“Jeffrey!”—Roxanne’s voice was pleading—startled and horrified, she yet knew that it was a mistake. Not once did it occur to her to blame him or to resent it. Her word was a trembling supplication—“Tell me, Jeffrey,” it said, “tell Roxanne, your own Roxanne.”
“Why, Roxanne—” began Jeffrey again. The bewildered look changed to pain. He was clearly as startled as she. “I didn’t intend that,” he went on; “you startled me. You—I felt as if some one were attacking me. I—how—why, how idiotic!”
“Jeffrey!” Again the word was a prayer, incense offered up to a high God through this new and unfathomable darkness.
They were both on their feet, they were saying good-by, faltering, apologizing, explaining. There was no attempt to pass it off easily. That way lay sacrilege. Jeffrey had not been feeling well, they said. He had become nervous. Back of both their minds was the unexplained horror of that blow—the marvel that there had been for an instant something between them—his anger and her fear—and now to both a sorrow, momentary, no doubt, but to be bridged at once, at once, while there was yet time. Was that swift water lashing under their feet—the fierce glint of some uncharted chasm?
Out in their car under the harvest moon he talked brokenly. It was just—incomprehensible to him, he said. He had been thinking of the poker game—absorbed—and the touch on his shoulder had seemed like an attack. An attack! He clung to that word, flung it up as a shield. He had hated what touched him. With the impact of his hand it had gone, that—nervousness. That was all he knew.
Both their eyes filled with tears and they whispered love there under the broad night as the serene streets of Marlowe sped by. Later, when they went to bed, they were quite calm. Jeffrey was to take a week of all work—was simply to loll, and sleep, and go on long walks until this nervousness left him. When they had decided this safety settled down upon Roxanne. The pillows underhead became soft and friendly; the bed on which they lay seemed wide, and white, and sturdy beneath the radiance that streamed in at the window.
Five days later, in the first cool of late afternoon, Jeffrey picked up an oak chair and sent it crashing through his own front window. Then he lay down on the couch like a child, weeping piteously and begging to die. A blood clot the size of a marble had broken in his brain.
III
There is a sort of waking nightmare that sets in sometimes when one has missed a sleep or two, a feeling that comes with extreme fatigue and a new sun, that the quality of the life around has changed. It is a fully articulate conviction that somehow the existence one is then leading is a branch shoot of life and is related to life only as a moving picture or a mirror—that the people, and streets, and houses are only projections from a very dim and chaotic past. It was in such a state that Roxanne found herself during the first months of Jeffrey’s illness. She slept only when she was utterly exhausted; she awoke under a cloud. The long, sober-voiced consultations, the faint aura of medicine in the halls, the sudden tiptoeing in a house that had echoed to many cheerful footsteps, and, most of all, Jeffrey’s white face amid the pillows of the bed they had shared—these things subdued her and made her indelibly older. The doctors held out hope, but that was all. A long rest, they said, and quiet. So responsibility came to Roxanne. It was she who paid the bills, pored over his bank-book, corresponded with his publishers. She was in the kitchen constantly. She learned from the nurse how to prepare his meals and after the first month took complete charge of the sick-room. She had had to let the nurse go for reasons of economy. One of the two colored girls left at the same time. Roxanne was realizing that they had been living from short story to short story.
The most frequent visitor was Harry Cromwell. He had been shocked and depressed by the news, and though his wife was now living with him in Chicago he found time to come out several times a month. Roxanne found his sympathy welcome—there was some quality of suffering in the man, some inherent pitifulness that made her comfortable when he was near. Roxanne’s nature had suddenly deepened. She felt sometimes that with Jeffrey she was losing her children also, those children that now most of all she needed and should have had.
It was six months after Jeffrey’s collapse and when the nightmare had faded, leaving not the old world but a new one, grayer and colder, that she went to see Harry’s wife. Finding herself in Chicago with an extra hour before train time, she decided out of courtesy to call.
