The Disappearance

by Philip Wylie

  “I see,” Paula said in a dry voice, after a pause. ‘‘I’d always thought—you—”

  “You always thought I was a grown-up baby!” Kate interrupted. “You knew I came from the wrong side of the tracks. Everybody knows that! But you never stopped to figure what that meant!”

  “What does it mean?” Paula felt her heart pound.

  The blue eyes were not meek now, and not angered. Kate’s mouth was relaxed.

  Her hair fell darkly all about. She no longer seemed tired or taut but flexible and without resistance. She leaned back, her knees apart, her hands at her sides. What Paula had thought of as helplessness and adorableness had changed; the quality in her now was not merely wantonness, but inviting surrender.

  Seeing it with her newly opened eyes, with a surge of sympathy, Paula made a strong effort to weigh her emotions: That’s what men see! When a girl looks like that, they know!

  Kate answered gently, “I’ll tell you what it means on my side of the tracks. It means you have older sisters and brothers; younger ones too. It means, in families like mine, your father runs around. And your mother takes her revenge when she can. It means you long for just two things—money and a good time, Paula. Pleasure. To be satisfied. It means your sisters grow up ahead of you and make a pass at getting things any way they can. If they meet a guy with a big car, they go in the big car. If some older woman with dough gets a crush on them and wants to do things for them and ‘help’ them, they let her. And they tell you all about it, Paula. If you’re attractive—like me—when you get to be about fifteen, your sisters take you along. They know men who like them young, the younger the better; and the more you know and the more you’ll do, the better.”

  “Oh.”

  “In a city like this people like that are common. There used to be a big future for party girls here. And the less fussy girls are about what kind of party, the more they get asked places.”

  “Of course I knew that,” Paula said. “In a sense. I just never connected it—”

  “—with me. With anybody you met. Sure! I understand. And no wonder! I’m smarter than you think. I always was. I realized, by the time I was sixteen and my sisters were dragging me everywhere, that if you played innocent, it paid off. People are so darned stuck on themselves that even when they think they’re sinning, they want to think nobody could make you do it with them, but them! A whole lot of what people call ‘love’

  isn’t a darned thing but that!”

  Such an observation from Kate astonished Paula and it added force to all she was feeling. She nodded, and swallowed.

  Kate went on: “What finally happened to me, was I fell for a fellow, though.

  Higgie. And got married. And had Georgie. And I didn’t mind it or miss the life I’d been having. Not really. I liked it. Except, once in a while.” She frowned, smiled—and did not take her eyes from Paula. “Yes, once in a while, I missed some things. If you’ve been around as much as me—no one man, no guy, alone—will leave you always completely satisfied. And there it is!”

  She mused a moment, her eyes friendly, unwavering, appealing. “Anyway, when the men vanished, I was scared. It was too much of a shock, like it was for almost everybody else. I was also stuck, plenty! I knew I’d have to get out of the bungalow. That night I decided I’d have to find a place to live where people had money, and an inside track, and could get things and help me. I always did like you, Paula, even if I hadn’t seen you very often. You’re smart and you’re important and you know how to manage and you’re rich and you’ve got sex appeal. You’re the bossy type but I don’t mind that.

  You’re the protective type too, and I like that. I knew, though, you’d only care about me if I seemed to be the innocent type. Meek and helpless. So that’s how I acted.”

  “It’s funny!” Paula murmured after a quiet moment. “A couple of years ago I’d have been thoroughly outraged. I’d have felt taken in. Now I don’t mind. I feel Battered.

  Maybe even charmed.”

  The younger woman answered knowingly, “That’s how it really is! Only, we’re not allowed to admit it. Even the people who do find out stay scared. Scared of other people. Reputation. Of cops, even. I’m glad you aren’t mad at me, Paula.”

  “No, dear.” Paula looked away.

  This was the moment of final determination. Her heart still beat heavily. In her memory she saw again the procession of girls and, again, the lascivious throngs of women along the street. In the same memory she saw a group of other women, women who had sometimes held important executive positions in the days before the Disappearance, women who had cropped their hair short and worn mannish suits, man-strong women with men’s wills and a yet curious immaturity toward men. In imagination she now could see herself, sleek and dashing in a new, secretive way. And suddenly she could see more: the image of Bill. Her man.

