Fairbairn, Ann

by Five Smooth Stones

  "And that's what pulled her through?"

  "Yes. Give Curt the credit. She was in her senior year when lightning struck. Thank God for our friends. One of mine, a newsman on the Globe, got hold of me before the story hit the papers and radio and I was able to get hold of the authorities at Smith on the telephone, and they kept her incommunicado on some excuse until Marcia and I got there."

  "Give me the details, Larry. Was it a killing and suicide?"

  "No one will ever know. A neighbor came to the door to borrow something. There was no answer, and when she looked through the glass of the door she could just see Curt's legs sprawled on the stairs. She called the police. When they broke in, they found Curt sprawled along the bottom steps, his head on the floor, dead of a broken neck. Upstairs they found the mother dead of a bullet wound. She was also on the floor. The gun was nearby. There had been a struggle. There was a mishmash of prints on the gun—both his and hers—which was almost impossible to interpret. Was he leaving after a quarrel, and did she come up behind him and push him down the stairs? Then go back and shoot herself? Or did he shoot her, start to run down the stairs, trip and fall? They had both been drinking."

  Brad finished his drink, got up and walked the length of the room and back, then sat again. "My God, Larry! What do you want me to do?"

  "Just keep an eye on things, help Peg if she needs it. Curt and his wife made separate wills; I drew his up six weeks before he died. There's no difficulty in either case. Both wills name Peg as principal beneficiary. The mother left what she had—not a great deal—in trust until Peg is twenty-five. Old Colony is trustee. Curt's is also in trust until Peg is twenty-one. Which she will be in a few months. That is when she will need help and counseling."

  "Will she want me to take over?"

  "Brad, haven't you any idea how shot to hell she must be inside? If I advise it, she'll do it."

  "Is she back at Smith? Is she going back?"

  "No. She tried. She lasted two weeks. Remember—she had passed for almost four years. Suddenly she's the central figure in a sordid tragedy involving her parents—a white mother and a Negro father. I thought it would help her if she talked it out, and I asked her point-blank what the attitude at college had been. All she would say was, 'They were very kind. They were very kind.'"

  "Christ almighty!" Shivers crawled up Brad's back, around his ribs, into his belly.

  Travis, watching his face from across the desk, said: "Yes. I thought you'd react that way. It would have been better if they'd been cruel, called her a nigger, enraged her, given her cause to identify with her dead father, the only person she really loved. Instead, they were 'very kind.' God bless them all —they meant well."

  Brad was leaning forward, arms on knees, eyes on the cigarette lighter he was turning over and over in his fingers. "She must have known damned well what they were thinking, what they stopped saying as soon as she came into a room, started up with the minute she was out of hearing. Known they were trying to be big and enlightened about an unfortunate fellow student with a beautiful white mother and a probable beast of a Negro father, who did just what you might expect. What else could come from that stage of development in a group of young sheltered white girls?"

  "And she's been eaten up, almost destroyed, by a feeling of guilt—the feeling that she let her father down by giving in to pressure, by denying him," said Travis.

  "Where is she living now?"

  "With Curt's sister. She got out of the galleon, too. Curt sent for her. She's down-to-earth, basic, rock-bottom good, and almost as black as we come. Peg has always been fond of her. She chose Auntie Turtle's household as the place she wanted to go."

  "If it was anyone but you, Larry, I'd start out of here on a dead run."

  "I don't know that I'd blame you." Travis reached for Brad's glass, then stopped, hand extended. "That's a cab door closing. I think she's arrived."

  They heard voices in the hall, Marcia's high and clear, and another that was deeper, huskier. Then Peg was there, standing in the doorway in the circle of Marcia's arm, tall and, in spite of her youth, commanding—until one saw her eyes, dark pools that cried, without tears, against the pain within her. The gold-red hair lay in heavy waves held down by a bandeau. Her figure was already mature, full-breasted, small-waisted, with well-rounded hips and a long, clean line of thigh and leg. But young, thought Brad, so very young, whatever she might have gained of adulthood seared from her by the flames of grief and shock.

