Afternoon in April

by Philip Wylie

  Larry had come up toward my chair, and, as I told them that, he stopped dead and looked at me. His stare was frenzied and very demoniac and very slowly he leaned forward. "You've been writing to her!" His voice was blistering. I suppose, behind his bitterness, was a great lost wish for his mother that he was fighting back. A moment later he could fight it no longer and he found another expression of that calamitous dilemma.

  "You've been to see her! A slimy Sheffield you turned out to be!!"

  I, too, was losing control of myself, for I answered less quietly. "Connie's more than just your mother. She's a woman. This is not an easy world--these are not easy times--for a woman to live."

  His face twisted. His voice was hoarse. "Unless she's an easy woman!"

  Ivan said nothing. John did not speak. Virginia hid her eyes in a handkerchief.

  I had to. I could feel my teeth shut. "You shouldn't have said that!"

  " I shouldn't have said that!" he cried. "What have you got to do with what I say!

  You don't belong! You're a cripple! You haven't got a mother and father! You know what you are? You're a--"

  "Shut up!" I said.

  He hit me. His hand flashed out of his pocket and he drove it into my mouth. It knocked me out of my chair onto the floor. For a little eternity I wanted to get up and kill him, and I knew I couldn't. I knew with an awful and enervating certainty, not that rage was tragic here, but that I was too weak--that I was, indeed, a cripple. That Ivan was sitting still in his chair, that even John had been struck numb. After that instant of conscious impotence. I lay where I had fallen, tasting the blood that ran into my mouth.

  Then fiercely and unexpectedly. Virginia leaped up and slapped him. She ran out of the room after that. Bill followed her.

  Frenzy faded from Larry's eyes, and presently he spoke in a remote, dazed tone.

  "I'm going to throw up," he said.

  I stood then and got out my handkerchief and wiped my lips. Nobody was paying any attention to Larry. I turned toward Ivan and he looked coldly away from me. Then my eyes sought John, but he had covered his face with his hands.

  So I walked out of the dining room. I think I was on my way upstairs to my own room when I happened to see my coat and hat in the hall. I put them on and went outdoors.

  The snow between the house and the beach was unmarked, and I broke a trail through it all the way down to the flat rock. There was a high cushion of whiteness upon it, which I brushed aside. Around the bay there was a rim of ice. Beyond it, the water sparkled coldly.

  I sat down, shaking.

  CHAPTER XVIII

  It was freezing out on the flat rock but I didn't notice that for a long while. It may have been half an hour--or five minutes--before I realized that my fingers were numb and my ears stinging. The first spasm of turbulence went away slowly and was replaced by fragments of thoughts. They were unrelated and a good many of them contained nothing but pity--for myself and the world. The sea water splashed against the fringe of ice and occasionally an invisible whorl of wind set up a jet of snow.

  I saw it all--and didn't see it. I thought that I'd never sat on the flat rock in the midst of deep winter and that fact emphasized the uniqueness and the difference of all that was happening in my life.

  I remembered the expression on Larry's face. It would leave a wound difficult or perhaps impossible to heal. He was seventeen--and sensitive. He would rub salt in the place. I reminded myself that Virginia was going away. As difficult to accept was the violence of my disappointment over the refusal of my foster brothers and sister to allow Connie to return. It had been a brutal shock, and I had no philosophy with which to bear it against the contrast of the preceding night--the ineffable and almost holy vigil I had passed with John.

  It was disintegration. The break-up of the Sheffields. They had grown up and they were choosing their own ways of life. It clarified itself and bit into me. The very perfection of our youth meant that its end would be absolute. Strong bonds burst more devastatingly than weak ones. It was going to be so with us. Neither Connie's spontaneity nor John's serenity, when put to the test, had given the family sufficient morale to maintain even some part of itself through this succession of crises.

