by Philip Wylie
“Do you realize, Edwinna, that Bill has to earn three dollars, these days, to keep one? And the one he keeps will only buy about half of what it used to.”
“Is it my fault Dad’s in the upper brackets? Should I cry?”
“What I mean is, the upper brackets aren’t really upper any more. Didn’t you ever feel responsible for yourself? For anything? Anybody? Do you actually believe that all a gal has to do is streamline her outside—so she looks like something built to attach to a plane—and from there on in it’s the sole duty of the male sex to see that she has no wants? Do you really imagine that—”
“Mother!” When Edwinna used the word “mother,” it meant that she did not care to hear anymore. She was fed up. She looked at Paula thoughtfully, and shrugged one modish shoulder. “Mother,” she repeated. “I mean precisely that! As long as I can get away with it. Why not? Was I consulted about being here? No! That was your idea—
yours and Dad’s. You had all the fun. And the social praise for having kids. Twins, even!
Maybe all the virtues went into Edwin and I got what was left over. Anyhow—it wasn’t my idea to start with. And I don’t have a good opinion of this world. The men I marry in it go soft and jittery, like Charlie—or mean, like Billy. I did not make the world, or the men here, or choose to be here. So I feel entitled to do what I can to compensate.”
“That’s certainly one beautiful—”
“—philosophy. I know. Or is it just—not kidding yourself? Have you had such a wonderful life?”
“Yes, I have. With certain exceptions—”
“Phooie! Twenty years of hard studying to learn a lot of things you’ve never used.
Twenty-seven years of being Dr. Gaunt’s housekeeper and errand boy. An M.A. and a Ph.D. in languages—and all you do is write grocery lists in plain English and add drugstore bills and count dirty clothes. That—definitely—is not for your Edwinna. Look.
I need dough and the point is—will you give me some—or do I have to bust in on Dad?”
“I’ll give you some,” Paula said. Her face was pale; her eyes were indignant. She would have to explain later, to Bill, and he would be annoyed—at her. But not so annoyed as he would have been if Edwinna had interrupted his work. Paula opened her pocketbook, which lay on one of the stainless-steel counters, and took out two twenty-dollar bills.
“Is that it?” Edwinna asked.
“That’s all there is.”
Edwinna said, “Thanks,” and started toward the living room.
“You better take Alicia along,” Paula said, “because I’m going outdoors. She made some crayon marks on the terrazzo. Maybe you’ll start rubbing them out. On second thought—leave them. It’s my dress you’re wearing.”
The tall, blonde girl whistled at her child as if she were a pup and took her hand.
“Come along, dear. Mummie’ll tell you some stories about wolves.”
In the sun, outside, Paula trudged along. “Damn, damn, damn!” she muttered.
Edwinna didn’t care—and when people didn’t care, you had no means of moving them, influencing them, reaching them. She’d been that way even as a child: stony, emotionless and often cruel. Why? Envy of her twin because he was a boy? Sibling rivalry? Paula dismissed that up-to-date idea with irritation. Somewhere inside Edwinna there was a person with courage and brains—lost under layers of hardness, of selfishness, of pleasure seeking, of contempt for everything and everybody. A swell person nobody would ever meet—in this world.
Paula picked yellow leaves from the solanum vines.
The local anesthetic had been absorbed and her tooth ached where the drill had bitten deep. Her knuckles still ached, too, from the door swung open without warning.
She walked around the house and saw that Byron had failed to follow her instructions concerning the gardenia; it was wilted at the tips and soon the buds would begin dropping. He’d put in some stones to hold the peat moss—too many—but he hadn’t watered the plant at all.
She went to work.
What did we do wrong? She asked herself the question sorrowfully—as parents have asked it through the ages. Her answer was Edwinna’s recommencement of the
“Italian Street Song”: a mocking answer. Edwinna thought she could sing; she thought she could have been trained as a coloratura; she was like a million other girls who had good looks and who, owing to that accident, considered their potentialities unlimited. A dope.
