The Moment of Tenderness
Page 16
I sat very still, letting the implications of this sink in.
“Life in the dormitories of Barnard is fairly liberal,” he said. “Do you think we could have dinner and the theatre again once or twice?”
“Oh—several times!” I cried. “But Roscoe, what about my poetry?”
He looked at me very kindly and rather sadly. “Amy, don’t stop writing poetry. Go on with it. You’ll learn a lot in college.”
“You mean what I gave you—it stinks?”
“No, Amy, I didn’t say that at all. But it’s only a beginning. You’ve still got a long row to hoe. Remember that nothing that’s worth anything comes easily.”
I felt like a balloon with the air slowly fizzing out of it. I felt that Roscoe saw himself in the grown-up world and I was just a little girl who belonged to one of his clients.
Then he looked at his watch. “Come along, Amy,” he said. “It’s time to go pick up your glasses.”
We went to the shop in silence, because I couldn’t talk, and Roscoe didn’t seem to want to; he seemed to be thinking deeply about something. And Bruce doesn’t talk. The glasses were ready, and the minute they were on, right there in the shop, right there in front of everybody, with me able to see him and everything, Roscoe kissed me. ME!
You know what? Being kissed with glasses on is one of the loveliest feelings in the world.
The Moment of Tenderness
The village of Mt. George in Vermont, to which Bill and Stella Purvis had moved from New York, was a monogamous one. In the three years they’d been living there they’d never heard of anyone being divorced, and adultery was unheard of. Once, in a neighboring and slightly more sophisticated village, in which both separations and divorces were not unknown, a summer resident was said to have entertained men friends in a more than casual way while her husband was overseas during the war, and a nice, juicy scandal evolved; this rather ancient morsel was still considered a tasty tidbit on the Mt. George party lines.
There was plenty of gossip in Mt. George, much of it unfounded and a good bit of it malicious, and there was a raw edge where the village was divided between the old timers who had been there for generations and the newcomers, like Bill and Stella, who had moved in since the war, and who now numerically equaled the natives. Even where warm friendships were formed between the old and the new there was still the unhealed wound that might break open at any time: over redecorating the church, or who should head the committee for a church supper, over PTA programs or the Republican caucuses, or simply over the fact that the newcomers had installed indoor plumbing and thermostatic heating immediately and as a matter of course; one does not live without these things; whereas for the people who were born in Mt. George and whose parents and grandparents were born there before them, a privy and struggling with coal and chopping wood or an ugly kerosene heater out in the middle of the living room had been an accepted part of their upbringing, and an indoor toilet, which they called a “flush,” was something for which they might have waited twenty years. Stella could easily understand an unformulated resentment over the fact that the newcomers took two bathrooms and a warm house for granted.
Not that any of them were rolling in wealth; there wasn’t a swimming pool or a tennis court in the village. Bill, like most of the newcomers, was what was called a “young executive” in one of the factories in the neighboring manufacturing town of Stonebridge (So one can’t escape being a commuter, one can’t escape suburbia, Stella thought; it can happen even in Vermont). The Stonebridge country club was on the outskirts of Mt. George and most of the newcomers belonged to it, rather grimly enjoying golf or the Saturday night dances.
It was at one of these dances that Bill and Stella first got to know Steve and Betty Carlton. Steve and Betty were in a way a bridge between the old and new residents in Mt. George, since Betty was a native and Steve was from Stonebridge. Steve was a doctor and Stella had had him in once for one of the children and liked then his quiet manner and obviously innate kindness. On this particular evening the Purvises and the Carltons happened to be the only people from Mt. George at the country club so it seemed natural for them to have a drink together, and then Bill asked Betty Carlton to dance and after a moment Steve asked Stella.
He was not a brilliant dancer, not nearly as good as Bill was; he simply walked with an easy rhythm about the dance floor, managing not to bump into anybody else, not seeming to notice the intricate steps that Bill and Betty and some of the other couples were executing. It was rather, Stella thought, like riding one of the old stable horses that are saved for the children or for people who have never ridden before: easy, pleasant, and completely unexciting. He looked rather tired, and Stella was tired, too, her three children having been unusually rambunctious that day, so they simply moved quietly about the floor together, not talking much except to mention the weather and the unusual amount of rain, and the fact that there was nobody else at the country club from Mt. George.
When the music stopped Stella looked over at Bill and Betty, who stood, talking animatedly, waiting for it to start again, and then at Steve, the tired old stable horse standing there smiling quietly. “Let’s sit down,” she said. “Do you suppose there’s such a thing as a glass of ice water in this place? I’m terribly thirsty.”
They went back to the table where they had joined forces and Steve asked the bartender for two glasses of ice water. “You’ll have to excuse me if I’m not very brilliant tonight,” he said. “I was up all night. Three babies.”
“I should think you’d rather have stayed home and gone to bed than come to the dance tonight,” Stella said.
“Betty likes to go out or do something on Saturday nights.” Steve offered Stella a cigarette but she shook her head. “Summer’s almost over: there won’t be many more dances.”
