Afternoon in April

by Philip Wylie

  He dropped his bag. The porch trembled. He sat down and fished a cigarette from his pocket. "Anybody know this was coming up?"

  "We knew she'd been seeing him. He appeared around here quite a while ago.

  Connie once had a hard time choosing between John and Colby."

  "I remember. Somebody told me. Aunt Beatrice, I guess."

  "There's nothing to get sore about, Ivan."

  "Isn't there?"

  I saw there wasn't any use trying to talk to him then. ''They're all out on the flat rock. I think maybe they went swimming. I stayed here because I sort of felt I'd like to be alone for a little while."

  His expression was barren. "I'd like to be alone, too. In a hole where I'd crawled.

  Dead." He banged the screen and slammed the front door, forgetting to take his suitcase.

  I brought it in about a half hour later. The Sheffields were still down on the beach.

  Anne was setting the table and crying. I'd wanted to be alone--but not as much alone as I felt then.

  CHAPTER XI

  The days, the weeks that followed were jangled and febrile. Once, in the midst of their helplessness, of the humiliation, of the crumbs and tatters of the countless emotions which rose in all of us, I was reminded of the effect of a boyhood experiment Ivan and I had performed. We had taken a player piano roll, and, with razor blades and a ruler, cut into it random holes, slices, gashes, slots and rectangles. When we played back our handiwork, the result proved to be shocking: groups of juxtaposed keys were slammed down and held, there were miscellaneous runs, and discords of unbelievable violence; yet, emerging through it was an occasional suggestion of what had been the original melody.

  Connie's departure similarly devastated the pattern of our lives at Fort Sheffield.

  Furthermore, the outside world invaded our lives--senselessly and cruelly. John needed sympathy. But there were few people who gave him the sort for which he hungered. That sort is the sympathy implied in a smile, a handshake, a sturdy clap on the shoulder. Instead of it, he suffered from a smug, gloating egoism, that only disguised itself as sympathy. Such a disaster as ours, although it is common among human beings in the never-ending struggle between instincts and ideals, brings out in many persons opposing emotions, which they are unable to conceal: they feel self-righteous on one hand, and, on the other, they feel that a step like Connie's excuses their own ill-gotten wishes, their day dreams, or even their secret behavior.

  There were plenty of them. And John needed all his reserve, all his patience.

  I remember Martha on the afternoon of that first day, driving up to the house in a dither, but none the less able to force tears into her voice at the proper time. "You must keep your chin up, John! All of us loved Connie, but all of us knew there was something a little flighty about her. It's your tragic responsibility to yourself to realize that, to the extent you are sad, it is because you have always over-rated your wife. Be strong!"

  As if anybody needed to tell John Sheffield to be strong.

  I remember Clarabelle Evans, plump and pretty. Her husband was a Wall Street broker, very rich and apt to forget Clarabelle's existence for a month at a time. "John, poor baby! If I were you, I'd just cross her right out of my mind! I'd get right on a boat and go right over to Paris, that's what I'd do! Laugh and play and forget. You're a young man--really. Certainly you can't take Connie seriously when you see how she took you!

  And that's not such a bad wisecrack, either!"

  There was Orville Briggs, the president of the golf club--a great deal of fat supporting a waxed, amber moustache, as if the whole man existed only to balance the ornament on his upper lip. He walked across two fairways to interrupt a foursome which John and Larry and Ivan and I were playing together. "Rotten thing, old fellow! But, being something of a ladies' man myself, I must remind you that they are like trolley cars-

  -another one along any minute. Sometimes the consolation prize is better than the cup!"

  John didn't even wince. But I saw Ivan's nostrils dilate and his right hand clenched. He was going to hit Briggs--and he didn't know it. So I put my arm through his, and I said to Briggs, "Maybe you're a ladies' man, but it's pretty obvious that you've never met a lady."