  Curiously enough, she could see her lovers too. In that churning sequence of thoughts she discovered what they had meant: reassurance, symbols of emancipation, proof of independence, tangible evidence to her inner self that she was free and equal with men. With all men. They had meant more: compensation, revenge, envy paid back, a woman bitterly justifying her resented womanhood.

  The spectacle was no longer exciting or strengthening. All she had attempted was to balance a dishonest scales, to assert the power of certain hidden but genuine impulses.

  These, in a world without men, had finally bloomed as extravagant emotions and strange perceptions. A great, concealed part of her had unconsciously identified itself as a man.

  At length, under unnatural conditions, it had broken through its own barricade and she was conscious of the truth about herself.

  She had become conscious with a fierce pleasure.

  But pleasure, like every inordinate tide, ebbed as she sat there. All that she had been forbidden to let herself feel about herself when she was young, to explore, if she had wanted to (and she would have explored it if she had been allowed to)—all she had been ordered to dismiss as unworthy (all that Kate still felt, all that was, indeed, forever embodied in Kate)—had been bottled up intact through the years. It had been socially exploited, to cause her to compete with men. And she had been left without a way of escape or a means of unreserved emotional expression. She had envied men, always. She had come close, at last, to being a charademan. She had reached that place in frustration and want and nervous confusion where she had nearly become, in the real world, all she had hidden inside the woman she had merely believed to be real.

  “What are you smiling at?” Kate asked sharply. She had been watching Paula in silence for several minutes.

  “The world. Not us, darling. Not us. You better go to bed, Kate. I’m shot too.

  Going, myself, in a few minutes. I’ll sleep on the couch in Bill’s office tonight. You can have the bedroom.”

  The girl’s eyes filled with tears. “I—thought—”

  “I know.” Physically, Paula felt exhausted. But she had found a way, or the hope of a way, by which a powerful weakness could be made the source of a humble strength.

  Her eyes shone.

  “I was right!” Kate said in a loud ugly voice. “You are prissy! You’re too good for your own good! You don’t really know anything at all!”

  “Kate! Go to bed. I’m sorry for you and I’m fond of you but I’m not a child, thank God! Good night, dear.”

  15

  IN WHICH THE PARALLEL LIMITATIONS OF MAN AND SCIENCE MEET

  THIS SIDE OF INFINITY.

  Gaunt spent that Christmas at Princeton.

  He arrived in the university town too late on Christmas Eve to join a modest party by means of which a group of scientists from the Institute for Advanced Study were trying to forget their failures and their many sorrows. His plane had been ordered to take him to New York, but it had landed in Camden, with engine trouble. By a taxi-cab, which had also broken down short of Princeton, and thereafter by arduous hitchhiking, the philosopher approached the home of Emerson
Mobley, vice-chairman of Gaunt’s committee. He walked the dark, familiar streets wearily.

  In the days before the Disappearance, Mobley, a noted physical chemist, and his handsome young wife had entertained Paula and Bill Gaunt in a house now unlighted. A house with a decrepitude that could be discerned even in silhouette: the leafless shrubbery was untrimmed and a tree limb, felled by some autumn gale, lay embedded in the lawn. The porch, had, even in the wintry chill, a smell of dust, of old paint, of rust and dry rot that exuded from summer furniture standing wretchedly in the murk. The boards sagged as Gaunt dropped his big bag with a tired “Damn!”

  He saw an envelope pinned to a part of the screen door which had not fallen away. After beating his mittened hands together to warm them, he took out a pocket flashlight and read the note:

  Bill—!

  There’s a party in progress at Blake’s place. Come over if you feel in the mood.

  God knows, it won’t be much. A few drinks, some music, and perhaps a wraith of gaiety before we give up the effort. I waited for you till ten o’clock and then left, hoping one of those infernal accidents that are slowly thinning us out hadn’t taken our Chairman: If you arrive beat up, there’s a leg of lamb, part of one, anyway, in the kitchen window box.

