by Sloan Wilson
“I haven’t even mentioned a coming-out party for Barbara and Janey,” Betsy said. “All I want is a decent house, without a damn-fool crack in the wall like a question mark, and without everything coming apart.”
“We can have the wall replastered,” Tom said. “I’m going to bed.”
He took a half tumblerful of Martinis up with him and lay for a long while sipping it in the dark. When it was finished, he went to sleep. He had no idea how much later it was when Betsy awoke him by shaking his shoulders hard. “Go away,” he said. “I’m asleep.”
“Wake up!” she said. “I’ve got a wonderful idea!”
She almost rolled him out of bed. The light was bright in his eyes. “Tell me in the morning!” he said.
“No!” she said. “Now!”
He struggled to a sitting position and rubbed his eyes. “What time is it?”
“It’s only about one o’clock. Ever since you’ve been asleep, I’ve been sitting downstairs thinking, and suddenly I got it!”
“Got what?”
“This idea!”
“Go to sleep.”
“No! You’ve got to listen to me!”
“I will if you get me a drink,” he said.
She rushed downstairs and came back with a glass half full of gin and ice. “There’s no more vermouth,” she said, “but this ought to fix you.”
He sipped it and made a face.
“Now!” she said. “Will you listen?”
“Is there a choice?”
“What I want to do,” she said, “is to sell this house and move into Grandmother’s house. Not for good, you understand–just until we can figure out what to do with it.”
“That’s wonderful,” he said. “Grandmother wanted us to add another wing. Do you plan to do that too?”
“Be quiet. Now you stop and figure, Tommy. We’ve got twenty-three acres in South Bay, the only twenty-three acres with a view anything like that. Even around here, good one-acre lots sell for as much as five thousand dollars apiece. If we divided that land up, we might get as high as a hundred thousand dollars!”
“Sure,” he said. “But there are a few other things to consider. Things like zoning restrictions. Things like building roads, so people could get to their lots. Things like wells and sewers.”
“Exactly,” she said. “And we couldn’t figure all that out while we were living in Westport and you were working in New York. But if I were living in Grandmother’s house, I could see the zoning board, and show contractors the place, and all the rest of it.”
“And what if it didn’t work?”
“We’d still be there to sell Grandmother’s place. And we’d have the money from selling this house. And we could let Edward stay with us.”
“Let’s talk about it in the morning,” Tom said.
“We can’t give Edward a pension–we never could afford it. And I bet he’d rather stay right in the old house.”
“Talk about it in the morning,” Tom repeated.
“And there are even more possibilities! Let’s say we took all our available money, from selling this place and from Grandmother’s estate and everything. Let’s say we took it all and converted Grandmother’s carriage house into a dwelling. It could be a charming place. Let’s say we did that and sold it with one acre of land for forty thousand dollars. Places like that go for at least that, and I bet we could fix the old carriage house up for twenty thousand. That would give us a profit of twenty thousand. We could use that to build another house and sell that for profit. We could put up a whole housing development, one house at a time. Maybe we could make more than a hundred thousand!”
“I’m dizzy,” Tom said. “To do that, you’d need capital. You’d have to know the real-estate business and the building business. And you should be able to devote full time to it.”
“I can learn, and I will devote full time to it.”
“And in the end we’d lose our shirts,” Tom said. “I know it.”
“In the end we might have a hundred thousand dollars and the pick of the new houses for ourselves.”
“Dreams of glory,” he said. “I’ve spent my whole life getting over them.”
“Look, Tommy,” she said. “You said I should think, and I did. You know what you are? You’re spoiled. You’ve spent most of your life feeling sorry for yourself because you knew Grandmother wasn’t going to leave you a lot of money. You’re spoiled and you’re licked before you start. In spite of all you did in the war, you’re not really willing to go out and fight for what you want. You came back from the war, and you took an easy job, and we both bellyached all the time because you didn’t get more money. And what’s more, you’re a coward. You’re afraid to risk a god-damn thing!”
“Thanks for the character reference,” he said.
“You’ve gotten to the point where you disrespect anybody who does what you can’t do,” she said. “You sneer at the United Broadcasting men, and everybody else. You think you’re something special because a hell of a long while ago you were a good paratrooper. And now all you want is security, and life insurance, and money in the bank to send the kids to college twelve or fifteen years from now, and you’re scared because for six months you’ll be on trial on a new job, and you always look at the dark side of everything, and you’ve got no guts!”
Suddenly she broke into tears. “I love you, Tommy,” she said between sobs. “I just had to say it.”
For several minutes the room was quiet.
“You’re partly right,” he said suddenly.
“I exaggerated,” she said. “And, Tommy, you’ve got more guts than any man I ever saw. Do you know why I love you, Tommy? It’s a funny thing–it’s childish. It’s because I never saw a man I thought could get away with making you really angry.”
“Plenty have,” he said.
“It’s not just strength,” she said. “It’s something in you. When you really want something, I don’t think anything in the world can stand in your way. That’s why you were so damned good in the war.”
“It was luck,” he said. “Whether you get out of a war or not is ninety per cent luck.”