Paula shook her head and thrust her hand into the peat moss to speed the wetting of the roots. She glanced at Bill’s windows and saw his silhouette. She wanted—she needed-his solace. A wretched day—the wretcheder because its miseries were mostly trivial. She was impelled toward her husband; but he was working. He wouldn’t like being interrupted by a sobby wife whose tears were caused by nothing new and nothing important and nothing that could be remedied. She pulled herself together with a strength she invariably summoned when things reached this low pitch. Typically feminine, she said furiously to herself, and it helped.
But if Bill looks out, she thought, I’ll wave. And maybe he’ll come and talk; we’ve spent years talking about Edwinna to no purpose—but, at least—it’s better to share the shambles.
And she thought, with another momentary sag of her spirit, that the bright sun would certainly reveal the change in the shade of her hair—if Bill did look. She fought through a panicky instant of wanting to run away. It was replaced by a sudden assurance.
Probably Bill had always known about the dye. Probably he understood, exactly, why pride and middle-aged anxiety made her try to keep it a secret. Probably he wouldn’t think it vulgar—funny, perhaps; or wistful.
For, after all, he loved her. She was sure of that.
Very sure and very much comforted. She gazed toward Bill again, ready to give a cheerful salute and a smile if he noticed her.
While she looked, Bill disappeared.
Paula ran into the house.
He was gone, all right.
Edwinna was sitting on the porch, still singing, watching Alicia patter about and waiting, in a false “sweet-mother-wife” pose, for her blind date to arrive.
Paula came out of the study and asked in a thin voice, “Did Bill leave his room?”
“No.”
“That’s what I thought! He just vanished!”
“Did you look in his bathroom?”
“Of course.”
‘Well—he didn’t come out—I’ve been here. And there’s only one door. So probably he simply evaporated.”
“Yes. That’s what he did.”
Now Edwinna looked up. “Mother. You’re pale as a ghost!”
Paula leaned against the edge of the maple-topped table where her collection of potted plants bloomed gaudily. “He must have thought of something, after all! He must have made some discovery! He must have been thinking, after all! Though it’s more the sort of thing Jim Elliot would do. . . !” She ran back through the study door and tensely addressed the empty room while Edwinna, and then Alicia came to watch.
“Bill!” she whispered. “Bill darling! Come back! Or say something!”
Edwinna shook her mother. “Snap out of it!”
From beyond the lawn, beyond the palmettos and the tall Caribbean pines, came a tremendous crash.
Both women immediately rushed to the windows and peered through slats of the Venetian blinds. A power pole several hundred yards away slowly fell over, bringing wires with it and causing a blue flash and a soft explosion. Smoke, then flames, sprang up at the base of the pole from the wreck of the car or truck that had hit it. Palmettos prevented them from seeing the vehicle.
“Somebody’s been hurt!” Edwinna started to run.
“Wait!” Paula yelled upstairs. “Hester! Stop waxing and take care of Alicia!
There’s been a car smash’“ She turned to her daughter. “Bring the fire extinguisher from the guest-room closet. I’ll get the two in the car porte! We’ll go in your car—since you blocked the tu
rning place!”
Within a minute they were on the way. Paula raced down the curving drive in first gear; she shifted to second as she shot along the bough-tunneled street; she shifted again.
stepped on the accelerator for a moment, and braked hard to turn into a shortcut bulldozed through the Gaunt palmetto land. She emerged on a straight, white coral street lined with pines. On her left was Teddy Barker’s bungalow—on her right a blazing car, its stayed nose hard against the stump of the fallen pole. Paula leaped out and directed a white stream from the extinguisher on the fire.
“You might get killed!“ Edwinna said frantically. “Short circuit!”
“This stuff is a nonconductor. When mine’s out, gimme yours.”
Edwinna did so and stood by until her mother effectively put out the fire. “We’ve got to get the doors open,” she said, “and the people out.”
“What people? Nobody’s in it!”
