The most unfathomable part of the Talbott’s marriage was that outside of the bedroom, Gideon was unfailingly generous, considerate, worshipful, adoring, and on Crystal’s part she felt both respect and affection for him.
By the time they returned to the mainland, she had suffered an irreversible loss. She felt nothing but a revulsed loathing for sex.
Two
1950
Honora
17
At four on the afternoon of January 2, Honora emerged from the tall office building at the corner of Hollywood and Vine. She didn’t feel the ninety-degree heat or smell the exhaust from the traffic; she barely saw the pedestrians.
A baby. The thought coursed through her like electricity through a light filament. A baby. She looked up at the aluminum Christmas tree that still topped the lamppost, and suddenly clasped the warm, grooved steel, whirling around: this being Hollywood, magnet for pretty girls and nuts, the passersby glanced at her with absentminded indulgence.
She still couldn’t believe it.
“You’re at the end of your first trimester,” Dr. Capwell had said with the bombast common to medical men precarious in their professional skill.
Honora had stared across his cluttered desk disbelievingly. Her periods hadn’t stopped. Last week Curt, worried about her lassitude and excessive need for sleep, had insisted she see a doctor. The apartment house manageress had recommended Dr. Capwell, who had sent blood and urine samples to the lab.
“But what about my periods?” she had mumbled, flushing.
His long, flabby cheeks had wobbled. “My dear young woman, spotting is quite common when the menses would occur.” Opening and closing his drawers, he came up with a dog-eared pamphlet. A female profile, yellow lines ballooning from breasts and stomach, showed various stages of pregnancy. “This will answer any of your prepartum questions. And here is my fee schedule.”
She released the lamppost and started west on Hollywood Boulevard. At Van Vliet’s supermarket she bought an inexpensive cellophane bag of salad vegetables, four oranges with withered skin that would be good for juice, a quarter pound of sliced ham, a quart of milk. She stared into the bakery showcase for several minutes then splurged on a chocolate cream pie. Today’s news called for a celebration.
As she replaced her wallet in her purse, she saw the pamphlet, and suddenly thought of Dr. Capwell’s three-hundred-dollar fee. She had no idea of what was charged for prenatal visits and delivery, but it seemed very high—or was this in contrast with the Ivorys’ bank balance, which was very low?
At Talbott’s Curt had earned a top salary: secure in his abilities, insecure about his early privations, he had saved very little. A week after their arrival, he had received a cashier’s check for two hundred dollars from the subleasor for his gorgeous decorator furnishings.
His Los Angeles contacts had taken him to lunch. Over martinis and porterhouses he heard the same story: private and government contracts had dried up, engineers were not being taken on but laid off by the hundreds.
Secretly Honora brooded that his inability to connect was part of a punitive conspiracy. In her scenario Gideon had discovered her letter to Joscelyn and blacklisted him.
Curt took his professional rejections with an outward jauntiness. He mailed résumés to every engineering company in the area. On the days that he had no interviews, they explored Los Angeles or went to the beach or played tennis on the cracking courts at De Longpre Park. At the beginning of December he had traded in his yellow Buick on a square, ugly prewar Ford coupe plus three hundred dollars. He made no secret of his preference for sharp convertibles, top restaurants, private clubs. Honora, dazed with love, considered southern California heaven. The one cloud was being separated from her family—she often woke from dreams of them with tears on her cheeks. About Curt’s future she was incurably optimistic. Two weeks ago, when a builder had offered him a job carving an Encino lemon grove into tract-size lots, she had urged him to refuse. “When something good comes along, you’ll be tied up.”
This morning he had driven off to yet another appointment.
She turned at the corner of Cherokee, halting to rearrange the awkward bakery box in the heavy brown grocery bag before starting up the street’s incline.
The Ivorys lived in a one-story stucco. Quite a few of the red roof tiles were missing, and a thick blanket of bougainvillea hid the peeling paint. The long, dingy hallway was cool and smelled of an unknown spice.
