A Shade of Difference

by Allen Drury

  This came three months after their meeting, on a day when the first intimations of Washington’s lovely spring whipped scudding white clouds through the bright-blue air and the trees were misty with the first faint flushes of green. Many of his colleagues in the Congress attended, the newspapers both in the capital and in West Virginia gave it major play, Life and Look ran photographs, it was one of the big social events of the session. His parents, Betty, and two of his brothers were able to come on from West Virginia, Kay’s parents and brother also made the trip from Wisconsin, and a week’s honeymoon in Bermuda put the final seal on what appeared to be a thoroughly happy union.

  And so, he thought now as his tired and frightened mind proved unable to keep away the haunting echoes of the past, it evidently was for a year or so. If there was a certain reticence, a certain holding-back, a certain withdrawal into some region where he could not follow, he put it down to background and upbringing rather than to basic character. If there accompanied it an already too-nervous insistence upon the outward form of things, an already too-harsh application of rigid standards of judgment to people and events, that too he thought could be traced to early training rather than any innate defect. He was a patient and loving man, and he told himself often in moments of puzzlement that it would just take a little time, a little understanding, a little extra generosity, and everything would be all right and as relaxed and comfortable as he had always hoped his marriage, if it came, would be.

  That patience and understanding might be interpreted as a lack of interest and a lack of really genuine caring on his part never occurred to him. He would have been horrified and miserably unhappy to know that what he could not always recognize as reachings-out for comfort felt themselves rebuffed and thwarted by his calmly tolerant responses. The physical consummations which seemed awkward and unsatisfying in the days of their honeymoon got no better as he tried to understand and adapt himself to what was desired of him. But what was it? He could not be sure. Obviously not experimentation, for the slightest indication of it was always rejected with what seemed to be something close to terror; and not even the most conventional, for even his earnest attempts—which of course soon became too earnest and too self-conscious to be fair to either of them—seemed to produce only an empty half-satisfaction that was in many ways worse than no satisfaction at all.

  “You know what?” he said finally, trying to be humorous and outgoing, but finding it, by then, a little difficult and strained. “I think we’re both trying too hard, about everything. Maybe if we could just relax with each other, everything would go along all right.”

  She smiled.

  “Maybe we need another snowstorm,” she said, and he thought, with the ravaging unanswerable pain that comes when something is gone forever. If we had one, I wouldn’t go home. That was my mistake. It would all be different if I hadn’t gone home.

  But even of that he was not sure, as the months went by and he began to conclude that it had been his fortune to marry a personality locked away in some impregnable fortress where he could not follow. She was so afraid of things—that was it, essentially, he decided. She was so afraid, and it was nothing he could really help her with, since it apparently grew from a childhood and character whose pattern had been frozen for life before he met her.

  So he resigned himself, as many do, to doing as best he could with what he had. As far as the world knew she was pretty, attractive, intelligent, accomplished—a perfect partner and hostess for a rising young member of Congress, one of those wives, so often found in Washington, whose lives apparently are blended into, but actually only happen to run parallel with, those of their famous husbands. She was well-liked by other Congressional wives, saw to it that they received and returned the proper invitations, was very popular in West Virginia—what more, really, could a man want, save a truly loving and committed heart?

  He decided that the best thing for him to do was concentrate on his career—he had become the dedicated bachelor public servant after all, he told himself wryly, if not quite in the sense he had earlier envisaged—and try not to think about what might have been. A Senatorship was opening up, he was by this time strong enough across the state to attempt it, and it began to seem that by devoting his thought and his energies to that he might block out the grinding ache of unhappiness that sometimes seemed to fill him so he could hardly breathe. The heart dies in many ways, some of them quieter than others, and he thought that if he could persuade his own to be concerned about other matters, its decease might not hurt him quite so much. He was well embarked upon this when she called him one morning at the Capitol to tell him that she had just been to the doctor and they were going to have a child.

  This hope, too, he had almost abandoned in the three years of their marriage, and it took several minutes after she hung up for the knowledge to really penetrate. When it did, it was amazing how fast his heart came to life again. In ten minutes’ time it was as though the dull ache and the grinding pain had never been. Now they could start over again in the light of the miracle of this new life; now everything would be all right once more; now the bad beginning could be forgotten and things could move on as wonderfully as he used to hope and expect. He went home happier than he had been since the early weeks of their marriage, determined to pour out such love and affection as would drive away the dark shadows that sometimes seemed to threaten, and never let them gather again.

  For a little time it seemed to work. An old ease, an old friendliness, seemed to return to them in the early months of her pregnancy; the world once more was full of hope. His own enthusiasm for his son—for such he was convinced the baby would be—communicated itself to her, and she joined in excited, half-humorous plans that soon had the boy following him into the Senate and ultimately into the White House, with a show of amusement that persuaded him for a while that she was as eager and happy about the new arrival as he. He was shocked as he had rarely been when one day, in the midst of their joking, a shadow raced across her face and she suddenly said in a small, lost voice, “I am so frightened.”