  That straightened things out more or less. Briggs turned as red as a Christmas wreath and started back across the two fairways. Larry giggled. John gave me a look--one of the kind you remember afterward and treasure. I van unclenched his hand, took a spoon from his caddy, and socked his golf ball with all his might. It carried two hundred yards, bounced, and rolled the rest of the way to the green.

  Later on during that game John sliced into the woods and I put mine on the edge of the rough, so I went in to help him hunt. I suppose what I'd said to Briggs was the thing that made John speak at that time--but I like to think, too, that he talked because there were certain sorts of confidences in the family which he sometimes shared first with me.

  He said he'd had a note from Connie.

  I went on beating at sarsaparilla and poison ivy with my mashie. . . . Connie had been gone three or four days then, and none of us knew where she was.

  "They've left for Bermuda."

  I didn't answer.

  "She wanted to know whether she should keep on writing to me and asked me to cable her 'yes' or 'no.'"

  I had a hope so forceful that I was amazed--a hope that John had cabled "yes."

  He stood still, peering around on the ground, but I think he had forgotten he was looking for his ball. His caddie came up and John said, "You hunt in that next little gully."

  "I'm pretty sure it's right around here, Mr. Sheffield."

  John was unusually curt--for him. "You take the next gully, Mike. We'll look here."

  So Mike knew we wanted to talk privately, and he wandered away through the leaves.

  "I cabled 'no.''

  There wasn't anything to say about that. My heart became cold and heavy again. I threshed the brush and by sheer accident found the ball, for which neither of us had really searched.

  "Here it is."

  He walked up, nodding. "There's one thing I can't understand about Connie."

  "What, John?"

  ' That note she left when she went away. Where she said she could have talked to us all about it, but that it wasn't like the Sheffields."

  There was an inexpressible bewilderment in his voice. I tried to explain.

  "I think I do, John. That 'all for one' business. We don't bicker in our family. We don't salt our wounds. When we decide to do things, we usually do them straight off--

  abruptly--decisively."

  He shook his head. "Not things like that. Connie was wholly wrong when she maintained that eloping in the night without a word to anybody was typical of what we've stood for. Look at Virginia and Bill. She's facing a dilemma--and what's she doing? She talked to you and she talked to me, and she brought Bill here." He sighed. "Nope. That's what made me cable Connie not to write. Some important part of her mind must have had a wrong slant on everything. And what's hardest for me to bear is not her going away with Barney--but how she did it."

  I felt that his distress had taken possession of his habitual honest judgment.

  "We're supposed to be modern in our family," I said. "Sophisticated--even a little gaudy.

  Now we've been hit where we live-and we've found out that we're not quite so worldly-wise as we thought. Wife--mother--home--another man--they're more primitive factors than all our fancy polish. They go deeper. They're racial concepts. And when they're destroyed--or even disturbed--well, a man who wouldn't be rocked by it would be a pretty empty man."

  My speech was sententious, I guess. Anyway, John seemed to have said all he wished. He picked up the ball and walked out of the woods.

  It was the next day--or the day after, that one of the tabloids got the story. Larry brought a copy of the paper up to us when we were having a cocktail before dinner.

  Virginia and Bill, John and Ivan and myself--sipping our dri
nk, trying to make conversation, but actually hiding embattled silences. Fort Sheffield had now become a true fort, with all its defenders wounded, and the besieging world showering down fatuity, unkindness, and explosions of long-accumulated envy.

  We knew that Larry had brought some fresh material of assault. His face took pallor easily, and his features were too fine to hide minute distortions. For some juvenile reason, he held the paper behind him as he came into the room--then threw it on the floor so that we could all read its headlines:

  SOCIALITE MOTHER ELOPES

  WITH EXPLORER

  (Story on Page 3.)

  Underneath, filling the rest of the front page, was a photograph of Connie, which had been taken at some benefit or other. She looked attractive and efficient, and not at all like a woman who would elope with an explorer, or anybody else.

  Larry turned the page, and we saw the inside banner:

  ABANDONS HOME FOR LOVE

  Rich Mother of Four Pursues Romance

  with Captain B. K. Colby

  Former War Flier Is Famous Naturalist

  Larry's Adam's apple worked and his voice was frenetic. "We ought to kill the guys that run this filthy sheet!"