As she stepped inside the door she had an immediate impression that the apartment was very like some place she had seen before—and almost instantly she remembered-a round-the-corner bakery of her childhood, a bakery full of rows and rows of pink frosted cakes—a stuffy pink, pink as a food, pink triumphant, vulgar, and odious.
And this apartment was like that. It was pink. It smelled pink!
Mrs. Cromwell, attired in a wrapper of pink and black, opened the door. Her hair was yellow, heightened, Roxanne imagined, by a dash of peroxide in the rinsing water every week. Her eyes were a thin waxen blue—she was pretty and too consciously graceful. Her cordiality was strident and intimate, hostility melted so quickly to hospitality that it seemed they were both merely in the face and voice—never touching nor touched by the deep core of egotism beneath.
But to Roxanne these things were secondary; her eyes were caught and held in uncanny fascination by the wrapper. It was vilely unclean. From its lowest hem up four inches it was sheerly dirty with the blue dust of the floor; for the next three inches it was gray—then it shaded off into its natural color, which was—pink. It was dirty at the sleeves, too, and at the collar—and when the woman turned to lead the way into the parlor, Roxanne was sure that her neck was dirty.
A one-sided rattle of conversation began. Mrs. Cromwell became explicit about her likes and dislikes, her head, her stomach, her teeth, her apartment—avoiding with a sort of insolent meticulousness any inclusion of Roxanne with life, as if presuming that Roxanne, having been dealt a blow, wished life to be carefully skirted.
Roxanne smiled. That kimono! That neck!
After five minutes a little boy toddled into the parlor—a dirty little boy clad in dirty pink rompers. His face was smudgy—Roxanne wanted to take him into her lap and wipe his nose; other parts in the vicinity of his head needed attention, his tiny shoes were kicked out at the toes. Unspeakable!
“What a darling little boy!” exclaimed Roxanne, smiling radiantly. “Come here to me.”
Mrs. Cromwell looked coldly at her son.
“He will get dirty. Look at that face!” She held her head on one side and regarded it critically.
“Isn’t he a darling?” repeated Roxanne.
“Look at his rompers,” frowned Mrs. Cromwell.
“He needs a change, don’t you, George?”
George stared at her curiously. To his mind the word rompers connotated a garment extraneously smeared, as this one.
“I tried to make him look respectable this morning,” complained Mrs. Cromwell as one whose patience had been sorely tried, “and I found he didn’t have any more rompers—so rather than have him go round without any I put him back in those—and his face——”
“How many pairs has he?” Roxanne’s voice was pleasantly curious. “How many feather fans have you?” she might have asked.
“Oh,——” Mrs. Cromwell considered, wrinkling her pretty brow. “Five, I think. Plenty, I know.”
“You can get them for fifty cents a pair.”
Mrs. Cromwell’s eyes showed surprise—and the faintest superiority. The price of rompers!
“Can you really? I had no idea. He ought to have plenty, but I haven’t had a minute all week to send the laundry out.” Then, dismissing the subject as irrelevant—“I must show you some things——”
They rose and Roxanne followed her past an open bathroom door whose garment-littered floor showed indeed that the laundry hadn’t been sent out for some time, into another room that was, so to speak, the quintessence of pinkness. This was Mrs. Cromwell’s room.
H
ere the hostess opened a closet door and displayed before Roxanne’s eyes an amazing collection of lingerie. There were dozens of filmy marvels of lace and silk, all clean, unruffled, seemingly not yet touched. On hangers beside them were three new evening dresses.
“I have some beautiful things,” said Mrs. Cromwell, “but not much of a chance to wear them. Harry doesn’t care about going out.” Spite crept into her voice. “He’s perfectly content to let me play nursemaid and housekeeper all day and loving wife in the evening.”
Roxanne smiled again.
“You’ve got some beautiful clothes here.”
“Yes, I have. Let me show you——”
“Beautiful,” repeated Roxanne, interrupting, “but I’ll have to run if I’m going to catch my train.”
She felt that her hands were trembling. She wanted to put them on this woman and shake her—shake her. She wanted her locked up somewhere and set to scrubbing floors.
