The Disappearance

by Philip Wylie

  Gaunt looked at the younger man. “I know.”

  “I better skip soon. It’s getting right seriously late. I’ll tell you something else, Bill. You’re not the first husband—since they went—to talk things over with me. And not the first one to realize that, no matter how much a dame loves her man, she, also, loves feeling of freedom even more.”

  “You seem to know several things,” Gaunt answered, “that I’m just beginning to catch onto. A little late!”

  Teddy rose; it occurred to Gaunt that he had sat there, quiet, with his back turned, when Gaunt had left the room. If an aggrieved husband had wanted to drive, say a poker, through his skull—well, Teddy had taken that risk with tranquility. It was another facet of the younger man’s code; he had exhibited a sense of values Gaunt would not before have attributed to him. Now, as the philosopher held out his hand, he did not think: this man stole the affections of my wife, or, this man has shared my wife, or, here is a man by whom I have been made cuckold. He thought: This is our friend.

  He walked halfway home with Teddy.

  It was just before dawn that Gaunt had the first dream.

  The dream began with the sensation of flying through a dense, enveloping radiance and was accompanied by a feeling of nearness to Paula.

  The mist broke. Gaunt found himself disembodied and seeing through eyes that looked down from a sky. Below was familiar landscape: the flat Everglades and their green pox of puddles, the islands in Biscayne Bay, Miami and Miami Beach, their suburbs and the indigo sea. Over this he circled.

  He noticed differences in the scene. Where “colored town” sprawled was ruin; large buildings and residences nearby had been burned; weeds and vines grew amidst the charred shambles. There were notches in the Miami Beach skyline, also, as if occasional hotels and apartment houses had collapsed. Elsewhere, only the windowless walls of certain familiar structures remained standing. The devastation was widespread although he soon saw that the university, the Riviera section, and the area around his own home appeared untouched. Very little traffic moved on the streets of this strange-looking Miami—much less than the actual volume even of these days.

  He approached the airport, still as if in a plane, and landed. People descended from the dreamed ship. People waited at the barrier for the arrivals. People hurried out to service the airplane. And they were all women.

  One was Paula, Paula carrying a heavy suitcase, Paula wearing her beige traveling suit and a beige hat that sat prettily on her lustrous hair. But Paula with a strange, haunted expression, though she smiled and waved.

  Now, a crowd gathered around her. Flashlights exploded in silent brilliance.

  Women, there were only women, asked questions.

  Gaunt realized they were reporters.

  “What were they like?”

  Paula seemed to be amused. “All kinds.”

  “Can we trust them?”

  “What’s left to do, but trust one another?” Paula seemed unsatisfied with that, and corrected herself. “I’m sure we can.”

  “Is it true that they had no atomic bombs?”

  The smile, still; but, still, the haunted look. And Gaunt could not imagine who

  “they” were. “It’s true. In fact, they didn’t know how to fire the naval guns or launch the torpedoes they brought. Just how to run the ships.”

  “When do you think, Mrs. Gaunt, the new government will be formed?”

  “This summer. Probably this next month. A conference will be held—thousands have been invited—”

  A younger woman asked, while she kept scribbling, “Is it a fact that the Russian women think they can lick the problem of non-fertility?”

  “They have a lot of hope.”

  “Have you? Have we?”

  “It’s not my line,” Paula answered quietly.

  Now the interview faded and Gaunt seemed to be riding on the streets of Coral Gables and down Sunset Boulevard and drawing into his own drive. Edwinna and Alicia, Hester and a dark-haired child he did not recognize rushed out to welcome Paula.

  “God!” said Edwinna. “It’s good to have you back! You going to stay?”

  “I am, yes.”

  “I was afraid they’d hook you for something.”

  Paula’s head shook. “I did my part. And I feel as if I ought to stay here.” It was a reunion that brought a lump in the throat of Gaunt’s dreaming sensibilities.

  He followed them indoors. The house seemed just as it had been before he was left alone in it. Paula dropped down on the chartreuse divan. “What’s new?” She set Alicia in her lap.