  EM.

  Gaunt opened the door, aware, as he did so, that a night watchman had seen him arrive and was peering from across the street. Evidently the watchman had been forewarned; he didn’t accost the philosopher. The flashlight led to a wall switch; there was electric power. Gaunt left his bag in the hall.

  He was eating some of the lamb—there seemed to be no other food in the house-when Mobley returned. A short, stocky person with light-brown eyes, large ears, a stamping tread and enough gray hair for three or four men of his age, which, Gaunt thought, was less than fifty. The chemist was quite deaf.

  “Welcome!” Emerson Mobley yelled as he slammed the front door. He sounded slightly drunk. “Welcome to my falling-down demesne! A House of Usher in slow motion!” He tramped across the kitchen and gave Gaunt a thump on the back. “Lucky guy! Florida! A sun tan! And we sit in this gelid Gehennah, trying to work on something nobody understands!”

  Gaunt grinned. “You should see my place! Hurricane last fall. Piled trees on the house and knocked my pine woods to smithereens. I plugged the roof holes with concrete and left the trees for firewood—if the insects don’t get them first.” His breath, Gaunt noticed, was visible in the grubby kitchen; he still wore his overcoat.

  Mobley picked up a slice of cold meat and bit out a semicircle. “Got a fire laid in my den upstairs. Come on. Hard trip?”

  “Nothing unusual. Slow. Couple of delays.”

  In Mobley’s room the fire was presently lighted. He pulled up leather chairs, rummaged in a box of what appeared to be wastepaper and located a bottle of gin, half full. “Care for a dram?”

  Gaunt nodded as he took off his coat. In front of the fire he felt warm for the first time since leaving Miami. He accepted the liquor in a none-too-clean tumbler, drank half of what his host had poured, shuddered, and relaxed a little. “How goes it?”

  Mobley set his drink aside untasted, took a chair, and eyed the rising flames.

  “Rotten! God! I wish Marinda was around! It goes lousy, Bill. The university, for instance. Thinking of closing after this next semester. There’s no incentive and the students won’t work. Just sit in class and glare at the lecturer. Or start horseplay, and mighty rough stuff too. Or cut class altogether. Last week I leaned forward on my desk while I was lecturing”—the chemist shook his head and suddenly sniffled, as if the memory had started tears of self-pity running into his nose—“and the whole thing fell apart! Pitched me over it, off the podium, onto the floor. Sprained my shoulder. The class thought it was hilarious! They’d taken advantage of a habit I have of leaning, and spent the night sawing up the desk and covering the saw marks.”

  “Shame.”

  “Sure, it’s a shame! Though I don’t feel very different, myself. Then there’s mob temper. Any little thing will send the whole campus into a violent brawl. They just pile on each other without asking what the fight’s about. A dozen of them have been badly hurt and it’s only a matter of time before somebody’s killed.”

  Gaunt nodded again. His host reached for his glass and emptied it at a gulp.

  Gaunt said, “How are things at the Institute?”

  “Bob Blake can at least keep order there. And he’s still full of ideas. Starts some new project every day. The same old limp non-chalance that hides the slick strategist and the steely brain.”

  “A great man, Em.”

  The chemist thought that over. “Yes, Bill. A great man. For a long time I wondered what still drove him on. A passion for pure science? Maybe. That damned common motive of wanting to get back your wife? Partly. But it didn’t’ explain enough.

  Blake’s fiddled with Oriental philosophy and I wondered if he had that karma, or Atman-identification, or that Nirvana, Orientals are supposed to achieve. It’s rubbish, of course.

  But I wondered. Then, one day, I hit on it. Remember, after he got through the uranium bomb job, he kept talking about how the scientists had sinned?”

  Gaunt smiled wanly. “I remember.”

  “It’s that! Our pet genius is driven by a guilt complex. He thinks the women vanished because of what he—and I—and to some extent you—and a few hundred more of us—worked out for the love of dear old Manhattan District!”