  “But you mustn’t be frightened,” he had protested, fear instantly claiming his heart, too. “It’s something so happy and wonderful for us both. It will make everything all right again. You’ll see,” he promised fervently, as though words could work miracles where facts could not. “You’ll see.”

  But she did not see; and from that moment his own happiness and confidence began to wane, strive desperately though he did to keep them at original pitch. Once having admitted her fears, she began to show an exaggerated, obsessive carefulness, a passion for self-protection that she said was for the baby but which he gradually became uneasily convinced was for herself alone. Try as he did to remain patient, this inevitably began to produce a growing irritation on his part, which showed itself in an exaggerated courtesy that he tried to keep humorous but which sometimes revealed the sharp edge of his anxiety underneath. Finally one day about three weeks before their child arrived this produced an unnecessary little incident that greatly frightened them both, though at the time it appeared that it did no real harm. Nor did it, he was often to think later, except as it contributed to the outward journey of a mind that he came to believe eventually must already have been well on its way.

  They had been getting ready to go to the last social engagement they would attend before the baby came, a cocktail party given by nearby friends, and presently, dressed and starting on their way, they had locked the door and stood for a moment on the steps of the little house in Georgetown where they lived. There had been a freezing rain in the night, the steps were slick in a few places, and again a sudden wild look of fear had come into her face.

  “I don’t want to go. I’ll fall.”

  “No, you won’t,” he said impatiently. “It’s only a block and we’ll be very careful. In fact,” he added with an attempt at reminiscent humor, “we’ll take three hours, if you like.” But the attempt had failed, for there was no response as she stood there cling
ing to the iron railing, apparently stiff with fear.

  “I can’t,” she whispered. “I can’t, I just can’t. Please don’t make me! Oh, please don’t!”

  And suddenly she had begun to cry, making no attempt to stop the tears, letting them flow down her face as he stood there helplessly looking up at her, while across the street a bearded Georgetown type, clad in sport shirt and walking shorts despite the freezing weather, paused with his poodle to give them a curious glance.

  “Very well,” he said after a moment. “We can’t stand here making a spectacle of ourselves. Let’s go back in.”

  Impatiently he took her arm with a grip tighter than he intended, impatiently swung her around more quickly than he intended. She gave a gasp and half-stumbled, half-fell against the doorjamb where the railing joined it. The railing held and she swayed against it with an agonized little scream that terrified them both and brought a startled movement toward them from the watcher across the street.

  “We’re all right thank you,” Hal called, fumbling desperately to find his key. “It’s just the ice. We’re going in again.”

  The watcher looked relieved and nodded. Hal found his key, got the door open with a trembling hand, and took his wife inside. Half walking, half sagging as he supported her, she reached a chair and sat down, turning toward him eyes filled with terror that he realized hardly saw him at all.

  “You’ve hurt him,” she whispered. “You’ve hurt me. Oh, you’ve killed us both!”

  “I haven’t killed you,” he said harshly. “For God’s sake, snap out of it. It was only a little bump.”

  “You’ve killed us,” she repeated, holding herself and rocking back and forth. “You’ve killed us!”

  Later after the doctor had come and gone, given her a sedative and assured him that it was only nerves and that nothing had been damaged, he had sat downstairs alone for a long time wondering bleakly whether anything at all could be salvaged from the wreck of their lost affections. Out of his unhappy reverie there had come finally the conclusion that little could, that this portion of his life must be written off with as few regrets as possible or it would destroy him, and that henceforth he must concentrate on the child and devote to him the love, the care, and the hope that he might otherwise have shared with them both. His wife he would continue to love, in some sort of hopeless, distant corner of his mind where lost hopes lived, but aside from the necessary courtesies to keep the household together, he would withdraw the gift of his heart, which for reasons he would never really understand had not been received in the generous spirit in which it had been offered, and give it to his son.

  Three weeks later the baby came, vigorous and healthy and holding promise of everything he had missed up to now. Only one thing marred the birth, which was difficult: the doctor, whose abilities he had regarded with considerable skepticism right along, but whom Kay had insisted upon on the recommendation of a friend of hers, had used forceps far more brutally than seemed necessary. The baby’s skull at first was badly misshapen. But in a month it had filled out to a handsome normalcy, and with this initial worry gone and her son in her arms, Kay too seemed truly happy for the first time. Once again, so naive and desperately ever-hopeful is the heart, he felt that the shadows had vanished and that once more there had come the chance that everything could still be all right.