Stella opened her mouth to say that Betty seemed much more like one of the newcomers than one of the natives, but thought perhaps it might not be tactful and took a sip of water to cover and watched Steve light his cigarette. She liked the way he moved his hands, very certain and very quiet, with a minimum of gestures. His hands were quite beautiful, she thought, both long and strong, and it was the way he used them to light his cigarette that made her decide suddenly and say to him quickly, “Look, I’m about three months pregnant, so I suppose I’d better see a doctor or something. Could I have an appointment to see you?”
He suggested that she come in to his office on Monday, and she drank some more of her ice water, feeling rather foolish and wondering if Bill would be angry with her. Most of the old Mt. George residents went to Steve for their babies as they had gone to him for everything else since the death of the old doctor, but the new people went to one of the obstetricians in Stonebridge, and all she could say to Bill was that she had decided to have their fourth child by the Mt. George general practitioner because she liked the way he moved his hands when he lit a cigarette.
Bill indeed was annoyed, and embarrassed at his reasons for being annoyed. “It doesn’t look well,” he said. “It’s not as though we couldn’t afford an obstetrician.”
“Saving a little money will come in very handy, you know that perfectly well. And I never have any trouble with my babies and I’m sure Steve Carlton’s perfectly competent. He delivers plenty of babies around here. Anyhow, I’ve spoken to him, so it’s all settled.”
“You can say I’d rather you went to a specialist.”
“Darling, you know the money’ll be a help. And I’d rather go to Steve. I have confidence in him, somehow. So let’s let it go.”
They saw the Carltons occasionally that winter, played some bridge, discussed golf and skiing and the possibility of organizing a kindergarten for the Mt. George pre-school children. Stella saw Steve briefly in his office once a month and he was there in the hospital while she had the baby in her usual brief and uncomplicated manner. Just when it was or why it was she began to think of him almost constantly she was not sure. She was still in love with Bill, though they
did not see a great deal of each other. In the evenings one of them always seemed to have a meeting, PTA or Women’s Club or Young Republicans or School Board; and on weekends if the weather was even halfway decent Bill played golf (or, in the winter, went skiing), leaving her at home alone with the children. The children and the house and garden seemed to take up all her time; she had been an omnivorous reader; now it seemed to take her a month to get through a book. She had been in the habit of listening to a great deal of music while she did her housework, but the records seemed to disturb the baby, who cried more than the others, and so the phonograph stayed silent for days on end, and instead of listening to Bach or Bartók while she did the dishes or the mending she thought of Steve Carlton and his hands. She had taken the births of her children matter-of-factly and easily, never dwelling on them before or after, but now she found herself reliving her last delivery, Steve’s absolutely steady and gentle hand resting for a moment on her belly as he felt the contractions, and the sweetness of his smile as he held the baby, slick and wet and incredibly new, out to her. She and Bill had decided that four children was more than plenty, but she almost wanted another simply to have an excuse to see Steve for five minutes once a month and for the brief moments of work intimately shared in the delivery room.
And why? Why this obsession with Steve Carlton? she asked herself one Saturday afternoon when Bill was, as usual, out playing golf, the baby on the porch asleep in his carriage, and the older three children playing noisily down by the sandbox. She sat rather wearily on the back stairs, leaning against the broom with which she had been sweeping them. Why had it started, this preoccupation with Steve? She knew that it was completely one-sided, that she probably never entered his mind unless she called him, which she did not do often, to ask about one of the children’s minor ailments, or he happened to be sitting at the same bridge table with her. And then she would deliberately have to keep her eyes off his hands as he shuffled, as he dealt the cards, as he played them with a quiet sureness. It was his hands always that she remembered, going out to the kitchen with him once at a small party the Carltons were giving, and standing, watching him, while he made her a drink, taking ice out of the ice box, moving with the quiet sureness that was so different from Bill’s equal sureness which somehow never, it seemed to her, avoided noise and aggressiveness.
Then there was an incident so slight that she was ashamed to remember and treasure it. It was at a church dinner and Stella and Bill were seated at one of the long tables set up in the church basement before the Carltons arrived. Stella saw them as they came in and looked up and smiled, and as they passed on their way to empty seats at the other end of the room Steve dropped his hand for a moment against her shoulder, saying, “How goes it?”
I am a fool, she thought, sitting there on the back stairs, leaning her cheek against the handle of the broom. He’s not particularly attractive, or particularly intelligent or interesting. I don’t think he’s even a particularly brilliant doctor, so why does the thought of him make my knees buckle? Then there was a cold, rainy day when she wakened with a throbbing headache, chills, and fever. It was too wet to send the children out to play and they soon had the house a shambles. She felt too miserable to get them to tidy up or to play in one room; it was easier to trail around, picking up after them. In the afternoon she called Steve’s office and he said that he would drop in on his way home. She fed the baby and put him in his play pen, and, telling the other children to amuse him, curled up in a miserable heap on the sofa. When there was a knock on the door she did not get up to answer it, but called, “Come in,” and Steve came into the house, speaking to the children and coming on into the living room. The children followed him in but he sent them back out to the baby, quietly, but in an authoritative manner which they obeyed at once. Then he pulled up a chair and sat looking at her for a moment. “What’s the matter, Stella?” he asked.