  John had taken out his pipe and was standing over the newspaper, looking at it.

  On the third page, there was a picture of Colby, posed over a dead rhino, with a gun in his hands. It was a romantic picture all right. Colby looked strong and calm--which he was.

  John turned from his scrutiny toward his younger son. "There isn't anything in that paper that isn't true, Larry."

  "Just the same--!"

  John shook his head. "It's only another of the things that Connie left in the deck for us."

  Somehow that figure of speech made me feel extra badly. It suggested that John, unknowingly, believed Connie had stacked the deck against him, that she had cheated deliberately and meanly. And I knew it wasn't that. She'd reverted to something that she'd forgotten existed--she'd been swept away--she'd sacrificed all of us to whatever had consumed herself--but I knew something of what Connie must also at times be suffering, and it seemed to me that John had lost sight of that. All of them shared parts of that reaction, and sometimes I did myself, although I thought more about Connie than they did.

  Perhaps my very detachment from the family in the fact of my birth gave me a better perspective. But I think that was not the reason. I think a peculiar bond between Connie and me had risen up from dim levels of my mind to cogency and strength. For it was Connie who had decided to adopt an unlikely little four-year-old suffering from the after-effects of poliomyelitis--instead of the little girl for whom the quest had been undertaken. That impulse of Connie's, almost twenty years ago, now brought out my loyalty--just as the fact that she was their wife and mother reduced the loyalties of the other Sheffields to dismay.

  I hadn't talked to Virginia alone until that night, and I did it after supper. We walked down to the fiat rock together and sat there while she spoke in a dazed, fumbling way.

  "I'm so mixed Frankie!"

  "Of course you are. The thing to do is just to sit and wait."

  "I can't help thinking--"

  "Thinking what?"

  She reached her bare arm through the dusk. "I never have any cigarettes, do I?

  Just thinking. I guess I won't go into it."

  But I knew. "I wouldn't draw any dopey analogies, if I were you."

  "You've got a lot of intuition, haven't you?" she said softly. "I've seen it work a thousand times. So accurately. It's often made me wonder what your parents were like.

  Particularly your mother. She must have been quite wonderful."

  I couldn't say anything to that.

  "How can I help drawing parallels, Frankie? Two men--one woman. Two women-

  -one man. Is it so different?"

  "Yes," I said. "It's different. As different as day from night." 78

  "You're not telling the truth, Frankie. You're trying to kid me--or yourself."

  "Why don't you just not think for a while? Sleep and eat and live on it? Nature has a way of dealing with all these things."

  "Nature!" She sounded bitter. "God! The difference this has made, even in my memories of Connie--!"

  "I wouldn't search through those memories, now. Wait. Wait a year."

  "Do you think a year would make any change?" Then she relented. She took my hand for an instant. "You're sweet, Frankie. Let's go back to the house."

  When we reached it, piano music was pouring through the open windows. I realized it was a duet. Ivan was the only one of us who had made anything of his music lessons, and he was playing with Bill. It was an exciting combination, for Ivan was very skillful, and what Bill lacked in a knowledge of counterpoint and harmony, he made up with feeling. They were playing "Moonlight on the Ganges," but, as we came into the room, they changed their melody. Bill began something unfamiliar. Ivan glanced at him with perplexity on his face, and then commenced to make occasional interpolations.

  Virginia and I sat down and they rehearsed the unknown song until Ivan had caught it. "What is it?" he asked.

  "A little thing," Bill answered, "that I ran up by myself."

  "It's swell. Let's try it in three fiats. Okay?"

  "That's an idea!"

  They tried it in three flats.

  I've said that those days and weeks in the Sheffield house were not unlike the monumental discords Ivan and I had once created for a player piano. But this duet added a new element of music that was real. Bill's composition got into my veins as I sat there.

  It was a blues piece, both stirring and bizarre, and suddenly I jumped up with an idea.