“Maybe,” she said, “but since you’ve gotten back, you haven’t really wanted much. You’ve worked hard, but at heart you’ve never been really trying.”
“We’ll have a go at this real-estate thing if you want,” he said. “I still doubt like hell that it will work. If we wind up broke, can you take it?”
“I can take it,” she said. “And you can too. I know what you’re thinking about.”
“My father.”
“I know. But it’s better to think of Barbara and Janey and Pete, and a new life. I haven’t been really trying, either. From now on I’m going to change.”
11
WHEN TOM AWOKE in the morning, Betsy was already dressed. Her hair was combed and she had put on lipstick.
“What time is it?” he asked.
“Six-thirty.”
“Good God,” he said. “Go away. I’ve another hour to sleep.”
“No you don’t,” she said. “No more rushing for the train.”
‘What?’
“This is the new regime. We’re going to have a leisurely breakfast before you go to work.”
“Oh, God!” he said.
The three children came in and stood by the bed staring at him. Their hair was all combed, and they had on freshly ironed clothes. “Momma got us up early,” Janey said mournfully. “Are you going to get up too?”
“He certainly is!” Betsy said. “Tom, I’ve got a lot of important things I want to say to you. Get up this minute!”
There didn’t seem to be much chance of getting any more sleep, so Tom climbed out of bed, groped his way to the bathroom, and started to shave. When he went downstairs, he heard a coffeepot percolating. The coffee smelled good. In the kitchen he found the breakfast table fully set and waffles cooking. “What’s going on?” he asked Betsy.
“Breakfast,” she said. “No
more instant coffee. No more grabbing a piece of toast to eat on the way to the station. We’re going to start living sanely.”
He sat down and poured some maple sirup on a waffle.
“No more hotdogs and hamburgers for dinner,” Betsy said. “I’m going to start making stews and casseroles and roasts and things.”
“Just watch the grocery bill,” he said.
“No more television.”
“What?”
“No more television. I’m going to give the damn set away.”
“What for?”
“Bad for the kids,” she said. “Instead of shooing them off to the television set, we’re going to sit in a family group and read aloud. And you ought to get your mandolin fixed up. We could have friends in and sing–we’ve been having too much passive entertainment.”
Tom poured himself a fragrant cup of coffee. “I’ll need the television for my work,” he said.
Betsy ignored him. “No more homogenized milk,” she said. “We’re going to save two cents a quart and shake the bottle ourselves.”
“Fine.”
“And we’re going to church every Sunday. We’re going to stop lying around Sunday mornings, drinking Martinis. We’re going to church in a family group.”
“All right.”
“Peter!” Betsy said.
Pete had just slowly and deliberately poured half the bottle of maple sirup over his waffle. The sirup had overflowed the plate and was now dripping on the floor. “You know you shouldn’t do that!”
“Don’t be cross,” Janey said. “It was an accident.”
“It was not an accident,” Barbara said. “He did it on purpose. I saw him.”
“Don’t be a tattletale,” Betsy said, wiping up the sirup with a damp rag. “You children are going to learn some table manners. No waffles for you, Pete.”
Pete immediately began to howl at the top of his lungs. “Give him his waffle,” Tom said hastily. “It was an accident.”
“No,” Betsy said. “We’re going to start having some consistent punishment around here.”
Pete put his thumb in his mouth and stared at her solemnly.
“It’s almost time for me to catch my train,” Tom said. “Are you going to drive me to the station, or can I take the car?”
“You’re going to walk!” she said. “It’s time you started getting some exercise.”
“I’m going to take the car,” he said. “Unless you want to drive me.”
“Can’t you walk?”
“I’m tired this morning,” he said. “Are you going to drive, or shall I take the car?”
“I’ll drive,” she said judiciously. “Get in the car, kids!”
The children scrambled into the car. All the way to the station, Betsy sat uncomfortably erect. Hardly any cars were at the station when they got there, and they saw they had ten minutes to wait for the train. They sat in silence.
“You think I’m being silly, don’t you?” Betsy said suddenly.
“I’m just a little startled.”
“We ought to start doing the things we believe in,” she said. “We’ve got a lot of hard work ahead of us, and we better start now.”
He kissed her and went to buy his paper. On the train it was both cool and quiet. He sank down in a blue plush-covered seat. All up and down the aisle men were sitting, motionless and voiceless, reading their papers. Tom opened his and read a long story about negotiations in Korea. A columnist debated the question of when Russia would have hydrogen bombs to drop on the United States. Tom folded his paper and stared out the window at the suburban stations gliding by. He wondered what it would be like to work for Ogden and Hopkins, and he wondered whether Betsy’s schemes could possibly turn out successfully. What would happen if he got fired by Hopkins and Betsy’s real-estate deals turned into a fiasco?
“It doesn’t really matter.” The words came to his mind so clearly that he half thought someone had spoken them in his ear.
“Here goes nothing.”
The sentence sounded in his mind, flat and emotionless. Suddenly the tension drained out of him, and he felt relaxed. It will be interesting to see what happens, he thought. Then he had a sudden impulse to laugh. The man across the aisle from him peered over his paper suspiciously, and Tom turned his face toward the window. A railroad track alongside the ones on which he was speeding gleamed brightly in the sun.
