by Irwin Shaw
“All right.” Archer started out of the room. There were tears in his eyes and he didn’t want the doctor to see them.
They went up to the top floor in the elevator without speaking. In the premature nursery, there were two incubators. A fat old white-haired nurse was seated between them, looking in through the plastic sides.
“Mrs. Grogan,” Dr. Graves said, “this is the father of the Archer baby.”
Mrs. Grogan smiled. She had no teeth and her mouth collapsed around her gums. “Here he is,” she said, with a brogue. “The poor wee thing.”
Archer looked down. It was small and crumpled and scarlet and the clamp on the umbilical cord looked cruelly surgical. Archer flushed. For a queer moment, standing there before these two strangers, he knew he felt ashamed, responsible for the struggling, freakishly tiny, inadequate creature in the plastic box, living on oxygen.
“He’s perfectly formed,” Mrs. Grogan said, “in every detail.”
“He’s breathing though.” Archer looked for a moment more, then stepped back.
“He’s breathing now,” Mrs. Grogan said. She shook her head. “But I’m fearful it’s going to be too much for the poor lad. He’s sorrowfully small, you know.”
“Yes.” Archer looked at the other incubator. There was a little girl there who looked gigantic and powerfully alive compared to his son. “How about that one?”
“Oh, that one,” Mrs. Grogan said gaily. “That one will be ready for the world in no time. She’s a darling.”
“She had four weeks more,” Graves said, “four very important weeks.”
Four weeks, Archer thought.
“Of course,” Mrs. Grogan said, “I’ve seen them this size before and they’ve lived to marry and raise a family. But it’s a miracle when it happens. But at least you’ve had the pleasure of seeing him alive. You’ll be thankful in days to come.”
Archer turned and went out of the room. The corridor seemed very cold after the moist warmth of the nursery. Graves came out and said, “They’ve probably got Mrs. Archer back in her room by now.” Archer nodded and walked back to the elevator.
Miss Kennedy was in the room with Kitty when Archer got there. The nurse was making last little arrangements, filling the vacuum jug with fresh water and putting it on the bedside table and placing the electric plug with the call-button on it near Kitty’s head, beside the pillow. The room was quiet, lit by the light of one lamp, with only a cold whisper of wind coming in through the slightly raised window, and Miss Kennedy moved in accurate silence about her tasks and greeted Archer only with a little nod when he came in. Kitty was lying still, stretched out, her head thrown back on the flat pillow and her eyes closed and Archer thought that she was asleep. But she turned her head and opened her eyes when she heard Archer’s step. Archer went over and stared down at her. Kitty looked queerly young, childish and exhausted, and Archer remembered photographs he had seen during the war of boys who had just come out after many days of combat. Kitty had been where he could never go and she had fought a battle he could never fight. He sank to the bed and put his arms around her, clutching her tightly. Kitty’s arms went around him and he could feel her silent tears against his cheek and he began to weep.
Miss Kennedy went softly out of the room, closing the door behind her.
“Clement …” Kitty whispered, holding him. “Clement.”
For Kitty’s sake, Archer struggled to stop crying.
“It’s all right,” he said senselessly. “It’s all right.”
“I couldn’t do it,” Kitty wept. “I tried so hard. I swear I did. But I just couldn’t do it. I let you down.”
“You mustn’t say that.”
“I did. The one last thing you wanted from me. The one thing you depended on me for.”
“Kitty, please, don’t talk like that.” He held her closer, trying to smother her self-accusation.
“I’ve been so bad, so selfish.” Kitty wrenched her head away and whispered into the pillow. “And I’ve been punished. Only you’ve been punished, too.”
“Nobody’s been punished, darling. You mustn’t think that. It’s an accident, that’s all.”
“It’s not an accident. It’s a judgment …”
“Kitty …” Archer rocked her in his tight arms, not wanting to hear any of this.
“A judgment because I’ve been a useless wife. These last months, when they’ve been torturing you so—I didn’t help. I made it worse. I joined them. I tortured you too. I was frivolous and I was mean and I only thought about myself. All those things I said about you and Vic and Nancy. How could I say them? How can you bear to live with me any more?”
