara. I swear I won’t make fun of you.”
“Oh, all right. It’s because that’s where Jimmy Dean is. You know about him, don’t you?”
“No,” I said. And then I said incredulously, “You mean the actor? The one who was killed a couple of years ago?”
“Yes. That’s where he’s buried, and I have to go and see it. Don’t look at me like that, Egan. You just don’t know how it is.”
But I did. And now I knew what I had cost her in that motel. She had been a Vestal Virgin dedicated to her moldering god, and I had spoiled that for her. The dedication was still there, but not the virgin. What was left now was an outsider, a member of a necrophiliac fan club traveling under false colors. So does each of us betray our god, one way or the other, whether it is Jimmy Dean or Ben Gennaro or whatever savage idol Michael Avery worshiped. The one God that seemed invulnerable to betrayal was Samuel Fisher’s, because He welcomed it. That takes real omniscience.
I said to Barbara: “Will you come back here afterward? Should I wait for you?”
She seemed grateful that I made no more of her revelation than that. “No,” she said, “I’m not coming back.” Then, emboldened to complete frankness, she confided, “I’m going to Hollywood afterward. I mean, from Indiana.”
“To be an actress?”
“Maybe. Do you think I could be?”
“It’s a big gamble.”
“I know, but I’d like to try. It wouldn’t hurt to try, would it?”
“Look,” I said, “you try anything you want, as long as it’s not illegal, immoral, or fattening. Don’t let anybody talk you out of it.”
“That’s how I feel,” she said, and she smiled at me, the smile lopsided on her swollen lips. “You know, Egan, you’re really an awful nice guy.”
“Not as much as you think. I ought to drive you over to the bus terminal, but I won’t. I don’t feel I’m quite up to it. You don’t mind, do you?”
“No, that’s all right.”
She picked up the suitcase and the cardboard box and went to the door. She hesitated there and then turned to me, giving me my last look at that bruised, innocent face alight with the glory of her mission.
“Well,” she said, “so long, Egan.”
I heard her go step by step down the stairway, the suitcase bumping the wall at the landings. Each flight down, the footsteps were a little fainter, the sound of the suitcase a little farther away. From the hallway on the ground floor I could hear no sound at all.
Click went the door, and she was gone.
EIGHT
There was a black hairpin on the floor. I picked it up and brought it to the dresser. All that remained on top of the dresser were three battered lipstick cases. I stood them upright, carefully arranged them side by side in a straight line and placed the hairpin at the end of the line. I studied myself in the mirror over the dresser, and when I slowly nodded my head up and down, the reflection of me rippled like the reflection in a pool of water that has had a pebble tossed into it. It was a cheap mirror. The image of reality it offered was no better than that offered by the stack of movie magazines on the floor beside the dresser. Dreams, Incorporated. Some needed the magazines; the rest of us could get the same effect without them.
I slowly nodded my head up and down in the mirror and understood with remarkable clarity that I had two possible courses of action. I could get myself blind drunk, or I could go to work. And the former had everything in its favor except one curious thing. I was already drunk. Without going near a bottle I had every symptom of three drinks down and one on the way. The thrumming in the ears, the slight unsteadiness of the legs, the feeling of detachment from objects around me, and, simultaneously, the distorted perception of them, larger and brighter than life—all the symptoms were there. I leaned closer to the mirror, trying to fix my image between the ripples and I saw that I was very pale and sweating heavily. That, I knew, was shock. Nature’s bromide. And what would the hangover be like when it wore off?
I went to work. The space around the lockers was crowded, and some of the crowd applauded me, questioned me, good-naturedly insulted me. On my locker door someone had glued a piece of blacksmith’s apron cut into a circle, my name burned into it, the Order of the Leather Medal. I sat down before the locker to undress, and a day welder came up, his face shield upside down in his outstretched hand, the shield full of money. “It’s for Cusick and Pereira,” he said, and then said apologetically, “If you don’t want to give, you don’t have to, Egan. For you it can be on the house.”
I put my contribution in the shield anyhow, and the welder passed on. Big Noonan appeared before me surrounded by some of the other night men. “Look, Egan,” he said plaintively, “ain’t it God’s honest truth Andy told us to knock off when that mess was over last night? Did he say anything about going back on the Centrale?”
It seemed that since both of us had left the yard early—Andressen marking in full time for us on our cards—and since no one else had bothered to tell the castaways on the Rio de Centrale about what had happened at the drydock they only learned about it from the morning papers, and Big Noonan was paying for that. “You could have brought back the goddam crane, at least,” someone told him. “We never even knew you were done with it. We almost broke our backs trying to sling those plates up on the ship’s hoist.”
Joe pushed his way through the gathering. He said to Big Noonan, “If you’re ready you can start right now. Grab yourself a sledge and knock those props from under the 181. You don’t need any help with it. You can do it all by you
rself.”
“For chrissake,” said Big Noonan.
“Go on,” said Joe. “Get to it. You had your vacation last night.”
The night shift cheered raucously. It moved away, and Joe sat down beside me. “You look real beat,” he said. “Was it that bad?”
“No, I’m all right.”
“Maybe, but you look lousy.” He shook his head. “And I still don’t get it. There he was, all set up to finish himself off and you stopped him. Why? Why did you do it?”
“I don’t know why. What would you have done?”
“I would have let him go. You think I never saw a guy go by on his way down? I saw it. And for all I didn’t even want it to happen, I didn’t go diving after him.”
“I didn’t dive. I made a grab for him, that’s all.”
“That’s all, and he was the big trouble you wanted to get rid of. You knew damn well he came up there to do a job on you, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Okay,” said Joe. “Okay, you don’t want to talk about it, we won’t talk about it. Anyhow, it’s good to know I got somebody around who can grab that quick.”
“Thanks,” I said, knowing it was meant to be a compliment.
“Just the same, you better remember what the tribe says when you’re up high someplace—anything you have to reach for ain’t worth reaching for. You’ll live longer that way. Jesus, you should have seen Shirley this morning. I had to stop her from running right over to your place with a pot of soup. She and her sisters are all soup happy. Anything goes wrong with you, here they come with a pot of soup. Got a broken arm, just soak a rag in soup and tie it on.”
The Winter After This Summer Page 44