“She’s barking up the wrong man,” David said with a smile. By the power of imagination, the power of will, he was putting an envelope, addressed to him in Annabelle’s handwriting, on the gray wicker table in Mrs. McCartney’s downstairs hall.
“She called me in the lab today,” Wes said, “wanting to make sure. She asked us five days ago, and the least you could do is tell her you’re not coming.”
“I asked you to do that for me.”
“Well, I didn’t. Okay, hermit. I’m hungry enough to eat for two tonight.”
David grabbed the letter, which he saw was to him, before he realized that it was not in Annabelle’s handwriting.
“Ah, the girl,” Wes said with a smile at him, and went on down the hall to his room.
The letter was from Effie Brennan. She had made a painful effort to be light and amusing, and suggested—he was reminded of the excuses he made for Annabelle—that perhaps he had forgotten her invitation, and ended clumsily, “Please come, I really have very few guests, and I have missed you very much.”
Perhaps it was the pleading letter, perhaps the desire to avoid an evening brooding over the lateness of Annabelle’s letter, perhaps it was the kind things that Mrs. Beecham said to him about Effie when he gave her the skin lotion. David took a quick bath, changed his shirt, and went down to speak to Wes, thinking that if Wes had already gone, it was no matter, and if he was still here, well and good. Wes was just about to leave, and delighted to have David’s company. David did not join him, however, in his preliminary scotch before he left his room.
Effie Brennan’s apartment was on Main Street, between a women’s dress shop and a hardware store, and one entered the red brick building through a door above which hung a dentist’s sign: DR. NAGEL, PAINLESS DENTIST. David, who had learned some German for his science courses, pointed out to Wes the name, which meant needle, and they both laughed. Effie opened the door for them before they reached her third-floor landing. A very good smell of roasting meat came from the room behind her.
She had scotch for Wes, and offered David scotch or martinis, but David smilingly insisted that he would prefer plain soda and ice. He did not even want the ice, as he disliked very cold drinks, but to beg her to leave the ice out seemed too much of an effort, and he felt, too, that it would have deprived her somehow of a little pleasure.
“I planned this menu,” Effie announced from the kitchen, “to be as unlike the things you get at Mrs. Mac’s as I possibly could.”
They ate in an alcove beside the kitchen, at a white sawbuck table like the picnic tables in public parks. This one was covered with a thin pink cloth, very clean and crisp. Wes soon dropped some of his pot roast gravy on it.
David partook of the wine with pleasure, and wished, after all, that he had contributed the bottle instead of Wes. It was an excellent Médoc, and David wondered where Wes had gotten it in Froudsburg, but he refrained from asking. Nevertheless, Wes noticed that he drank it appreciatively, and said, “So wine is your weakness. Why didn’t you ever tell us, Davy boy? Ah, the connoisseur, the gentleman!” Wes wafted a hand across the table, narrowly missing the wine bottle.
“I think it’s lovely to like wine,” Effie said. “When I was in Canada four years ago . . .”
David resolved to send her flowers the next day. He had a vague memory of having seen chrysanthemums in bunches somewhere recently. Then he became aware of her rather slender hands, gesticulating as she talked, aware of their nail polish, which certainly could be called of a conservative color as nail polish went, but which turned him away from her and even frightened him a little. Annabelle didn’t wear nail polish, and she had once told him she liked her nails a little short for the piano.
They were in the living room now, sipping final cups of coffee, and Wes was pointing to a small oil painting that he said Effie had done of a couple of fishing boats tied up at a wharf. It was neither bad nor good, and David made an appropriate comment, and asked her if she did much painting.
“All these,” she said with a wide gesture at the wall on the kitchen side of the room. “Well, not that one,” she added, indicating a rather competent portrait of a middle-aged man. “A friend of mine did that. That’s of my father.”
Wes went about looking at every picture and finding something to say about each of them. David began to wonder how he could manage to leave before Wes, as he wanted to.
“I’ll show you something really mad,” Effie said gaily. “I wouldn’t do it, if I hadn’t had two martinis.” From the top drawer of her slant-top desk she pulled out a large sheet of drawing paper. “Recognize it?” she asked, handing it to David.
To David’s surprise and discomfort he saw that it was a portrait of himself.
“It’s Davy!” Wes cried, and laughed. “I didn’t know you’d sat for her, Dave.”
“I didn’t.”
“I’m enormously flattered that you recognize it. I did it from memory. Memory!” she repeated nervously and rolled her eyes. “Not that I had much. I mean—well, now I can see what I missed in the eyes.” She went back to her desk.
“But the hair and the whole shape of the face is great,” Wes said.
And that was reasonably true, David thought. There was his thick, dark brown hair—the drawing was in brown charcoal—the straight eyebrows and the mouth. “I think it’s incredibly good, just to be from memory, Effie,” David said, smiling.
She stopped in midmovement, there was a sudden silence in the room, framing his words in space. It was as if Effie had stopped to drink in his casual words of praise. Then she moved and stood before him with a crayon in her hand. “I don’t suppose you’d really sit for me for one minute and let me get the eyes right.”
David nodded. “Of course I would.”