At her door, she called, “Curt?”
He opened the door. “What’re you selling today, lady?”
“This,” she said, leaning forward to kiss his mouth.
Pulling away, he took the grocery bag, asking, “Anything spoilable?”
“Milk and a pie.”
“You put them away. I’ll let down the bed.”
* * *
Late afternoon saffron light sifted through the closed venetian blinds to cast a quadrangle across their entwined, naked bodies. They were smiling at each other.
“Now we can talk,” she said. “What happened at your meeting?”
“Nothing much. I have a job.”
She clutched his bicep. “Curt!”
“That surprise shows a definite lack of wifely confidence.”
“You really got the job?”
“Not at the appointment.” His tone was casual, but his excitement gave off vibrations against her skin.
“Will you stop being so irritating and mysterious?”
“This morning I got a letter from Fuad Abdulrahman—”
“Fuad?” She could feel the postcoital warmth drain from her. “Then it’s in Lalarhein?”
“Yes. He’s offered me the job of project manager on this road they’re building.”
How could she go to a backwater Arabian country? Now? Stop being idiotic, she told herself. Women have babies there. Her expression must have flickered. His topaz eyes were suddenly watchful. She looked down. Her breasts were definitely larger, the nipples no longer pink but light toast. She covered herself with the sheet.
“Now what about you?” he said. “What did the doctor say?”
If I tell him, she thought, he’ll turn Fuad down. Those periods were pure serendipity—like her, Curt had never once considered pregnancy. Time enough to let him know once we’re in Lalarhein.
Honora took a deep breath. “It turns out,” she said, “that I’m as healthy as they come.”
“Then why’ve you been sleeping twenty-three hours a day?”
“The laziness of a well-loved woman,” she said.
He raised an eyebrow. “Honora?”
“Also a slight iron deficiency,” she covered hastily. Dr. Capwell had prescribed something called Feosal pills.
“That’s all, iron deficiency?”
“Nothing like a little anemia to drag a girl down.” Finding wifely duplicity more than she could handle, she changed the subject. “When do we leave?”
He took her hand, playing with the narrow, electroplated gold band. “The road’s going to cut from Daralam, that’s the capital, to the Persian Gulf, an area generously described as primitive.”
“I’ll stay in my tent, then, pistol at hand.”
“We’re talking about heat, flies, sandstorms, lack of water, not cannibals,” he said, pausing before he finished. “Sweet, Fuad says one of the conditions for the chief engineer is that he can’t bring his family.”
The light was gone and gray shadows filled the room.
“How long will you be gone?” she asked, attempting to keep her voice steady.
“They want me to leave right away—Lalarhein’s not exactly on the flight path, it takes close to a week to get there. I’ll be on the project until March, or at the longest, the beginning of April. They’ve offered an exorbitant salary with two months up front. I’ll deposit it in the account for you.”
At the mention of cold cash her throat clogged with childish tears. How could she live without him?
If she told h
im the truth he would never leave her. Without his work he’s dying. The baby’s not due until the beginning of June, and he’ll be back long before then. Choking back the tears, she said. “There’s just one thing.”
Again he was alert. “What’s that?”
“No lolling under the date palms with any of Fuad’s concubines.”
His laughter held a note of relief. “Only on my days off.” He caught her hand, pressing the wrist to his lips, his breath warming her pulse.
* * *
On January 4 she saw him off at the Burbank Airport, the first leg of his journey. She waited on the observation deck ten minutes after the speck that was his plane had disappeared into the cloudless blue of the eastern sky. As she left the parking lot she turned left not right, and didn’t notice the frame shacks and citrus groves had given way to uncultivated land, dwarfed shrubbery, then dun-colored foothills. The only movement was a fringe-winged hawk circling above the tumble of rocks. She was hopelessly lost. Speeding up curves, she reached a gas station with old-fashioned pumps. Breathlessly she explained to the sun-dried, grizzly attendant that she was trying to get to Hollywood. “Girlie,” he said. “you’re heading dead in the wrong direction.”