She took her arms away from Archer’s shoulders and let them fall limp behind her head. Archer lowered her gently onto the pillow and stood up. He turned away and wiped his eyes. Kitty had never seen him cry before and he felt embarrassed, as though he had exposed a shameful secret about himself that he had cunningly hidden for twenty years.
“What’s happened to me?” Kitty whispered, staring up at the ceiling. “How did I get so bad? I used to be so proud of myself, I used to think I was so strong, I used to think I was a protection for you, that I paid my way, that we had a real marriage, you and I …”
Archer put his handkerchief away. He stopped crying suddenly. His nose felt as though he had a cold. “We do have a real marriage,” he said. He sat down in the chair beside the bed and rested his hand under Kitty’s head, low-down, feeling the damp hair and the warm, firm skin on the back of her neck. “You mustn’t ever think anything else.”
“And the way I fought you,” Kitty went on, disregarding his attempt to comfort her. “When you were in the worst trouble of your life. When you had to act the way you did, because that’s the sort of man you are and that’s why I love you. And I yelled at you like the worst kind of money-loving, comfort-loving bitch …”
“Kitty …” Archer pleaded. “Not tonight. Wait …”
“And I was so wrong about Jane,” Kitty went on inexorably. “I was so offhand and modern and superior. I was too lazy to see what was happening, I was too busy making myself comfortable, I didn’t want to bother … I let her slide away. I let her hurt herself and get beaten and shamed …”
“You’re being too harsh with yourself,” Archer said, believing that what he was saying was half-true. “It’s only because you’re exhausted and you’ve been through so much tonight.”
“No good as a mother,” Kitty whispered. “No good as a wife. All the time I was up there in that room, waiting, I kept thinking of what I said a month ago … I said, ‘I hope he comes out in seven months, I’m getting so tired of carrying him around.’ Do you remember?”
“You never said anything like that,” Archer said, although he remembered when she had said it and remembered the slight superstitious twinge of fear he had felt when he’d heard it.
“Oh, yes, I did,” Kitty said. Her voice turned into a flat sing-song. “I said it and you remember it, because I remember the look in your eye when I did. Well, I got my wish. Better than my wish. I was tired, I said. I was annoyed at the inconvenience. Oh, God, what sort of woman am I?”
“Look,” Archer said, “we’re going to forget everything you said and everything I said and all the mistakes we’ve made and all the chances we’ve muffed. And we’re going to start over again …”
“I’m not going to forget anything,” Kitty said. “And neither are you. Why don’t you leave me? I’m no good for you, nobody’ll blame you if you just put on your hat and coat and go right now.”
“Kitty, darling,” Archer said desperately, “I’m going to call Miss Kennedy and tell her to give you some dope and let you sleep for awhile.”
“You can’t call Miss Kennedy,” Kitty said in the toneless singsong. “She’s gone off duty. She’s going to church. Clement …” Kitty’s face was distorted with grief. “Clement, she said she was going to pray for our son.”
He put his arms around her again, letting her
weep, kissing her cheek. She cried for a long time before she grew quiet and then she was very sleepy and she said in a small, but clear and surprisingly calm voice, “I’m all right now, darling. Why don’t you go out and get some air and a drink and something to eat?”
Then she fell asleep.
Archer stood up. He felt broken and unsteady and it was hard for him to believe that he had ever slept in his whole life. Kitty’s mouth was open, and she was snoring softly, the sound hoarse and domestic in the strange, cold room. As he watched his wife sleep, he wondered how much of what she had said was true, how much of what had happened to them was really a judgment. But on whom, he thought, who has been judged?
He took his hat and coat off the rack carefully and went silently out of the room, closing the door gently on the soft, defeated, snoring noise within. As he walked down the dark corridor, surrounded by the convalescing, the delivered, the doubtful, the dying, he remembered that Kitty hadn’t asked him whether he had seen their son, whether he was dead or alive.