“It doesn’t really matter.” During the war that had been a kind of key phrase for him, almost a magical charm, an incantation. He had always been tense before a jump. He had always started worrying about Betsy–that was the first stage, as soon as he learned he had another jump coming up. He had had a clear picture in his mind of a Western Union boy delivering a telegram to her beginning, “The War Department regrets to inform you . . .” Betsy would open the telegram, and then she’d go upstairs to the big bedroom in Grandmother’s house, and she’d show it to Grandmother, and Grandmother would say, “You should be proud. He died for his country.” And then Betsy would start to swear–he had always been able to see her staring at his grandmother, crying and swearing, exactly as his mother had long ago.
That vision had always given way to another, on the eve of a combat jump. He’d start thinking about how he’d never go to bed with Betsy again. And he’d start thinking about all the cold beer he was never going to drink, and the rare steaks he was never going to eat. Then he’d start getting mad.
By the time he’d got his parachute on, or had “chuted up,” as they had called it in the ’troops, he had usually widened his self-pity to embrace all the others aboard the plane. The poor bastards, he had thought. The men had sat in their bucket seats on each side of the aisle of the plane, as expressionless as the men on the commuter train–about the only difference was that during the war they had had no newspapers. Tom had often sat there, expressionless as the others, thinking of a whole platoon of Western Union boys delivering the War Department’s regrets. He had heard men talk about premonitions of death before a battle, and often when someone was killed, it would turn out that he had told someone about a premonition, but Tom had had premonitions all the time.
The worst part of the whole nightmare had always come just a few minutes before the jump. A sharp image of a compound fracture of the right thigh would suddenly flash into his mind. During his first combat jump the man beside him had landed wrong and suffered a compound fracture of the right thigh. A long jagged splinter of bone had come through the trouser leg, and the man had sat there staring at it until someone had given him a shot of morphine. Tom had never seen him again, because the Germans had started moving in on them, and it had been necessary to abandon the man with the broken thigh, lying there doped up, still staring at the splinter of bone. Tom had never been able to forget it, and almost every time after that he’d catch himself gripping his own right thigh a few minutes before he had to jump. It was at such times that this silly sentence would come into his mind, and he’d start to relax.
“It doesn’t really matter.”
The words had had a marvelous effect on him. He had often repeated them to himself, until they began to sound like some kind of revelation. By the time it had been necessary to stand up and walk toward the open door of the airplane, he had always been able to move as casually as though he were just going to step into the next room.
“Geronimo!” a lot of the men used to yell as they jumped, trying to sound fierce as hell. Tom used to yell it too when it was expected of him, but what he was really thinking, with a curiously comforting air of detachment, was “It doesn’t really matter.” And then, just as Tom went through the door into the prop blast, the second part of the charm had always come to him: “Here goes nothing.” And when the parachute had opened, with its terrific wallop at the back of his neck, and he found himself floating down in that curious moment of complete quiet and calm which immediately precedes a combat landing, the third part of his incantation had always come to him: “It will be interesting to see what ha
ppens.”
All this seemed incredible to Tom as he looked back at it, but those three catch phrases still had the power to soothe him as he sat on the train, one of many men holding newspapers on their laps, and thought about a new job and what Betsy called “the start of a new regime.”
By the time he got to New York, he felt relaxed. What the hell is all the crisis about? he thought. After the whole damn war, why am I scared now? I always thought peace would be peaceful, he thought, and laughed. As he walked through Grand Central Station, he looked up and for the first time in years noticed the stars painted on the blue ceiling there. They seemed to be shining brightly, and feeling slightly theatrical, he wondered if it were legitimate to wish on a painted star. He decided it would be all right to make a phony wish, so he wished he could make a million dollars and add a new wing to his grandmother’s house, with a billiard room and a conservatory in which to grow orchids.
12
IT WAS while he was walking up Forty-second Street from Grand Central Station to his office at the Schanenhauser Foundation that he saw the man with a leather jacket. It was an ordinary brown leather jacket with a sheepskin collar–it was only unusual that the man should be wearing it in the summer. The man was a swarthy, rather rumpled individual, wearing dungarees, a T-shirt, and the leather jacket, unzipped. Somehow the jacket nagged at Tom’s mind–he had seen one like it somewhere a long while ago. It was ridiculous to have one’s mind keep returning to a leather jacket when there was work to be done. The memory of the leather jacket was like a riddle, the answer to which had been half forgotten, obscurely important, as though someone had told him a secret he was never to repeat, a secret with some hidden meaning, but now he couldn’t remember it.
Trying to put the jacket out of his mind, he hurried along the street. While he was waiting to cross Fifth Avenue, a man standing beside him coughed painfully. Then Tom remembered about the leather jacket–remembered everything about it as clearly as though he had never forgotten.
It had been back in 1943, not many months before Germany started to disintegrate. Only he hadn’t known then that Germany would fall to pieces–it had seemed as though the war would go on forever. It had been in December, early in December, that he killed the man in the leather jacket, simply because he needed the jacket for himself.