The younger woman ventured nearer the smoking, hissing wreck. She looked.
“That’s a fact! Somebody must have left it in gear, and it must have started up—by itself.”
Paula put down the fire extinguisher and looked at her daughter with an expression of interested disapproval. “Is that what you think? Then why didn’t Teddy Barker come over? He’s home. His car’s in his garage.”
Edwinna turned, stared at the bungalow, noted the car, and shrugged. “That Lothario! Probably he has company.”
“And where was Byron when we drove past?”
“Probably lying in the weeds, sleeping. I’ve seen him do it before now.”
“Then—why hasn’t anybody come? You could hear that crash a mile!”
“Somebody is,” Edwinna answered. “Your pal Katie.”
Kate West was, indeed, running from her home farther up the coral street. As she ran, one of her long, black braids fell from a none-too-secure hairdo. She didn’t try to put it back. She called, “Oh, Paula! Thank heaven, you got here! I heard it and I was scared to look. Is anybody killed?”
“The car was empty, ninny!” Edwinna yelled back.
“I phoned the police right away. The line was busy! Then I saw the blaze start up and I dialed the South Miami Fire Department and it was busy! Then I tried the County Fire Department—and they were busy! I was simply beside myself! And in the midst of that, George had to go and disappear! He’d been playing in the yard—and he’s wandered off! Oh, dear!”
Kate’s dark-blue eyes rested on Paula, waiting direction, comfort. She held the fallen braid in her hand and bit the end of it, as no doubt she had done in times of stress when she was a much younger girl and had worn braids down her back.
She still looked, Paula thought, like a kid—not a wife and mother. Like a sixteen-year-old—a plump, implausible facsimile of feminine maturity—frightened, appealing, hoping she’d done the right thing. Her eyes were worried. In shorts, with her tumbled, Indian-like hair, Kate was wholly out of place on a street in a city at the instant of unguessable (no, guessable) cataclysm. A bonfire at some teen-age girl’s camp where everybody was a little shuddery as ghost stories were told—that would be fitting for Kate.
Paula had always felt maternal toward her young neighbor.
Now the feeling overwhelmed her and she wanted very much to soothe Kate. But she didn’t know what to say. She didn’t even know, precisely, what it was that she felt—
or felt most.
The three women stood there for a matter of seconds—Kate panting, Edwinna frowning slightly over the discovery that she had extinguisher fluid on her dress. (Paula’s dress, thank the lord!)
“All the lines were busy,” Kate repeated in an anxious, apologetic tone. “I couldn’t bring myself down here till you came! Blood makes me sick—and people burning. . . . !” she shivered.
“Never mind,” Paula answered. “You did the best you could. Lots of girls wouldn’t even have tried to get the fire engine, or cops.” The very blue eyes were grateful. “I’ve got to find Georgie, now. You’ll pardon me. . . .”
“We’ll help you look,” Paula said. “But I’m afraid. . . .”
From far away came the roar of a great explosion. Black smoke, inflamed at its heart, bulged into the sky. While they watched, not speaking, a smaller explosion occurred near Cocoplum Plaza and smoke rose from that place also.
Then at last another person appeared. It was Bella Elliot and she came down Forty-seventh Court in the green shade, slowly. She was weeping. In her arms she carried young Sarah; she kept patting the child. She did not seem to have noticed the heavy blast in the distance or the smaller, nearer explosion. When she recognized the three women she smiled, because she always smiled when she first encountered people she knew.
“A thing has happened,” she said, almost as if she were reciting a piece, “that I don’t know how to stand. Jim’s gone—on one of those astral voyages—only he went bodily this time and he took Gordon along. I saw them. They were in the yard together, though Jim couldn’t see me. I was watering the poinsettia. And they went before my eyes—just in a flash! Completely.”
“I know . . .” Paula murmured.