The night was cold and Archer put up the collar of his coat as he walked down the empty street toward the river. A drink would have been good, but he didn’t want to see people, he didn’t want to hear saloon laughter or jukebox music.
The river slid past blackly, looking wintry and dangerous, and there were only occasional cars rushing home in a quick flare of headlights along the highway. Downstream, bulking out of the night, punctuated by weak, irregular patterns of light, were the islands on which were the hospitals and the prisons. Upriver were the swinging, mathematically spaced lights of the great bridge, unsubstantial in the darkness. There was no moon, but the stars were bright and frosty in the cold darkness of the sky.
The biting air was insistent against Archer’s face, waking him up, but making him feel a little lightheaded, as he stared out over the water and smelled the brackish tidal salt of the river.
I should go to sleep, he thought. Tomorrow’s another day. Not correct. It was past midnight. Today’s another day. He turned around and looked at the hospital behind him. It was almost completely dark. Only here and there a light shone, people refusing to die in the dark, nurses having coffee, doctors probing pain with experienced fingers, saying, This will wait till morning. And in a room high up on top of the building, Mrs. Grogan, without teeth, watching the two incubators, waiting placidly, because it was her job and that’s how she earned her ten dollars a day and bought her tea and her chop and her cotton stockings, waiting placidly, as she. had done how many times before in her cheerful, kind-hearted way, for a small, inadequate, hurried heart to stop beating. All sorts of strange jobs in the world and all sorts of ordinary people to fill them. Airs. Grogan, keeping an eye on the oxygen gauge, comfortably sucking her toothless gums, on the death watch for infants. Thinking what, under her thin gray hair? You’re well out of it, lad, and don’t let anyone tell you different. Listen to an old lady who’s been through it all. There’s nothing to it, lad, only disappointment and leavetakings, and people telling you one thing and meaning another, and fight, fight, fight all the long days of your life. You’re not missing much, lad, and that’s a fact. And from what I read in the papers, we’re all to be blown up any day now, in one thorough explosion, and left to rot in the rubble with our bones turning to water and our blood thinning to acid and giving off signals like a radio station and the signals always saying the same thing, good-bye, good-bye. And here you are dying comfortably in a nice warm box, and not old enough to regret any of it, and there’ll be many on that day who’ll envy you tonight.
Archer turned his back on the hospital. Down the river, on the Queens side, among the factory-stacks, an enormous sign wrote a message across the sky in electric red letters. PEPSI-COLA. Look past the borders of the city at death-time, look for comfort and omens, and see the cryptic, shining words of the oracle, steadfast in mists and storms, saying PEPSI-COLA.
Archer stared out across the river, conscious of the cold and the silence and emptiness of the streets around him, and it made him remember that other night, such a short time ago, when he and Vic had walked side by side along Madison Avenue after the program was over and they were both feeling good, and the night was promising, and the evening’s first drink was waiting for them in the warm bar.
Where had that feeling gone? What had happened to that promise? That night he had chuckled at Pokorny because he was so comically over-serious, and how comic was Pokorny tonight? And he had kissed Alice Weller and congratulated her and assured her she would work again, and on what grounds could he congratulate her now? And he had criticized Barbante for using too much perfume and had joked about his passion for women, and where was the joke now and was he expected to laugh at it tonight? He had been annoyed with Atlas because Atlas was independent and scornful and only Atlas had really survived. And Atlas had survived because he was suspicious and despairing from the beginning and had built a defense for himself out of a protective combination of shrewdness and loathing. Perhaps there were lessons to be learned from Atlas, but who could learn them?
And Vic … Fifteen years. The lanky student with the black eye and the bruised nose and the pretty girl in the summery classroom. The ferocious boy on the football field, playing with that curious mixture of violence and disinterest, disdainful of the praise or friendship of his fellows, coldly unmoved by the pleas of the coach or the dislike of his classmates, making his own rules as he went along, arrogantly, confidently, not taking anybody else’s advice or, at least when he was young, serving anyone else’s system of values. The gay, inventive, useful, inevitably successful man. You’re not satisfied just to adore, Kitty said. You have to be like your hero. You ape him, the way he talks, the way he walks, the way he wears his hat. I don’t have my own husband any more. I have a carbon copy of another man, and I’m disgusted with it. And now, here’s your final, great chance. The final identification. You can suffer for his sins. How could I expect you to pass up an opportunity like that?