  “Plenty!” Edwinna smiled in a way Gaunt did not recognize, a way that showed courage and compassion. “The worst news is, just about all that food we swiped, and paid for, and stashed away—I divvied up for an orphanage. The poor girls were starving!”

  “If that’s the worst news,” Paula smiled, “the news is good.”

  “Not bad,” their daughter agreed. “But tell us about your trip! Everything! How was New York? Was the first cabinet as asinine as it sounded? Are they really going to get an effective government started?”

  There was a sound of a car stopping. Of footsteps. Now, in his dream, Gaunt had a sense of the scene withdrawing, of a shadow eclipsing it, and an inner sensation of loss, or frustration, or disappointment, or even danger. The last of what he saw furnished no explanation for his anxiousness. Kate West, her black braids shining, bundles in her arms, came through the kitchen door and looked delightedly at Paula. “You’re back. Oh, how wonderful!”

  The dream ended.

  Gaunt woke, shaken. His unkempt sheets were dank with the perspiration of a hot night’s sleep. The room was different from the way he somehow knew it would have been, in his dream; how, he could not tell. He had the formidable sensation that the world upon which he opened his eyes was no more real than the dream. Maybe, he thought, the same thing has happened to them.

  But the idea seemed senseless to his conscious mind. There was no way to explain it in the space-time framework of reason. Objects, whole cities, could not coexist in two different forms. He brushed the fantasy aside and rose and washed his face in tepid water.

  It was a wishful dream, a dream born out of the undying hope that the women were not

  “gone” altogether and forever.

  Still, as he prepared to get a breakfast for himself he could not quite throw off the forceful realism of his dream and with that the even stranger sense of its conclusion on a note of alarm, a note for which there seemed no reason, taking the thing at its face value.

  Kate West had joyously entered the scene—and it had been as if bells of warning sounded.

  Even by noon, even in the hard sunlight, he could not entirely banish the memory of his vision, at once so hopeful and so inexplicably ominous.

  That night he told Jim Elliot about it. The lawyer listened with the odd glitter of eye that was reflected by his most occult thoughts. But, in the end, Jim shook his head:

  “I’d like to believe your dream was a mirror of truth. But doubtless what created the dream was your wishing. As to Kate, she’s a sweet, innocent, forthright child. The very fact that her appearance was coupled with your anxious sensation proves, to my mind, you invented the dream. That it was a dream—and not second sight. Your guilty conscience, maybe.” Jim smiled. “You never—lusted for our handsome young neighbor, did you, Bill?”

  And Gaunt said, “How can I answer that? I have only begun to know that I do not know!”

  “Ah!”

  Night sheltered them together in the world-wide loneliness.

  12

  A WORLD OF WOMEN—O TEMPORA! O MORES!

  The approach of Christmas brought to Paula her first sensations of absolute despair.

  Christmas had been the children’s season. But it had also been Bill’s special day—and week and month. He had conspicuously connived over surprises, chuckling when he’d let big packages be seen by the youngsters and then archly refusing to discuss t
hem or claiming they were wheelbarrows, dictographs or other bulky items of no interest to youth inflamed by Santa Claus.

  He’d been an inspired stocking filler. Pillow stuffed and cotton bearded, overplaying the role, he had made a stupefying Santa Claus. Every year, with stepladder, hammer, wires and nails, he’d decorate not just a room but the whole house. That custom had started in their first little flat near the campus and continued through all the houses of their happy marriage—the big house across from the University Chapel, the house in Princeton, the apartment in Paris (on their first sabbatical), the Lake George summer house (when they’d winterproofed it and spent several skating, skiing Christmases there with the twins), and the Miami Beach house (where Bill had hung colored balls and lights and tinsel on palms in the yard). Of course, the previous Yuletide in the new house had been the most exuberant of all.

  So it was impossible for Paula to think about Christmas without thinking of hammers pounding and Band-Aids on Bill’s fingers, of miracles of glitter, red ribbon and green festoons, of delivery vans driving up with “Do Not Open Until” packages, of hubbub, excitement, gaiety and such smells as mince pies and plum puddings add to an atmosphere already aromatic with the breath of a big spruce tree.