  Gaunt stared into the fire. “Seems far off.”

  “Light years!”

  Mobley offered Gaunt another drink, saw that he had not finished the first, and poured his own tumbler half full. He swirled the transparent liquid. “Every night now, Bill, this is it. A pint. Some nights a quart. Then, for a while, I sleep. A while. When I wake up, I have about four fingers. Then I can stand beginning another day. Classes, my lab in the afternoon, maybe a conference or two in the evening. Then—home, the bottle and bed. I’m an alcoholic.”

  The philosopher was moved by regret, by sorrow, by pity, and by anger at this evidence of one more progressive defeat. “Why not layoff, Em? Your brain’s among the best. If the world ever needed it, the world needs it now!”

  “What world?” Mobley rose and stood in front of the fireplace—short, heavy body and big, square head. “A world of residual lepers. A world, you might say, where our very disease has destroyed the frontal tissue that might once have found its cure. It began long ago. Long, long ago! Pure science left out man, so it was just pure ego. And that’s all that remains nowadays—ego. Right?”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “The ego—and hunger. And death, in the future, somewhere. Marinda gone forever. No substitute. Heavens knows, I’ve tried to find one. Haven’t you?”

  “No.”

  “The more fool you, then! The more prude! Or maybe your glands are second rate, Bill! If you were like me, a shaker of pepper and salt with the emphasis on pepper, you’d have tried to find escape. Some solution for the world as it is. And it would always have left you thinking of—your Paula. As I think of my Marinda.”

  “That was my starting thesis.”

  Emerson Mobley shrugged, poured more gin, and, to Gaunt’s weary horror, commenced to snivel. “Everything in me is dead, Bill. Dead—dead—dead! I don’t give a damn! Someday, when I see the students brawling, I’ll pitch in, just for release. And I wouldn’t be the first professor!”

  “Maybe,” Gaunt replied with quiet compassion, “we ought to go to bed, Em. I’ve had a rugged day.”

  And that, Gaunt thought—grateful for quilts and blankets enough, heedless of the faintly sour smell that showed they had long been used without laundering—is—was the magnificent Emerson Mobley!

  The man who could make molecules of the isotypes, with one hand tied behind his back!

  Gaunt sighed morosely in the darkness of the clammy bedroom—and fell asleep.

  Bob Blake sat on a table cross-legged. His crewcut wa
s as crisp as ever and his smile as boyish. His perpetual cigarette snowed ash on a floor that showed how often he sat on the same table and how infrequently the lecture hall was cleaned. Gaunt saw Tateley, tired and looking a decade older; Wendley had come down; Ascott and Tretter, two more of his committeemen, also had managed to make the trip. A dozen other scientists were there—young, middle-aged and one very old man with dark-brown eyes and a far-off smile whom they addressed in almost reverential tones. Aside from these few, ranged in wooden seats that faced Blake and the blackboards, the huge room was empty. But it was warm.

  Blake opened the conclave. “First, gentlemen, I think we ought to thank Bill Gaunt for his summary of our work. A fine job!”

  “Until,” said Wendley, “he tacked on that psychological garbage.”

  Blake’s gray eyes twinkled. “I was going to suggest discussing that. I thought it was first rate. But, let’s at least have the courtesy to acknowledge the committee’s effort.

  It helped us here at Princeton. Brought up several new points. Stitched a lot of theory together. Bill, it was masterful. Few men alive today could have applied such broad knowledge to so many different fields. The chair would welcome a motion.”

  “I move,” Tateley said, rising tremulously, “that we thank Dr. Gaunt for his report and his committee for the surveys and the research that went into the report.”

  The motion was seconded and unanimously carried.

  “As to Bill’s own suggestions—” Blake then began.

  Wendley was on his feet. “Perfectly monstrous! To begin with, it is an imposition on Faith that a layman, an intellectual alchemist, should even suggest the Word of God is open to any analysis! The idea that the Original Sin is the reverse of what we know it to be, I, as a learned man, a scientist and a devout Christian, regard as pure and perfect diabolism!”