  "Look you guys! You've got something! You need words!"

  They stopped playing, and Bill glanced up. "Elegant! What words?"

  "I think," I said, "I could knock off a little thing called, 'You Can't Tell Time by an Elevator Dial Blues.'"

  So we all went to work. That's how the song was written. And the song was the first of many rites that finally led us back toward normality.

  It was a fine composition with a stirring chorus and it became our theme song. It made us laugh. Everybody wrote his own words for it, in the end. Larry had a number called, "You Can't Graze Cows in a Locomotive Cab Blues." Virginia's was, "A Peach Won't Grow on a Huckleberry Bush Blues" And even John suggested, "Way Down South with the Byrd Expedition Blues."

  Days passed. Days and more days. Months.

  Bill stayed a week that first time, and two weeks more in August. Larry went to work in the Bridgeport factory--where John had succeeded in settling his labor difficulties. I finished my thesis. A season came when even Anne was no longer red-eyed--when Barry, the gardener, ceased avoiding casual contacts with us--when our friends and acquaintances began to re-accept us with the unemotional regard in which they had held us before Connie went away from Reedy Cove.

  We even knew something about her. She and Colby had spent a month in Bermuda. Then the Adirondacks. Then the Canadian Rockies. People had met them and written to us. H was a forlorn form of communication--but it was all we had. None of the other Sheffields listened voluntarily to any such second- or third-hand information, but I would seek out every informer alone and ask questions.

  Autumn finally came. Ivan went off to medical school. I got my Ph.D. Larry made an unusually somber departure for his year at Ridgely. It was his last. John had an idea, bought some stock in an airplane company, watched its value drop to one-quarter of what he had paid, bought more, and found himself suddenly a director in a corporation that manufactured amphibians. So he began to talk to us about aerodynamics and foreign markets--and a beautiful little silver-colored model of a plane came to rest on our living room mantel.

  I had intended to teach that year, and I had been corresponding with several schools. But I gave up the notion for the time being. My excuse was that I wanted to do some research in Early English and Anglo-Saxon--Beowulf, and so on. Nobody was completely fooled. They knew, at least, that I
didn't want Virginia and John to be alone in that big house all Winter.

  And I knew that it was Virginia.

  One day in October I got a letter from Connie.

  CHAPTER XII

  Connie's letter was in a plain envelope and the address had been typewritten. She had also typed "Personal" on the envelope--and I had assumed it was a missive from someone· about my poetry. It was post-marked "Los Angeles, California," and I had kept it for several days unopened. I always let letters from nice old ladies and aspiring boys and girls accumulate until my conscience and a rainy day combine to get them answered.

  Thus I found her note between the familiar, "I was deeply touched by your reference to the Cumberland Valley, having been born there in 1888," and the one which said, "I know it is presumptuous to ask a busy author to act as critic, but, nevertheless, I am enclosing herewith some of my verses, and would like to call your attention particularly to one entitled, 'Sweet Grass.''

  It was very brief:

  "Dear Frankie:

  I have thought and hoped all these many weeks that somebody would somehow communicate with me, and now I know that I must ask for it.

  Frankie, I can't bear not to hear once in a while, at least how you all are getting along. I can't bear, either, to write to any of my own children. But I thought that you, who are not my child, and yet in a sense even more mine, might understand, and, for the sake of old times and old things, send me a word now and then. Just a few lines about all of you every month or so would add so much to my life here with Barney. Not that we aren't happy.

  I know this is a kind of blackmail, but I am blackmailing you gladly—

  Will be at the Yucca Inn, Palm Springs, this winter,

  Always,

  Connie."

  My first impulse was to rush with the letter to Virginia. But I didn't. Maybe that was wrong. However, Virginia had made an unspoken pact with the other Sheffields to avoid every vocal memory and reminder of Connie. I suppose I was afraid that Virginia wouldn't share the emotions which that pathetic note had given me. I was afraid that she would be unsympathetic toward me for allowing myself such emotions. So I burned the letter.