  He rose to step back and stand quietly by the window, watching her as she crossed the room to Lawrence Travis and kissed him gently on the cheek. "Uncle Lawrence"—she looked around the chaos of the room, "Uncle Lawrence— don't go away." In that quick survey of the room her eyes had touched Brad and then gone on as though he did not exist. To her, thought Brad, I don't.

  It was Marcia who answered her. "If we don't, Peg, how are we going to get you to Europe for that visit?"

  Travis took her hand. "It won't be long, sugar, before that happens." He drew her forward, into the center of the room. "And I'm leaving you in good hands. Brad—"

  Brad came forward, not smiling, knowing any gratuitous friendliness on his part would only heighten her sense of loss over the Travises' leaving.

  "Bradford Willis, my dear—" Travis was saying.

  She looked at him directly now, unsmiling. "In your hands?"

  "If you'll accept their help—"

  "What—what else can I do? I—I suppose it will be all right." She took a quick, shallow breath. "I'm sorry. I don't mean to be rude."

  "Of course you don't, my dear." Marcia spoke crisply. "You and Larry and Brad can talk, and I'll fix coffee and sandwiches. We'll send Larry to the Square for dessert, and gorge on chocolate-marshmallow-sundaes-to-go." As she left she kissed Peg's cheek. "Be nice to Brad, dear. He's really a pet. The only green-eyed man I've ever known I'd trust with my life. And yours."

  He had never been sure afterward just when it was that he knew he loved her. It might have been that first night or it might have been a day in the office weeks later, after he finally convinced her that in the fall she should make up her credits for a degree. He suggested Boston University as the most convenient; his real reason—that it would be most impersonal—he did not mention.

  When at last she agreed and they were standing together at the doorway of his office, she looked up at him and said, "I'm going to call you Brad."

  "Of course!"

  "Thank you, Brad, for everything. No one except my father and Uncle Lawrence has ever been so good to me before. Perhaps you can't understand what it means. When you're hurt and bruised all over because the whole world's fallen on top of you, and you hate yourself besides—"

  "I think I can understand, Peg. Give me marks for trying."

  "The highest—"

  They were married a little more than a year later. He hadn't known how to propose. Juries were no problem compared to this. One night, driving back from a shore dinner on the Cape, he said, "I don't suppose twelve years difference in age is an insurmountable obstacle."

  She had not been in the least puzzled. "Insurmountable? I don't consider it an obstacle at all."

  ***

  They spent their honeymoon in Europe, much of it with Lawrence and Marcia. "You wanted to run, remember?" said Lawrence the day they arrived, and Brad answered, "Yes. But I didn't know then in which direction."

  Even before they were married, he had noticed that one cocktail before dinner always called for a second, often a third, and that after dinner a highball glass was seldom out of her hand. One night on the ship, crossing over, he said, "You've a strong head, my girl."

  "I have, haven't I? Sometimes I wish it weren't quite so strong. I don't seem to get half so much fun out of it as most people. It just unties me."

  "Then why bother?"

  "Because I like the feeling of being untied."

  She waited hopefully for signs of pregnancy, fumed when they didn't appear.

  "Peg, de
ar, be patient! We've only been married a year."

  "That's what that doctor said. 'Go home and forget about it. It will happen when you least expect it.' Which is more than reasonably dense, because I'm expecting it all the time."

  The approximate date when her drinking became clearly recognizable as a problem was one he could pinpoint. After they returned from Europe she threw herself headlong into the work of every active Negro and biracial organization in the area, even when the organizations were battling among themselves. After some of the meetings and get-togethers, she would come home and rage futilely: "What's the matter with our people, Brad! What's the matter with them! They don't do anything, They not only don't, they won't! Except squabble among themselves. And if you say another word, one word about the time not being ripe, I'll divorce you!"