Effie worked with a little pointed eraser, and scratched a point on her charcoal from time to time on a sandpaper pad.
“There!” she said finally. “I’ve even improved the eyebrows.” She set it up on a bookshelf for all of them to admire, though at everything they said she laughed deprecatingly. “Portrait of the genius as a young man,” Effie said, interrupting them.
Shortly after that, Wes slipped out of the room, to the bathroom, David supposed, and he found himself with Effie, both of them as tongue-tied as adolescents. She told him he could have the charcoal drawing of himself, if he really wanted it, and he said of course he did.
“I don’t know what you think of me. You probably think I’m silly,” Effie said, her eyelids fluttering, unable to look at him. “But I like you a lot. I wish you wouldn’t be so shy with me. I’m bad enough.”
In an agony of embarrassment, David stood like a stick.
“I mean, I really don’t see why we couldn’t see a movie now and then. Or you come here for dinner now and then. I’m not going to cook you and eat you.” She laughed painfully.
David braced himself, thinking if he got it over with, everything would be easier. “To tell you the truth, Effie, I’m engaged and—even though the marriage is a little way off, I’d prefer not to see anybody else.” It was like revealing himself naked for an instant, then clutching his clothes about him again.
But Effie did not look at all surprised. “Do you see her on weekends? Is that where you go?” she asked almost dreamily.
“I see my mother,” he replied.
“Your mother’s dead.”
David’s mouth opened and closed. “And who told you that?”
“Your boss. My boss Mr. Depew knows Mr. Lewissohn. He had some business with Mr. Lewissohn. So we were chatting about you, and I said to Mr. Lewissohn, ‘It’s too bad about his mother,’ or something like that, and he said, ‘What’s the matter?’ and I said that she had to be in a nursing home, and he said no, she was dead. It was on their record and he remembered it. I didn’t go into it, naturally. I certainly wasn’t trying t
o probe. I just told Mr. Lewissohn I must have gotten mixed up.”
David knew his face must be white, because he felt about to faint. “Mr. Lewissohn’s mistaken. She’s very ill and she may die in a few months, but she’s not dead. He’s made a mistake about that record.” But David remembered the record now too, the simple “No” he had written in a questionnaire’s blank two years ago. He hadn’t thought of it since the day he filled it out. What if Wes should find out? Or maybe Effie had already told him.
Wes was back.
Effie and Wes had a nightcap of scotch, and David a cup of coffee—instant coffee, since the pot was empty. Then they got up to leave. Effie looked strange, he thought, and he attributed it to the fact she perhaps did not believe what he had said about his mother. As he was about to thank her for his portrait, which he had picked up, she said, “On second thought, I’d better spray it with fixative before you take it. Otherwise it’ll smear.” Her eyes looked straight into his as she spoke, and he knew he would never see the drawing again.
6
A letter from Annabelle arrived the next day, the eighteenth of December. Seeing it on the wicker table, David did not snatch it but picked it up quietly along with a picture postcard with a California landscape, probably from his cousin Louise. He climbed the stairs to his room.
He took off his coat and nervously hung it, yanking its front straight on the hanger, closed the wardrobe door, then sat down at his writing table, the better to bear whatever the letter might contain. It was two pages, written only on one side, and his eyes swam over the whole thing before they focused.
Dec. 16, 1958
Dear Dave,
Pardon me for taking such a long time to answer you—but I think I have a good excuse! I have just had a baby, an 8½ pound boy. There were some complications—or rather some were expected, so I was afraid to say anything before “it” was actually here, but now everything is fine. I hope you can understand, Dave, that with a baby to take care of it is impossible for me to think of going anywhere. He was born Dec. 2, at 4:10 A.M., which makes him two weeks old today.
Dave, I really can understand that this may come as a surprise to you, but it shouldn’t. I am happy—at least right now—and though I might have been equally happy or more happy with you, that is just not the way things worked out. To think of anything else except the way things are is just to live in a world of the imagination—fine for some things but not for real life. Don’t you agree?
I’ll have to take a job as soon as I’m able to arrange about the baby, as Gerald has made a bad mistake about his shop (against everybody’s advice) and consequently has had great expenses. Enough of that.
I must end this as I have a million things to do. I’m sorry I can’t see you, especially just before Xmas. Are you going to California for Xmas? I do think of you, Dave.
With much love, as ever,
Annabelle
David stood up and faced his triad of windows. A baby. It was unbelievable, just unbelievable. His stunned brain played for a moment with the idea she had only made this up, perhaps to startle, to hurt him so that he would not try to write her again—her objective being to make him stop hurting himself. If she had been going to have a baby, wouldn’t she have said so months ago? Wouldn’t any woman?
He sat for a long while on his bed, frowning with an attentive, puzzled expression at the carpet, until finally a knock on the door roused him.
It was Sarah, saying something about dinner.
“I’m not feeling well tonight. I won’t be coming down,” David said to her.
Her presence reminded him of where he was, and when he had closed the door after her, he listened until her footsteps were out of hearing, then picked up Annabelle’s letter, his eyes falling on certain words though he refolded it quickly, put it back into its envelope, and set his ink bottle on it with a thump. He took his coat, left his room without locking the door, and went quietly downstairs just as Wes came into the hall from the dining room.