18
Intimidated by the way Dr. Capwell wrote in his cramped hand across three by five cards during her visit as well as by his convoluted medical jargon, Honora seldom questioned him. Instead, she settled into the regimen outlined in the pamphlet. Every morning she walked two miles, she drank her daily quart of milk, ate bland food, showered rather than taking a long, relaxing bath. She felt incredibly carnal, and maybe in a way it was just as well that Curt wasn’t around since the pamphlet stated: sexual intercourse should be restricted as much as possible. Fresh air being a must, she spent a lot of time in the apartment building’s narrow, mossy backyard where hummingbirds hovered at citrus blossoms and tangled vines. Here, she wrote voluminously to Curt. She did not tell him about the baby. Her secrecy lay behind an amorphous cloud of reasons. There was no point worrying him when he was so far away. She eagerly, gleefully, anticipated his expression of incredulous delight when he saw her condition—hadn’t he informed her they would have a minimum of three children?
Lalarheini mail service was rotten. From Curt’s comments she knew he had never received certain of her fat letters, and assuredly some of his were missing. A clump of finger-smeared, multistamped envelopes would arrive in one day’s delivery, then she would wait for weeks on tenterhooks dreaming up disasters that had stopped him from writing.
She and Langley exchanged frequent letters, but her fingers cramped whenever she tried to mention her condition.
In her cumulative loneliness she often wept. These were the easy tears of pregnancy, but Honora didn’t realize it.
Her breasts were tender and growing large—nearly as big as Crystal’s she would think proudly—but her abdomen bulged very slightly and her loose sweaters hid the straining zippers. At the end of January she felt a peculiar liquid thrusting. Though maternity clothes were not yet a must-have, she bought two smocks and a brown rayon-garbardine skirt with a cutout stomach.
* * *
One nippy evening in mid-February she was lounging on the couch listening to the Gas Company’s Evening Concert while eating a green pippin and reading The House of Mirth. At a tentative rap on the door, she looked up bewildered. Dropping the apple core in a saucer, holding her place open in the library book, she went to answer.
Next to the familiar battered suitcase checkered with ancient, classy travel stickers stood Langley.
“Daddy . . . .” she whispered.
“I say, looks as though it’ll be Grandpa before long.”
Her father’s whimsical tone reached back into her earliest childhood and her novel thumped to the floor as she flung herself into his arms.
He admitted he hadn’t eaten dinner and while she cooked for him, he sat companionably at the aluminum tube breakfast set which crowded the miniature kitchen. Pouring himself a drink from the nearly full scotch bottle that Curt had left, he told her the family news: Joscelyn had been advanced a full year in her new school and was having orthodontia, Crystal was brightening up the Clay Street mansion with the aid of a firm of Union Street decorators—“very lavender young men,” Langley called them.
He ate the lamb chop planned for her tomorrow night’s dinner in two bites, swiftly cleaning his plate, confessing he would enjoy more of the peas and her excellent chips. Peeling the potatoes, she asked, “How’s the publishing house doing? You’ve never mentioned it in your letters.”
“Let business wait. I’m on holiday. But I do want the latest on Curt’s project.”
Honora fried the chips, explaining at length about the stabilized shoulders, the sand that must be graded, compacted and covered with layers of asphalt, the right drainage for the occasional desert flash flood.
“The sands of Araby! It’s always been a dream of mine to go there. But I must say I’m a bit surprised Curt left you. Now.”
“He doesn’t know about the baby.”
Langley poured himself a refill. “Dead soldier,” he said, setting the empty bottle on the window ledge. “Honora, this isn’t the sort of thing you keep from your husband.”
“He’d have stayed home, and this job is terrifically important for his career.”
“But still you must let him know.” Langley’s blue eyes grew bleak and she knew he was remembering her mother’s fatal hemorrhage at Joscelyn’s birth.