“Beautiful,” she repeated, “and I just came in for a moment.”
“Well, I’m sorry Harry isn’t here.”
They moved toward the door.
“—and, oh,” said Roxanne with an effort—yet her voice was still gentle and her lips were smiling—“I think it’s Argile’s where you can get those rompers. Good-by.”
It was not until she had reached the station and bought her ticket to Marlowe that Roxanne realized it was the first five minutes in six months that her mind had been off Jeffrey.
IV
A week later Harry appeared at Marlowe, arrived unexpectedly at five o’clock, and coming up the walk sank into a porch chair in a state of exhaustion. Roxanne herself had had a busy day and was worn out. The doctors were coming at five-thirty, bringing a celebrated nerve specialist from New York. She was excited and thoroughly depressed, but Harry’s eyes made her sit down beside him.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing, Roxanne,” he denied. “I came to see how Jeff was doing. Don’t you bother about me.”
“Harry,” insisted Roxanne, “there’s something the matter.”
“Nothing,” he repeated. “How’s Jeff?”
Anxiety darkened her face.
“He’s a little worse, Harry. Doctor Jewett has come on from New York. They thought he could tell me something definite. He’s going to try and find whether this paralysis has anything to do with the original blood clot.”
Harry rose.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said jerkily. “I didn’t know you expected a consultation. I wouldn’t have come. I thought I’d just rock on your porch for an hour——”
“Sit down,” she commanded.
Harry hesitated.
“Sit down, Harry, dear boy.” Her kindness flooded out now—enveloped him. “I know there’s something the matter. You’re white as a sheet. I’m going to get you a cool bottle of beer.”
All at once he collapsed into his chair and covered his face with his hands.
“I can’t make her happy,” he said slowly. “I’ve tried and I’ve tried. This morning we had some words about breakfast—I’d been getting my breakfast down town—and—well, just after I went to the office she left the house, went East to her mother’s with George and a suitcase full of lace underwear.”
“Harry!”
“And I don’t know——”
There was a crunch on the gravel, a car turning into the drive. Roxanne uttered a little cry.
“It’s Doctor Jewett.”
“Oh, I’ll——”
“You’ll wait, won’t you?” she interrupted abstractedly. He saw that his problem had already died on the troubled surface of her mind.
There was an embarrassing minute of vague, elided introductions and then Harry followed the party inside and watched them disappear up the stairs. He went into the library and sat down on the big sofa.
For an hour he watched the sun creep up the patterned folds of the chintz curtains. In the deep quiet a trapped wasp buzzing on the inside of the window pane assumed the proportions of a clamor. From time to time another buzzing drifted down from up-stairs, resembling several more larger wasps caught on larger window-panes. He heard low footfalls, the clink of bottles, the clamor of pouring water.
What had he and Roxanne done that life should deal these crashing blows to them? Up-stairs there was taking place a living inquest on the soul of his friend; he was sitting here in a quiet room listening to the plaint of a wasp, just as when he was a boy he had been compelled by a strict aunt to sit hour-long on a chair and atone for some misbehavior. But who had put him here? What ferocious aunt had leaned out of the sky to make him atone for—what?
About Kitty he felt a great hopelessness. She was too expensive—that was the irremediable difficulty. Suddenly he hated her. He wanted to throw her down and kick at her—to tell her she was a cheat and a leech—that she was dirty. Moreover, she must give him his boy.
He rose and began pacing up and down the room. Simultaneously he heard some one begin walking along the hallway up-stairs in exact time with him. He found himself wondering if they would walk in time until the person reached the end of the hall.
Kitty had gone to her mother. God help her, what a mother to go to! He tried to imagine the meeting: the abused wife collapsing upon the mother’s breast. He could not. That Kitty was capable of any deep grief was unbelievable. He had gradually grown to think of her as something unapproachable and callous. She would get a divorce, of course, and eventually she would marry again. He began to consider this. Whom would she marry? He laughed bitterly, stopped; a picture flashed before him—of Kitty’s arms around some man whose face he could not see, of Kitty’s lips pressed close to other lips in what was surely passion.