Fifteen years. Ending in an overheated banquet room in a fancy hotel with a cleverly dressed, beautiful, neurotic girl making this year’s confession of sin and turning this year’s version of state’s evidence. Ending in the embrace under the lamppost, and the tears, and Nancy’s voice saying, Forget him. Write him off. Wipe us all out. Please.
Very early, Hutt had warned him. Nobody can stand investigation. Nobody, Hutt had said. If you think you can you must have led your life in deep freeze for the last twenty years. Well, he hadn’t listened, and the investigation had taken place, and it had turned out that Hutt had been right. His life hadn’t been led in deep freeze, and bit by bit it had been shattered. He was defamed and jobless. His wife had lost his son, who might be dying at this moment in the dark building behind him. She had also lost her own respect for herself, because she had proved jealous and ordinary at the climactic moment of their time together and both she and Archer knew that however good their life together might be from now on, it would be a patched life and not whole and complete as it had been before. As for Vic … Investigation had proved him a liar and a betrayer of trust, and there went another fifteen years.
If he had done what he wanted to do that day in Hurt’s office, Archer thought, if he had resigned immediately, none of this would have happened. He’d be out of work, but he was out of work now, and he would still have a complete wife, a friend. His wife would still have been frail and undependable, his friend untrue—but he wouldn’t know about it. He was forty-five—the necessary illusions might very possibly have stood up the twenty or twenty-five years more that he had to live. Perhaps he had known all this subconsciously and the immediate, almost instinctive gesture of resignation had been a reflex, not so much of courage and loyalty as a panicky and disguised attempt at self-preservation. Perhaps he had known, deep-down, that he was surrounded by people who were, not what they seemed, that he was committed to loyalties and concepts that could not bear investigation, that the structure of the world he had built for himself had depen
ded equivocally on his own naiveté and that when that naiveté was destroyed by fact, the structure on which he rested would be shattered along with it.
Perhaps, Hutt had said, perhaps we have to resign ourselves to an unhappy fact. Perhaps we live in a time in which there are no correct solutions to any problem. Perhaps every act we make must turn out to be wrong. You couldn’t afford to believe this—but could you afford not to believe it?
And Barbante had taken it another step. You can die on your feet, or you can die on your knees, Barbante had said, drunk and desolate in Hutt’s office. Surprisingly, thinking of it now, Archer felt that there was more hope in Barbante’s formulation. At least it included the notion of moral choice and hidden in it there was a conception of dignity and the possibility of right though tragic action that was missing from Hutt’s program. The only trouble was that it was an action that had to be performed in the dark, in a twisting, deceptive, obscure medium, with the horizon, in momentary glimpses, always at a different and surprising angle. There is an activity in which I can profitably engage myself in the next twenty years, Archer thought with a queer sense of triumph at having reached this far. I can devote myself to discovering at every moment just how vertical I am. I can commit myself to the single task of keeping my knees from touching the ground.
He felt cold now. The wind was stronger and bit at his face and his hands were stiff in his pockets. He turned and walked away from the river toward the hospital. He looked up at the top floor and wondered numbly and without emotion if his son was still alive. He thought of the warm, moist room and the shapeless old lady between the plastic boxes, and the struggling, desperate, overreached heart. Curiously, he put his hand under his coat and through his shirt to the skin of his chest. His hand was cold on the skin, but under it his own heart beat steadily and prosaically. If only there were some way, he thought, to give a fraction of this strength, a share of this reliable, unthinking movement, to the crumpled small form on the top floor. If only there were some way to subtract a day of his own heart’s beating, a month, and add it to his son’s. If Graves would work on something like that, he thought grimly, instead of resigning so gracefully to the mysterious intentions of God…