  For a time she wrote fiercely on racial problems, completing a magazine article that was accepted enthusiastically by a prestigious monthly literary magazine. She started two others, but left them unfinished. The half-finished third she tore into scraps and threw across the living-room floor. "Words! Words!" she cried. "And a damned lot of good they'll do!"

  "Without words this country would still be a British colony," Brad said patiently. "They always precede bullets."

  At first he noticed that when he came home at night there would be times when her cheeks would be flushed, her eyes unnaturally bright, her talk repetitious. For a little while he joked with her about it, and she returned the jokes. It was when she started denying it that the seeds of real worry were sown. She always brought their coffee cups into the living room after dinner, and they lounged companionably on the divan. On a night when she had left the room to answer the telephone he stubbed out a cigarette, looked into his coffee cup for a final swallow and, finding it empty, picked hers up, too comfortable and lazy to go out to the kitchen for more. The bite of raw liquor thinly diluted with coffee had made him wince.

  He called her on it when she returned, and she flared up angrily; then, for the first time since he had known her he saw slyness in her face.

  "Sorry I blew up, Brad, but I hate being lectured. Hate it! I'm drinking it for cramps. Satisfied?"

  "I would be, Peg, if you hadn't had cramps ten days ago."

  "Oh—those. These are intestinal."

  "Who told me to lay off lettuce and roughage when I had the same trouble a while back? That was a big salad you had tonight."

  "Let me alone, Brad! Let me alone! Stop nagging me!

  You'd think I was some sort of damned alcoholic or something!"

  And then, because he knew, sickeningly and without doubt, that she was, he called upon what wisdom he had and remained silent, saying only: "Just don't sneak it, Peg. Just, for God's sake, dear, don't sneak it."

  But she had continued to sneak it, while still firmly denying it, apparently getting a perverse pleasure from the secrecy until what he had believed at that time to be the first break came in the guise of a critical double pneumonia that hospitalized her for three weeks. "Lobar type," said the doctor. "Both lungs a mess. Be thankful for modern drugs, Brad. I don't think she would have pulled through without them."

  When she got home Brad arranged for her aunt to take care of her during the day. He tried to get the old lady to live with them during that time, but she refused. "Them gran'chilren of mine," she said. "Peg, she's all right oncet you gets home. Sets a heap of store by you, she does."

  "And I by her, Auntie Tuttle."

  "I knows. I ain't blind. You been powerful good to her, powerful good. An' you've had plenty trouble."

  He was afraid that even under the watchful eye of Auntie Tuttle the weakness and depression of convalescence would start the drinking again, and he felt weak with relief when, sitting with him in front of the fire one night, she said: "I think I've learned my lesson, Brad. I know I was hitting it too heavily before. I'll admit it now. But I like it this way better—wobbly in the legs, maybe, but clear in the head."

  When she started again, a year later, the pattern had changed. The drinking became periodic, and he knew she was licked when she said: "I can control it, Brad. A beer now and then, a drink before dinner occasionally, wine with dinner." He watched the now-and-then beers and the before-dinner drinks, and the wine with dinner pyramid—sometimes over a period of days, sometimes over a period of weeks—into protracted bouts of heavy drinking that were terminated only by her body's eventual and violent rejection of the abuse she heaped upon it. But if there were sobriety and a relatively good state of physical well-being during those interim periods, there was no inner stability or peace, only that precarious surface equilibrium.

  The only lay person with whom he discussed the problem in any detail was Michael Shea, the firm's junior partner whose open, apparently guileless Irish countenance had lulled scores of opposing counsel into complacency, only to find themselves all but blown out of the courtroom before the case was finished. If his brogue had been assumed at one time, it had become part of his personality by the time he entered the firm, and had long ago stopped irritating Brad. Mike, everyone knew, was a member of AA, and made no bones about it.