  If she had told the truth to herself Paula would have admitted that at times and in certain ways the absence of Bill had compensations. Appalled by the whole, she had taken certain pleasures in parts of the bereaved present. She enjoyed management free of criticism and safe from arbitrary change, change without adequate reason (from her viewpoint) and without notice. She appreciated being given, even by universal tragedy, her own way in every personal matter. She had put to good use the good brain she owned; she was, in every possible respect, her family’s head, as a result. Besides, in a moment of national crisis, she had been valuable. Such conditions and facts were satisfying to a hitherto frustrated element of her nature.

  But the approach of Christmas brought her face to face not just with physical limitations but with a lack of certain emotions which Bill had buoyantly provided. She had saved from their strictly rationed food the makings of a comparative banquet. At night, when the children were in bed, she and Edwinna and Kate had refurbished and painted old toys and dolls exchanged with other women to furnish Christmas with surprise, at least; newness was out of the question. And she had helped Edwinna with the decoration of the house.

  There were gifts for Alicia and Martha and also for four other little girls who had recently been assigned to the Gaunt house, in lieu of two adults. These solemn, sometimes fretful school-age youngsters were subject to fits of weeping, to colds and chickenpox, to measles and “nerves.” They were the Gaunt family’s white “quota”—girls who, with their books and their sandwiches, each morning walked the quarter mile to school.

  There were gifts, also, for the six Negro families who lived in tents pitched in a cleared area on the Gaunt acres between Paula’s house and the cottage that had been Teddy Barker’s. Their voices, so often raised in laughter, and their music nowadays came constantly to the big, modernistic house just as the chlorinated reek of their outdoor latrine came also, on every southwest wind. Paula had organized, arranged, managed that.

  Her “quota kids” and her colored colony were as “happy” as any in the county.

  Paula served on many committees now, and served ably, as was attested by the constant increase of electric lights in the area, the steady gain in trucks running, the restoration of water pressure and other such triumphs. The women were “organization minded.” Once they overcame the initial months of shock—once they realized that, of the many hundred trades, businesses, professions, techniques and jobs in America, at least a few of their sex were skilled in all but six or seven—they set out to teach and to learn so as to restore what they could of “civilization.”

  In the direction of all such activity Paula had been a local Trojan. Still Christmas stumped her.

  Standing in Sam’s Market with a wire cart one day, at the end of a line, waiting for five pounds of potatoes, Paula was suddenly overcome by such a feeling of fatigue and misery that her eyes filled. She turned away from the chilly gray light outdoors toward the dismal interior of the storeroom, so no one would see.

  Such tears were not unusual. Women, anywhere, anytime, would thus burst into silent weeping. And no one would appear to notice, usually. At most, a firm hand would squeeze a weary arm. That was what happened to Paula, surprising her because she hadn’t realized anyone had come up behind her. She turned, forcing a smile.

  The bulk and the bovine countenance of Berthene Connauth blocked out a wan section of the half-denuded store. There was no one, Paula thought, whom she would less like to see at that instant.

  “I know how it is!” the clergyman’s wife whispered hoarsely.

  Paula jerked her head in assent and turned again, hoping to engage the woman in front of her in talk, so as to escape Berthene. But that woman was busily discussing Christmas plans with others in front of her.

  “Buck up!” said Berthene.

  Paula thought acidly, Now she’ll quote Psalms!

  The clot of yellowish-white hair leaned closer, the wrinkled features, sagging putty nose, lamblike, glasses-enlarged brown eyes, mustache and bristled moles. She was as ugly as a sea elephant. “I had—a dreadful sinking spell, myself, this very morning, my dear!”

  Paula nodded and shrugged.

  The woman’s heavy sigh was scented with violet “breath pills” which had been consumed to sweeten exhalation in Paula’s mother’s day. “You look so pretty, my dear!”