Bella didn’t hear, or notice, or stop talking. “I’ve always worried about the—
thoughts—Jim has. And the cults and things he investigates. But I’ve always felt too—
like your Bill, Paula—that they were mostly in his imagination. He was only interested because he wanted to know all the truth and because he wanted to be sure he was being as good a man as possible! As if there could be any better! But he went away—with Gordon.”
Kate murmured, “My Georgie ... !”
Edwinna interrupted coldly. “I’ve got a date who’s due any minute! And I’ve got to change, since we had to put out this fire. Paula—that was your idea—the old Girl Scout emerging!—and if it’s ruined your dress you can blame yourself! And I hope you’ll get over this crazy idea that Dad and Mr. Elliot have vanished off the earth, by the time I come home again!”
She walked over to the convertible. She didn’t ask the others if they wanted a lift.
She simply backed, cut the wheels hard, and drove home. Kate looked with increased fright at Bella and at Paula, again murmured the name of her one child, and turned toward her house.
Paula crossed to a dip in the concrete-topped coral wall around Teddy Barker’s garden. She pushed herself up on it with the heels of her hands. She took Sarah from Bella and set the child on the wall. “They’re all gone, I think,” she said. “All the men.”
The younger woman shook her head. “Just Jim—and Gordon.”
“Bill too. I was looking right at him—the way you were. Byron’s missing. Then, there was nobody in the car that crashed. It must have been going along, and run pretty straight for quite a ways after the driver—went. In the ruts. Then hit. And Georgie’s missing too. And Teddy’s car is here and he never walks anywhere if he can avoid it, except golf—but he didn’t come out when the accident happened. Then you. And of course the explosions.”
“You aren’t making any sense, Paula! Do you know that?”
“Were you?” Paula shook her head. “Bill would have figured it out in a split second. It took me—a little time.” Her voice was steady, reasoning, patient with its owner. “Things would blow up, after all, wouldn’t they? Things men were doing that had to be watched. Like filling a truck with high-test gasoline. The only question is, how much area does it cover? No! There’s another. What happened?”
“I told you. . . .”
The redheaded woman spoke sharply. “Listen, Bella. Listen. What happened to your Jim and your Gordon happened to my Bill and it has evidently happened to lots of other men and boys around here. Now let’s go back to your house or my house and turn on the radio.”
When they did—when they had walked down the lane and through the hibiscus hedge and put Sarah back in her playpen—when they had switched on the radio under the begonia in the kitchen where the evening’s stew simmered, they heard no meaningful
sound. No music, no commercial, no voice.
“That car,” Bella said, still fixedly. “The pole, switch it to the battery.”
Paula shook her head, but complied. The radio still was mute. “Try a light.”
The other woman snapped a switch. Lights went on. She cut them off. “What is it, then?”
“The engineers,” Paula whispered. “They’re all men, so far as I know. Without them, they can’t broadcast, can they? Women?”
“You mean—men everywhere—just—” Bella gestured.
“Around here, anyway.”
“Maybe they’ll be back—in a minute.”
“I don’t feel as if they would.”
“What’ll we do?”
“God knows,” Paula replied. “Put out fires, tonight, probably, if we can. Hunt for women who can run power plants and things like that. There can’t be many!”
Bella tried to smile again. Her wide, mobile mouth turned up at the corners. The vestige of a familiar radiance came into her eyes.
“Maybe it’s only a dream.”
“Or maybe life until now was.”
“Maybe. . . .”
“What?”
Bella shook her shiny brown head and began to cry.
Tears filled Paula’s eyes. By-and-by she spoke again. “You stay here with Sarah.
I’ll walk over to Sunset Boulevard and see what it’s like there. Perhaps I can find out something.”
“Do you really think it’s real?” Bella’s voice wept the words.
Paula asked a question that her philosopher husband had not so immediately and usefully put to himself: “Maybe not, but what use is it to believe anything else?”
“Could it be something the Russians have done?”
Paula was momentarily startled. “I don’t believe so.” She pondered and shook her head. “It’s more like something—”
“Something what?”
“God did. Though I never believed in that kind of God.”