Sighing, she turned the potatoes. “I’ll tell him soon,” she said. “Daddy, you’re staying here, of course.”
“It’s rather tight quarters.”
“We’ll shift the couch in here for me and you can take the Murphy bed.”
“Surely there’s a smallish hotel nearby.” He spoke uncertainly.
Glancing up from the sizzling frying pan, she noticed that his collar was wrinkled, as if ironed by an inexperienced hand.
“Daddy, you’ve come nearly five hundred miles to see me,” she said firmly. “No more talk about hotels.”
* * *
The next two days she took Langley on sightseeing tours, chattering happily as she drove. She was a prisoner released from solitary confinement. Occasionally Langley would grow silent, a temporary brooding that she attributed to their financial discrepancies—he had explained that since he was from out of town no bank would cash his checks.
She splurged on three bottles of Black and White. Though he never reached any degree of inebriation, two of them disappeared in two days.
The sofa on which she slept crowded the kitchen and they shifted the table and chairs into the main room, making every meal seem festive. His third day was Sunday, and they had the traditional English midday sabbath feast of roast beef, potatoes browned in the drippings and Yorkshire pudding followed by a trifle topped with whipped cream, mandarin orange slices and glazed violets.
After the coffee, Langley patted his lean stomach. “The best meal I’ve had since we left home.”
“Home? Is that any way to talk when your grandson’s going to be president?”
“He’ll be a proper American like you and your sisters. But me? Over here I make a hash of everything.”
“Daddy, that’s not true. Gideon never appreciated you. But your new employer has every faith in you.”
Beads of moisture appeared on Langley’s long, clean-shaven upper lip. “Honora, it’s time we have everything out in the open between us. There never was going to be a publishing house.”
She let out a little sigh, although from the first she had nursed uncertainties about this job.
Langley went on quickly, “This chap hired me to ghostwrite his book. He gave me half my fee in advance. His outline was idiotic schoolboy trash, a yarn of derring-do in the Boer War. I made the plot less ridiculous.”
“Naturally,” she said. “You’re a top-notch editor.”
“Last week the book was turned down by Little Brown. He had the gall to tell m
e I had taken the spirit out of the great work.” Langley drained his glass. “He refused to pay my second installment.”
“How unfair!”
“I knew all along that he was a common bounder. But while I was writing I could tell myself I had a new career, such as it was, in the same country with my girls. Now there’s no hope. None.” His small whimper was the sound a whipped puppy makes.
She gripped his hand, which was the masculine version of her own, long and slender.
Langley gazed out at the tangled strip of garden. “I’ve been corresponding with Mortimer Franklin-Smith—you remember him don’t you? He’s at Brighton House. An opening’s come up, an excellent one, for a man with my qualifications.”
“In London?” she asked with a shiver. Was she about to be thrust back into her lonely cell?
Rising, he went into the kitchen. “The way things stand,” he said, “I must turn it down. I don’t have enough to cover my expenses, much less the fare.”
“That’s no problem.” She followed him. “Curt left me a healthy bank account.”
“I can’t take your money.”
“Daddy, you’re being silly. But I do wish you could stay until next month, when he’ll be back.”
“You know that nothing would please me more than to be here when my first grandchild makes his appearance.” The weak, refined features were flattened by desperation. “But a chance like this comes along once in a lifetime.”
He seemed to expect an answer, so she nodded.
“Honora,” he said, “there’s to be no nonsense. I refuse to take a single penny unless it’s done as a regular business arrangement, with interest and a note.”
The words sounded familiar. During the last debt-ridden year in England hadn’t she overheard him snapping them into the telephone? “I’m your daughter,” she said.
“It must be a loan, and that’s that,” Langley said angrily, and did not look at her. “Around a thousand should cover me. Not pounds of course. Dollars.”
“A thousand?” she whispered.
“Of course if you can spare more I wouldn’t be quite so strapped. Could go second class, not third, and so on.”
Too Much Too Soon Page 13