  Brad had prowled restlessly around Mike's office a few weeks before this Sunday morning when he sat before the fire trying tiredly for the thousandth time to find a solution, a path that would lead both Peg and him to peace.

  "She doesn't want to quit, Brad." Mike pushed the papers on his desk away and leaned back.

  "How could anyone help but want to? Mike, one, just one of those hangovers and I'd run screaming for a cure."

  "Because there's something—rather, some thing, she can't face. What it is you don't know. Sure, and I don't think she does either."

  "Last year she went to a psychiatrist. It was one of those rare periods when she admitted to a problem."

  "And it didn't work."

  "She went three times. It set her off again. She refused to go back—asked me if I'd ever had a dentist fool with a live nerve without using novocaine."

  "The poor darlin'. I'd feel the same way. If you'd asked the old pro here, I'd have told you to save your money."

  "Save my money? She won't use my money, either to buy liquor or for something like a psychiatrist or that brief spell in the sanitarium."

  "When hers runs out she'll use any money—for the liquor, that is. That's a cruel thing to be saying to you, Brad. I wish to God I could help you. What happened after the sanitarium bit?"

  "She didn't stay long enough for anyone to find out what the end result would have been."

  That was something he could not discuss with Mike or anyone else. How Peg, at eight o'clock on a Sunday night, three hours after he had finished his visit to her, had managed somehow to elude the nurses and come home. She had been given her clothes to wear outside in the gardens of the institution, three days before. For ten days he had known rest and a sort of desolate peace of mind, and freedom from worry. He was at his desk in the study going over the final draft of a rebuttal argument when he heard her voice. "Brad—" She was standing in the doorway, clear-eyed, sober—and he saw the hurt and lonely child of that first meeting in Lawrence Travis's home. When he jumped to his feet and tool her in his arms, she did what she had not done that first da; —wept, clinging to him. "Brad, don't be cross with me. Don' be cross. I was so lonely—after you left, Brad—so damned lonely—"

  He looked down at Shea. "I thought you knew. She didn't stay long enough to finish the treatment. After about a week or so at home, she started drinking again. And refusing to admit it."

  "You've the patience of a saint, man. It's as I said, she doesn't want to quit. And never has, if you ask me. She'll no stop to please you, Brad, no matter how much she loves you And she'll not stop for fear of a hangover or any physical results. She'll stop when sobriety means more than being drunk. To put it bluntly."

  "There has to be some way—"

  "It will come—if you've faith—"

  Damn, that was the trouble with the Irish like Shea, and n stil
l irritated Brad. When you wanted a clear-cut, objective appraisal of an apparently hopeless situation you were apt to wind up in the fuzzy, abstract realms of what he called faith "Thanks, pal," he said. "That's a tremendous help."

  "Don't be hardening your heart now. There's a priest in our group. I'll be seeing him tonight and I'll ask him to pray for her—"

  "You and Dora and the priest—" He smiled at the open, ingenuous face. "You're a good man, Mike Shea. I'll say that."

  Mike laughed. "There's times when I'm thinking you're nothing but a sunburned Irishman yourself. You big dope— don't you know that what you're doing—which is trying—is faith? In a cockeyed sort of way? Go on now, go home and get some rest. You've a tough one in the morning."

  ***

  Brad stood up, stretching, squaring his shoulders to relieve the tension. He walked to the fire, stirred it into indifferent life, then returned to the divan. He picked up one of the pillows and tossed it to one end, then stretched out, covering his eyes with the crook of an elbow. There it was—full circle, that journey into the past in which he was like a man lost, without compass, in a dense forest, returning always with nightmare regularity to the point from which he had first set out for home. And he was no closer to the true course than he had been that revealing night when he had taken a swallow from Peg's cup and felt the darkness closing in.

  There could be no running away from it, no insistence— even legal coercion—that Peg remain under medical and psychiatric supervision. It would do no permanent good. Don't be cross. I was so lonely—after you left, Brad—so damned lonely.