  Virginia's announcement would snap the last strand of loyalty. She might defer it now, for a while. But she would not change her purpose. I'd sensed before, that she had studied her own code in the light of Connie's violations--but the parallel was not as real as it would have seemed. In Barney there was an element of recklessness and irresponsibility. He had loved the wilderness more than Connie, and if pursuit of adventure at the expense of love would hurt him, he would never show it. Bill was not like that. Once Virginia committed herself to him, he would be faithful to that trust forever and through anything. It was in his eyes and the tone of his voice. Then--Virginia was leaving behind no husband. If she hurt the family--if Larry stormed again and Ivan sat darkly silent--that sorry rage would be over attitudes and not such soul-deep images as mother, father, son, daughter.

  We were older. This was spring--premature and tempestuous. It was ice exploding in the still river that had been our family existence. I could not see beyond it, however, to any green mistiness, any soft twilight, any thrilling ponds or April-scent. To me it was a spring that burst the bare ice only to uncover a barer earth.

  But gradually I knew that I must play some part in the disintegration, whether I wished or not. And it seemed better to make my part voluntary. To dare to think beyond that took all my small store of courage, and I did it painfully. The years rolled back until I had recovered the exact feelings of the small boy who had read John's letter en route to the junk man and who decided forwith to run away. I felt that it was time for me to think again of going. And I gave that thought its full juvenile rein, carrying it so far as to consider ways and means of returning the money willed to me by grandma Sheffield. I was making a very good independent livelihood. I'd be all right. I could go to New York and find myself an apartment--comfortable and small, with a skyscraper cordillera around it--where I could live in solitude.

  Then I thought of Nora--suddenly and without a discoverable reason. An apartment, I thought, and a wife like her as a gesture to life and being alive. There I could dwell in simple misery--tasting the fruits of life sparingly--writing--a man whose days had already been lived.

  That was as far as I could carry such speculation. I found myself giggling. I had been looking into as much immaturity as could have been found in Larry's mind. Nora, indeed! I couldn't remember now, why I had kissed her. But I could recall that I had--and it had been pleasant. So lowed her something. A diamond bracelet, maybe--or an ice cream soda. I rather inclined toward the latter.

  The fiat rock was chilling me upward and I rose from it. I kicked it. A deceitful perch, I thought. I've fooled myself whenever I sat down on it. I'll take no more girls here and come here no more to struggle with what I stupidly consider my soul.

  With that, I started back toward the house, somewhat restored, but still in an exaggerated mood--one that tried to compensate for my loss of myself. I found out soon enough that it was only another mood. Perhaps I'd hoped to laugh the Sheffields back toward normalcy. I'd intended to see Larry immediately in order to make him feel that I did not hold any grudge against him. And I did see him as I came in.

  "Look," I said, "We've got something to forget--and from where I sit--the sooner the better."

  He pretended that he neither heard nor saw me and he walked away.

  He'll get over it, I thought.

  Ivan was in the library with a book. I went in. The mood ebbed further when he looked up. He opened his mouth to speak and was silent. I picked out a magazine and sat down. And a moment later he stood. "I might as well tell you," he said evenly, "that I'll never be able again to think of you the way I did."

  "But--"

  He tossed his book on a table and he, also, walked away. So I sat there alone for some time. I began to think again--not in a new pit of wre
tchedness nor again in a state of thin exaltation--but very soberly. When Virginia saw me and entered the room, I felt that I was calm. But she had her own particular thrust for me. She sighed and dropped on the divan and spoke after a long time.

  "I've always been terribly afraid that the fact that you're different from the rest of us would come out in some ugly way like this."

  It was a chilling statement. I couldn't say anything. She sat in silence and sighed again. "Why didn't you get up and hit Larry?" she asked.

  That startled me. I was on the point of being noble and slow-spoken. Instead, I told her the truth--even enlarged it. "Because I was afraid. He would have beaten me. A man has to have two legs to fight on."

  "That's what I thought. I felt sorry for you."

  None of them had ever spoken to me--or, conversely, failed to speak to me--in that way. I couldn't believe that Virginia was doing it. I went obliquely to my own defense. "I'm not yellow, Virginia. Not that way, anyhow. But--it was futile. A sense of futility. It rushed over me. I had an impulse to get up--and I knew that it would only make the spectacle that much more ignominious and hateful."