  Damn it, Paula thought, the worst thing in an ass is sincerity! She is sincere.

  ‘Thanks. I feel stinking.”

  “One’s troubles bow one down. I know. But you should be proud of yourself, my dear. Proud! I don’t know what our community would have done without you! And you’ve been of such immense assistance to the whole country! I tell you, just knowing there are women like you positively makes my skin prickle with pride!”

  Paula’s own flesh crawled a little at this obvious attempt of the self-righteous old futz to cheer her up. “Thanks.”

  “I’d misjudged you, my dear. Misjudged you!” The sweet violet sigh came again.

  “I’d thought of you as such a frivolous person. Such an atheist.”

  “By your standards, I suppose I am,” Paula said coldly.

  “My standards? They’re changing! Yes, changing! Very often, as I read the Good Book these evenings, whole passages seem to have a different meaning from the one I’d accepted. Often, indeed, the very opposite meaning! And I find myself inclined, amongst the paradoxes, to accept the side I had formerly rejected!”

  The queue was moving as tiresomely, Paula thought, as queues would move in Purgatory. “A lot of us have undergone changes.” Paula felt it was wrong to be mean to the old frump because she felt low.

  The bland, appallingly large eyes now had a twinkle. “You know, Paula, if things ever went back to their former state—I’d never be the same! Never! I’ve missed all the fun in life because I was so set against it in my youth. I honestly no longer ever deplore my husband’s—sins.”

  “I wasn’t aware he had committed any,” Paula answered, more politely. It was better to hear about sin than to continue in the sin of self-pity.

  “Few were. He drank a drop now and then, of course. Our denomination is broad-minded in that matter. Though not my parents! You know, Paula”—the harsh voice dropped to a sotto voce rumble—“for a month, now, beginning at Thanksgiving, I’ve had a glass of port every single night! The Thanksgiving sup was my first. And, I must say, I’ve greatly enjoyed it. I actually quivered with horror when I decided to see what the evil was! And now I’m quite the toper!”

  Paula could not repress a grin: the old crocodile had a jolly streak in her! A shame it had emerged at this too-late date.

  “And I’ve utterly forgiven John even his great youthful sin.”

  “The youthful one?”


  “You’ll never tell a soul, Paula?”

  “Not a soul!”

  Mrs. Connauth either believed her or had reached that state of grace and insouciance in which she secretly hoped the tale would get about, in a discreet way. Such was Paula’s thought. The news that came with it flabbergasted her:

  “For seven years, wholly unaware that I knew of it, John had the most lurid sex affair with a blonde woman in the choir!”

  “No!”

  Berthene was nodding calmly. Paula had never said a rhetorical “no” with more emphasis. For a moment she thought that deprivation had cracked the old woman’s mind.

  But nothing about Berthene supported that idea. She was placid; her eyes were even a little more human than usual; and her big frame was firmly planted on her large, flat feet.

  “It’s quite true! Someday I’d like to tell you all about it, how I discovered it, my sensations, how it embittered me! Now, with John gone, I have come to realize it was no one’s fault and, from the standpoint of evil, a lesser thing than I had imagined! The Seventh Commandment, my dear, is softened by the admonition to the bystanders. You remember?”

  Paula was still astonished. “About the man who is innocent throwing the first stone?”

  “You show an admirable knowledge of the Scriptures, my dear! Of course! The Saviour knew! To Him, it was not a grave sin. A human thing. To be forgiven! But I did not forgive for thirty-three wasted years! Think of that! Think of being guilty of such an excess of wickedness, disguised as virtue!”

  “Berthene,” Paula said impulsively, “if I were a man, right now, I’d take off my hat to you!”

  “Bless you!” The old woman patted Paula’s back in a motherly way and kept smiling. “You see, my dear, we all have burdens.”

  The line moved on.

  It was only when Paula was driving home, and only after a wild hoot of laughter at the remarkable confidence, that she went over the sequence of the conversation and realized that Mrs. Connauth had had a reason, a subtle and generous reason, for making the confession. She had done it all deliberately—playing the role of her old self at first.