“There you are. You’re not feeling well?” Wes asked with concern.
“I’m all right. Not hungry tonight.”
“You’re green. What happened?”
“Nothing. I’ll just get a little air. See you later,” he added weakly, and went out the front door.
For the first time in months, perhaps ever on his walks, he went to Main Street, where there were lights and people. Many of the stores were closed, but many also stayed open for Christmas shopping, and there were people enough on the sidewalk, the dull-faced peasant types that from David’s first days in the town had surprised him by their preponderance and repelled him. Aware suddenly that he walked on Effie’s side of the street, he crossed over so as to have less chance of running into her. The windows of cheap shoes, women’s dresses, drugstore windows crammed with toys, flickered past in the corner of his left eye. Constantly he stepped aside to avoid the oncoming drifters, gawking at the windows. A huge, dangling Santa Claus, laughing drearily on a too-slow phonograph record, made him dodge sharply, but when he looked he saw that the black oilcloth boots were at least four feet over his head. A record store boomed “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing.” Through this chaos David carried precariously the small, concentrated chaos of the Situation like a ball held up in the air by jets of water from below it. When the sounds and the light grew dimmer, and a dark, silent vacant lot stretched out on his left, he found a thought in his head: Annabelle was not herself now, wasn’t able to see anything in perspective, because of the baby. No, he didn’t think she had lied about the baby; Annabelle wouldn’t stoop to trickery. But it was no wonder she was immersed, drowned now in what she considered reality. Naturally, a baby was real, pain was real, dirty diapers, hospital bills, and of course the stupid husband. What Annabelle couldn’t see now was that there was a way out still.
If Annabelle could not come to him he would go to her. He decided to go this Sunday, when he would most likely find Gerald Delaney at home too. He would go to his house in Ballard Friday evening as usual, and leave around nine Sunday morning for Hartford. He would not call her first, he thought, and give her the opportunity to beg him not to come. He would call her in Hartford and insist upon seeing her and Gerald too. Then he began to plan, as methodically as he could, his argument.
David credited himself with an ability to maintain a self-possessed manner, regardless of his emotions. And though the letter from Annabelle had been shattering, had prevented him sleeping the night of the evening he received it, neither Wes nor Mrs. Beecham—who measured him for socks—nor anyone at the factory commented on a change in him Thursday and Friday. He remembered the flowers for Effie and sent them to her with a thank-you note. On Friday, around 5:30 P.M., Wes left Mrs. McCartney’s in a resigned and cynical mood to go home to Laura.
With a swiftness that made Wes drop a package he was holding, David swung around and caught Wes by the shoulders and shook him. “Try it again, for Christ’s sake! You’ve had your vacation!”
“Good God, Dave!” Wes said, readjusting his jacket. “What on earth’s the matter with you?”
“Nothing! But you—If you go back with a bitter attitude, where do you think you’re going to get with her?”
“Maybe I don’t want to get anywhere with her.”
“You said you loved each other once.” David tried to quiet his hard breathing. “I’m sorry, Wes.”
“Christ. I thought you were going to beat me up.” Wes’s expression was still resentful. “To tell you the truth, I’ve been invited to Effie’s for a bracing scotch or two before I face—home.”
“Go ahead, go ahead.” Then David sat down on his bed and put his hands over his face, waiting for Wes to be gone, for him to be quite out of the house, before he started on this most important of journeys.
It was at least a minute before he heard his floor creak under Wes’s steps and the door ope
n and close.
7
Sunday morning, it rained, starting a little after 6 A.M., when David got up. On the radio, he heard that the rain was expected to turn to snow. In his pajamas and robe, David had a leisurely breakfast of boiled eggs and an English muffin and bacon—though he had no appetite, the importance of eating had registered on his mind, and the breakfast went down dutifully. Then he played some Haydn on the phonograph and drifted about his house, looking at the backs of his art books, at his framed manuscript page of a Beethoven theme which had cost him a considerable sum, at the gold-leaf-framed Leonardo drawing which had cost more, and at his silver tea set on a table in a corner of the living room, which he realized with a little shame he had never used once.
It rained all the way to Hartford, and grew perceptibly colder and foggier as if he were forcing his car into Hyperborean realms. David still heard the Haydn in his ears, and he hummed with it as he casually rehearsed his lines. Not one line did he compose verbatim, however. In a situation like this, he preferred to rely mostly on inspiration. Having vowed he would enter the city properly this time, he again got shunted onto an overpass that brought him out finally in a factory district, not unlike the neighborhood of Annabelle’s house, but miles away from it, he knew. He was forced to ask directions twice at filling stations.
Talbert Street. A name evoking nothing, named perhaps for some ephemeral good citizen, or maybe just slapped on for no reason at all. After sighting the street, David drove two or three blocks to a drugstore to telephone. He knew her number by heart.
A man’s voice answered.
“May I speak to Annabelle, please?”
“Who’s calling?”
“David Kelsey.”
“David?”
“Yes. David.”
It seemed longer than necessary before she came on.
This Sweet Sickness Page 6