  She looked at me and her eyes were icy. "Don't you ever do what your first impulse tells you to do, Frankie?"

  I thought that over. My last bit of spirit was gone again.

  I said, "Cripples don't," and I was so beaten down that I didn't even regret that for minutes.

  So she left too.

  We stumbled through lunch without looking at each other. Dinner, we abandoned.

  I went into the kitchen at five, after spending the intervening hours in my room, and Anne expected my excuse. "Don't tell me you won't be here for supper! Virginia and Mr. Bill have gone out. Mr. Sheffield's staying in Bridgeport. Larry and Ivan are dressing up to go out. What's wrong now, Frankie?"

  "We had a family disagreement."

  She rolled on a piece of pie crust. She swallowed. I had a sense of sadness in her, invisible, immense. "Birds flying from the nest," she said.

  "Maybe it's nature."

  "Not in this family. It's against nature." She looked up from the spreading dough.

  "I'm never going to believe in anything any more, Frankie. You Sheffields can't kid me.

  You've come to the end of this mess and you're too God-almighty high-spirited to stand it. So you're all running out. It makes me sick, to think of all the character you had just blazing up the flue like this!"

  She was trying to be angry--and every word made the effort more difficult. I put my arm around her shoulder and hugged her and left her to have her good, old-fashioned cry alone.

  That night I stayed awake telling myself that it would blow over.

  But it didn't.

  Larry stayed at home for four more days--and neither spoke to me nor sat down at the table when I was there. Ivan said only perfunctory things--and went back to medical school a week ahead of time. Virginia talked--listlessly. And Bill was gone. John scarcely appeared in the house until the two boys had left. Then he settled into his old schedule, but he was taciturn and unresponsive. I began to feel that I was a symbol of the cause for all of it. In less unhappy moments I could remember how bitterly John had been disappointed in his children, but during most of the time, I realized that by seeing Connie, I had precipitated this blank, impossible state upon them all.

  A dismal New Year's had come and gone. Anne was in bed with a cold. Virginia was getting ready to go to Washington. She hadn't said so, but I knew. For one reason, she'd made three clothes--buying pilgrimages to New York. For another, she'd absently ringed a date in January on the library calendar. The twentieth. Connie had left Palm Springs and gone to Georgia, alone. Friends--a number of them--had been at pains to tell us that.

  Usually they told us abruptly. "By the way," they liked to say, "I suppose you've heard that Connie is a true widow now?" Then they'd watch for the wince. Unfortunately for those friends--the Sheffields were poor wincers.

  One night I decided to check out.

  We--Virginia and John and I--ate in our now-habitual silence, taking food to sustain lives which were tasteless for John and me and in abeyance for Virginia. When he left the table, I said, "John, before you go to bed, I'd like to talk to you."

  "Come up."

  Virginia looked at me then. I thought I saw a shadow of dread in her eyes, but if I did, it was gone instantly. I folded my napkin and left my dessert. I was thinking about how she had told me that she was glad I'd always be in her life--and then, twenty-fours hours later--she had begun to behave as if I did not matter at all. I climbed upstairs.

  Next to John's bedroom was his "study" and we went there. He jerked his head at a chair and picked a pipe from the rack. This was the first time we'd met alone since the night Connie had called, and he hadn't asked for the meeting, so I said what I had to say curtly.

  "I'm leaving Fort Sheffield, John."

  Probably I'd expected him to act as coldly as the others had. I must have, because when he dropped into his chair and familiarly covered his face with his hands and said,

  "I've been expecting this for all these days," I was stunned.

  "Have you?"

  "--and hoping one of the kids--anyone of them--or all of them--would kick in and quit taking out their damned prides on you."

  "Why didn't you say something?"

  He shrugged. "Because I was doing it, too, Frankie. Don't you see that you've been made the whipping boy for all of us? You were the guy who stuck. You had the guts to stay loyal to Connie--even. And we all lay down and quit. Now--you're going away.

  And I think you have the right to shake the dust of the Fort off your shoes when you leave."