  At this point, too, the wider world impinged, for it would soon be time to reach a decision about running for the Senate. In the mood of pleasure with everything that came with his son’s birth, obstacles sank into insignificance—they were not actually very many, so well thought of had he become by now in West Virginia—and the road seemed clear ahead. He called a press conference in his office in the Old House Office Building, announced his plans, and formally opened his campaign. Within a week a majority of the party’s leaders in the state had endorsed him and he had received enough pledges of financial support to make the project economically possible. For the rest he intended to rely on the handshaking technique that had worked so well in his home district, a decision that consumed time but proved wise.

  Four months later he had won the primary over the opposition of two of his fellow Congressmen and a former Governor, and in the general election that followed he won by a comfortable margin that sent him to the Senate secure in the support of his people at home, secure in the respect of his colleagues on the Hill, and secure, as it now seemed, in his own home.

  There followed, while Jimmy grew steadily into an alert and beautiful child and domestic unease remained at a minimum in the light of his cheerfully bubbling presence, four years in which everything seemed to move onto an upland of great fulfillment and reward. He was well received in the Senate and within a short time had won a place of acceptance that gave promise of bigger honors and influence to come. He was not, as he himself recognized, one of the giants of the Senate, such as Orrin Knox or Seab Cooley; he did not possess the nature of the instinctive middleman of ideas and human interchange that had brought Bob Munson almost inevitably to the leadership; but he had a function to perform. He was one of what Stanley Danta once referred to as “the Young Reliables,” the diligent, hardworking, straightforward, substantial men who brought to public service the devotion and the dedication, the balance and integrity without which the legislative processes of a free government cannot function.

  As such, his road led upward. He was appointed to the Banking and Currency Committee and to Labor and Public Welfare, and began to apply himself to the problems that came before those two bodies. Because the problems were so intimately involved with the economic welfare of the country, and because he was so faithful in his devotion to them, it was not long before the Administration was using him to present its point of view and introduce its remedies. Some of these he questioned, and it was a tribute to his steadily strengthening position that he should have been called to the White House, that his views should have been carefully examined by its shrewd and forceful occupant, and that certain modifications which he suggested should then have been worked into the legislation bearing his name. He had early made clear that he would not give his name unless this were done, and his position was respected. The result was better and more workable legislation in several fields of vital economic import to the country. Toward the end of his first term, this had given him sufficient stature with his colleagues so that he was appointed to fill a vacancy on the committee on which Senators like to serve above all others, Foreign Relations.

  So went his public career, on a rising arc, and few even of his closest friends suspected that at home the arc, after too brief a period of happiness, was going down again.

  He could not at this moment, while two interns stopped by to question him on how he was feeling as the operation approached, put his finger on the exact point when the decline had begun. There was too much grayness over that period for him to single out any one instant and say: This was it. It was a general thing, the gradual awareness that Jimmy wasn’t talking as quickly or as well as he should—though this was soon forgotten when he did begin, for then he chirped like a bright little cricket all day long and the ear could ignore an occasional oddly slurred word … the growing uneasiness that Jimmy was bumping into things a little too much and wasn’t co-ordinating physically quite the way he should—though this too could be ignored in the obvious high intelligence of his mind and the quick perception of his mischievously laughing eyes … the occasional alarmed puzzlement when Jimmy had sudden little sleepy spells, for no apparent reason, and would sometimes come out of them “swallowing up,” as he put it—but this did not happen more than once a month, and it too could be put aside in the doctor’s comfortable assurance that it was “just some little virus, probably, and nothing to worry about.”

  Yet these things were not normal, and the pretense that they were could not be kept up forever. Before they knew it, he and Kay were meeting each other’s eyes uneasily across the busy little blond head whose owner played unheeding at their feet. In both their m
inds worry came to live and tension and irritation began to develop from it and they headed toward some crisis on the subject whose nature and cause they did not know but could only await with silent and unexpressed foreboding.

  To all outward appearances, and for 90 per cent of the time, their son was as cute and bright and handsome and lovable as any child they had ever seen. He was, in fact, precocious far beyond his years, and something of a tease as well, so that there were occasions when his parents could see that they might be faced before long with a real disciplinary problem if they did not exercise sufficiently firm control while they could. His way of doing it was to be pleasant, man-to-man, reasonably lenient, with a swat on the bottom when things threatened to get out of hand. Hers was a method of verbal injunction and threat, which called on powers that deeply disturbed her husband and caused more than one sharp argument.

  “I’ll turn out the light in the bathroom if you don’t keep quiet,” she would call after the third request for a glass of water, “and then the goblins will get you.” Or, “If you run outside when I’m not looking, there’s a big black dog out there with green teeth and red eyes who will eat you up.” And quite frequently, calling upon some dark memory of a churchgoing childhood in a tone of chilling severity that disturbed Hal most of all, “You’ll have to be a good boy, now, or God will get mad at you.”