“I’m all aches and pains,” she said. “I think it must be the flu. I’m sorry to get you over here, Steve. I’ve been taking aspirin but it hasn’t helped.” He sat there gravely looking at her while he took her temperature, put his fingers briefly against her wrist. Then he took out his stethoscope and asked her to take off her sweater and listened to her chest and back. “Your diagnosis was correct. I’m going to give you a shot of penicillin and some more to take orally and I think you’ll feel a lot better tomorrow. Where’s Bill? Can you get right to bed?”
“He ought to be home any minute now. I don’t think he has anything on for tonight. Oh, poker. No, that’s tomorrow.”
Steve put the back of his hand for a moment against her cheek. “Feel pretty rotten, don’t you? You get into bed and I’ll tell Bill to keep the children away.”
“Thanks,” she said. “They’ll be climbing all over me otherwise.”
He went out to the kitchen and she could hear him explaining to the children the hypodermic needle that he was preparing, and telling them that they must be quiet and not disturb Mommy. Bill came in then, wanting to know what was going on, and then came and stood over the couch, saying gruffly that he was sorry she didn’t feel well.
When she was in bed in the dark bedroom she felt better. She was even able to go over in her mind the gentleness of Steve’s hands, the quick skill with which he had given her the penicillin so that she had hardly felt the needle. She was even able to remember what she had felt too sick to notice at its moment of occurrence, the touch of his hand against her cheek.
That was it! she thought. That was what undid her, the moment of tenderness. That was what it had been all along. And why? She was not particularly starved for affection. Bill was an enthusiastic and frequent love maker. The children were always covering her with slobbery kisses and handing her mangled loving bouquets in summer or melting snow balls in winter. So why was she undone by these impersonal glimpses of tenderness in a man who was kind and good but with whom she had in reality nothing in common?
Why did the memory of a hand on her belly during childbirth, a pressure of the shoulder at a church dinner, the polite fixing of a drink by a host for his guest, dissolve her utterly?
She fell asleep then, and in the morning when she felt, as he had assured her she would, better, she determined to put him from her mind. This unreciprocal obsession was neurotic and unfair to Bill and she must rid herself of it. And she remembered, too, with hot shame, hearing Betty talk once of the trouble doctors have with female patients falling in love and making fools of themselves. “Of course it doesn’t mean anything to Steve,” Betty had said, “but sometimes it can be awfully annoying.”
But I am not in love with Steve, Stella thought, and it is not love I want from him, just those little moments of tenderness.
Nevertheless she determined to put him from her mind. She succeeded pretty well. They still saw the Carltons occasionally at the country club or for bridge; she called Steve in when the children had, one after another, mumps, chicken pox, and measles. But she no longer thought of him constantly; she could see him without feeling that she was going to melt.
Then one day her oldest boy fell out of a tree and gashed his head and broke his arm. Her nearest neighbor, hearing the screams, came and took the other three children and called Steve, and Stella rushed Billy down to Stonebridge to the hospital. Steve was waiting for her and in an incredibly short time Billy had five stiches in his head and his arm in a cast and Steve was telling her he thought the boy ought to stay in the hospital overnight.
Then he was looking at a place on her hand where she had burned herself badly the week before and which was not healing properly. “I’ve got to stop off at the office for a few minutes before I go home,” he said. “Come along and let me dress that burn for you. It’s really simpler to do it there than here.”
She followed him to the office and then, after he had bandaged her hand, he continued to hold it for a minute, saying with a tired smile,
Mica, mica, parva stella,
Miror quaenam sis tam bella,
Alba velut gemma caelo.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.’ It was the first thing I learned in Latin and for some reason I’ve never forgotten it. Mica, mica, parva stella. You’re not twinkling as much as usual, are you, Stella?”
“I’m just tired, like everybody else,” she said. She did not take her hand out of his, and he did not put it down.
“Can’t get off the merry-go-round, can we?” he asked. “Even if we don’t really like it. What Betty wants is to have it go faster and faster. She’d like to move, you know, somewhere where people have a little more money and social prestige counts for more. I don’t know why. I don’t think she’d really be happy out of Mt. George, not living the kind of life we have to lead anyhow. Mt. George is in her blood, but though she pretends to resent all the new people like you and Bill and to blame you for higher taxes and the roads not being cleared soon enough in winter, she’d be miserable without you. Bridge and golf and the country club dances and coming in to Stonebridge for some function or other, all the things that nobody from Mt. George has ever cared about, are the only things that seem to matter to her.”
He had never talked so much before and he did not talk quickly or excitedly now, but quietly, pausing here and there. When he had finished he sat silently holding her bandaged hand for a long time, and then he bent forward and kissed her.
When he had finished he said, “I’m sorry.” But all she could do was to shake her head, not speaking.
“This is something that has never happened to me before,” he said. “This is something I’ve never done before. Please believe me.”
She nodded slowly, still unable to speak, unable to take her eyes off him.
“I apologize,” he said again. “It would for some reason be very easy for me to fall in love with you, parva Stella, but it’s something that should never have come out into the open.”