  My heart beat warmer then. I realized that in my own confusion I had lost sight of just what the others felt. He looked up and our eyes met. He seemed old and resigned. He smiled--at me. "Yeah. Go, Frankie. I guess you want to be away before Virginia--does what she has on her mind--don't you? I wish I could duck that too."

  "She told you?"

  He shook his head. "Virginia made her last confidence--in the summer. She didn't need to tell me. What's the matter with us Sheffields, Frankie? Is there some sort of rot in us somewhere? Haven't we got what it takes? Have all the years been just easy living?

  Fool's paradise stuff?"

  I shook my head. I was glad that John was himself with me again. And yet--he was asking me about his family--as if I were an outsider. I had become one.

  "Bad luck," I said.

  "Other people can stand bad luck."

  I got out a cigarette and stalled with it. Finally I had to talk, because he wouldn't.

  "There's another thing, John. Grandmother's money. I'd prefer to be without it." He bowed his head. "So we've succeeded in making you feel that low about us!"

  It hadn't occurred to me that such an interpretation would be put on my reluctance to depend on a former generosity. And yet, the emotion implied by the gesture was exactly that. Nothing I could have suggested would have shown any more clearly than that an unconscious wish to wipe the slate clean of Sheffield allegiance. Of course, it was the opposite of what I really wanted. It was an emotional, juvenile thing. But I had told John, and I could not think of a way to explain what I really felt, or to say that I belatedly realized the implications of my words. I could see now, that from John's viewpoint, I might as well have estimated all the money that he had spent to bring me up, and offered to pay it back from my own earnings. He was hurt.

  There was nothing to do. I muttered apologetic-sounding words. "It isn't that. Just-

  -"

  He took a deep breath. He stared straight at me for a long time. And I looked back. I was fuddled and depressed and I'd shown ideas I had not known were in me--

  disappointments and indictments--but I was going and if it was all a mess--it was my mess. He stared, and finally shrugged and even smiled.

  "All right, Frankie. I don't give a damn what you do with the money. Send it to some charity, if you'll feel better.
"

  "I shouldn't have brought it up at all, John."

  "Sure you should--if it was on your conscience. We don't need it. And what we do need--I cannot guess. You want to bolt. I don't blame you. I'd like to bolt myself. Chuck the works. I've run my life and my family with certain definite ideas. I had certain positive expectations about them. They were wrong. And I don't know whether it was the family--or the ideas. Something soured. But I think that maybe I was over-confident.

  Maybe I took too much in my own hands. I'll quit doing that--at any rate. Beginning with you. You're kicking yourself for what you've just said. You've criticized us by saying it.

  And we had that criticism coming--because we've let you out of the family. Larry with his fists--Ivan with his lips--me with my silence. And Virginia--maybe she let you down more than any of the rest of us. It's too late to remedy it. I suppose I've got to learn to get used to that. And I'm not going to linger over the fact that right now I respect you more than I do my own blood."

  "They're kids, John."

  "They're selfish. That's all you can say about it. A year ago, if anybody had told me Virginia could be hypocritical--I'd have laughed in their face."

  "You can't say that she is."

  He nodded. "No. Perhaps not." He looked at me some more, weighing unguessable thoughts. Then his tone changed. He touched on a subject he had never mentioned to me. "Frankie, when Connie and I adopted you, I was against it."

  I didn't answer that.

  "When you came to live here, I hated you. You looked like a bad bet. That gives me a glimpse of what may be my trouble now. You were imperfect--and I couldn't stand it. I've got a perfection complex, I guess. And that's not the way life is. Two or three years passed before I even liked you. Of course, you were too young then to know--"

  He hesitated. He was still looking at me with speculation. And I had a hunch. I knew that he was on the verge of telling me some secret thing--some fact about myself. I began to tingle--as if I had a fabulous bit of the future in my grasp. I was frightened. I was hopeful. I was both unwilling and avid to go on. The moment had changed from one of difficult and retributive parley to one of confession. As if to urge from John the thing his eyes still withheld, I made a confidence of my own first.