“God!” he cried aloud. “God! God! God!”
Then the pictures came thick and fast. The Kitty of this morning faded; the soiled kimono rolled up and disappeared; the pouts, and rages, and tears all were washed away. Again she was Kitty Carr—Kitty Carr with yellow hair and great baby eyes. Ah, she had loved him, she had loved him.
After a while he perceived that something was amiss with him, something that had nothing to do with Kitty or Jeff, something of a different genre. Amazingly it burst on him at last; he was hungry. Simple enough! He would go into the kitchen in a moment and ask the colored cook for a sandwich. After that he must go back to the city.
He paused at the wall, jerked at something round, and, fingering it absently, put it to his mouth and tasted it as a baby tastes a bright toy. His teeth closed on it—Ah!
She’d left that damn kimono, that dirty pink kimono. She might have had the decency to take it with her, he thought. It would hang in the house like the corpse of their sick alliance. He would try to throw it away, but he would never be able to bring himself to move it. It would be like Kitty, soft and pliable, withal impervious. You couldn’t move Kitty; you couldn’t reach Kitty. There was nothing there to reach. He understood that perfectly—he had understood it all along.
He reached to the wall for another biscuit and with an effort pulled it out, nail and all. He carefully removed the nail from the center, wondering idly if he had eaten the nail with the first biscuit. Preposterous! He would have remembered—it was a huge nail. He felt his stomach. He must be very hungry. He considered—remembered—yesterday he had had no dinner. It was the girl’s day out and Kitty had lain in her room eating chocolate drops. She had said she felt “smothery” and couldn’t bear having him near her. He had given George a bath and put him to bed, and then lain down on the couch intending to rest a minute before getting his own dinner. There he had fallen asleep and awakened about eleven, to find that there was nothing in the ice-box except a spoonful of potato salad. This he had eaten, together with some chocolate drops that he found on Kitty’s bureau. This morning he had breakfasted hurriedly down town before going to the office. But at noon, beginning to worry about Kitty, he had decided to go home and take her out to lunch. After that there had been the note on his pillow. The pile of l
ingerie in the closet was gone—and she had left instructions for sending her trunk.
He had never been so hungry, he thought.
At five o’clock, when the visiting nurse tiptoed downstairs, he was sitting on the sofa staring at the carpet.
“Mr. Cromwell?”
“Yes?”
“Oh, Mrs. Curtain won’t be able to see you at dinner. She’s not well. She told me to tell you that the cook will fix you something and that there’s a spare bedroom.”
“She’s sick, you say?”
“She’s lying down in her room. The consultation is just over.”
“Did they—did they decide anything?”
“Yes,” said the nurse softly. “Doctor Jewett says there’s no hope. Mr. Curtain may live indefinitely, but he’ll never see again or move again or think. He’ll just breathe.”
“Just breathe?”
“Yes.”
For the first time the nurse noted that beside the writing-desk where she remembered that she had seen a line of a dozen curious round objects she had vaguely imagined to be some exotic form of decoration, there was now only one. Where the others had been, there was now a series of little nail-holes.
Harry followed her glance dazedly and then rose to his feet.
“I don’t believe I’ll stay. I believe there’s a train.”
She nodded. Harry picked up his hat.
“Good-by,” she said pleasantly.
“Good-by,” he answered, as though talking to himself and, evidently moved by some involuntary necessity, he paused on his way to the door and she saw him pluck the last object from the wall and drop it into his pocket.
Then he opened the screen door and, descending the porch steps, passed out of her sight.
V
After a while the coat of clean white paint on the Jeffrey Curtain house made a definite compromise with the suns of many Julys and showed its good faith by turning gray. It scaled—huge peelings of very brittle old paint leaned over backward like aged men practising grotesque gymnastics and finally dropped to a moldy death in the overgrown grass beneath. The paint on the front pillars became streaky; the white ball was knocked off the left-hand door-post; the green blinds darkened, then lost all pretense of color.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Other Jazz Age Stories Page 48