“She’s bought a house in the Chelsea section,” Sweetie said. “That’s where she wants to live.”
“The—!” I didn’t let fly with the epithet, which was legible enough on my pursed mouth. “The grasping, scheming little—”
“I know.” Sweetie circled the room, nursing her arms. “Still what’s she done worse than marry a man for his money? It happens every day. Anyhow, most of the money went from Granny to Daddy to Daddy’s widow, before Granny could settle any on me. You see, she postponed doing that because she had this idea I wasn’t ready for it. She gave it to Daddy to handle for me. Then when she saw me on my own two feet, she decided to go ahead with the settlement. Only it never got on paper. That’s what she was going to Europe for. To get a look at everything before final arrangements.”
“Can’t you break the will?”
“We’ll try, of course.”
“Have you been in touch with the Lady of Chelsea?”
“Our lawyers have been on the transatlantic phone. My Feldkamp and her London solicitor.”
“Tchach!”
“Please don’t huff and puff so. You’re no C. Aubrey Smith.”
“And you’re no Isadora Duncan,” I said, turning on her. “All that Free Spirits stuff! Children Without Official Permission. Well, you’re free now—free to show what you’re made of backed into a corner. You’ll have to get a job—”
“Job?” she quavered.
“For one thing. How do you expect to support a child? You’re going to have a child, you know. Oh, what a fool I was to let you talk me into it. I thought you were in the clear, financially and all. Why the hell didn’t you look into that side of it more thoroughly?”
“I did. Is it my fault if I had the rug pulled out from under me? Oh, we mustn’t quarrel—now,” she said with an excruciating little implication.
I was thinking about something else. She was so impractical that maybe she didn’t even have the facts of her own physical situation straight. Maybe it was all a false alarm. It might be only a straw, but it was worth grasping at.
“Are you sure about your condition?” I asked, hoping against hope. “Did the doctor tell you definitely?”
She gestured impatiently. “Oh, yes. I passed the rabbit test.”
“You mean you flunked it. I passed it!”
We paced the room independently for a time. We passed one another without speaking, like strangers promenading in severely stratified quarters. Suddenly she dropped into a chair in panic.
“A child on the way and no money. Oh, Chick, what’ll we do?”
“‘We’?” I said in an unexpected treble. I stopped and fixed her with a level eye. “Now, look. Get this straight, once and for all. I mean very, very straight. This is your doing. Leave me out of it. I’m having no part of it. I can’t afford to get mixed up in this.”
“We’re both in it up to our necks.”
“No, we’re not! Not me. No, no. Include me out.”
“To think this could happen to me. Me.”
“That’s better. Because it’s not my responsibility. But I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” I said, relenting when I saw the distraction with which she drew a handkerchief through her fist, a warning signal that she was slipping farther back into her old self. The feathered peignoir was another, an echo of the Ophelia-like abstractions and the air of slightly disheveled classicism that went with being an Isadora Duncan manquée. Both echo and premonition now? And would the latter be worse than the former? “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll pay your railroad fare to New Mexico. Once in Taos, your artist friends will take care of you.”
She didn’t answer. She stared at the carpet. I wished I had used some other phrase than “take care of you.”
“So far away,” she said. “And how will the hospitals be there? Hospitals! I’ve never liked them.”
“They’re just like anywhere else, Sweetie. All modern improvements. There’s nothing to it any more. And the spirit of D. H. Lawrence brooding over all. You’re sailing under lucky stars, Sweetie. And so good-by. Good-by, good-by, good-by …”
She smiled and got hold of herself. “You’re sweet, Chick,” she said, rising and narrowing between us the distance I was trying to expand. “A tower of strength, too. I’m glad it’s you.”
I backed off from that extended hand, that nesting eye. “You mustn’t get too attached to me. I’m going to be firm about this.”
“I don’t think that’s precisely the tone to take to a girl in a condition like mine.”
“You’re not a girl—you’re a woman.”
“Doesn’t it mean anything to you that I’m carrying your child under my heart?”
“Not a damn thing,” I said, wincing under the deliberate words.
She turned and went to the window, gnawing a corner of the handkerchief. I was at least grateful for the theatrics.
“I’ll kill myself,” she said.
I drifted to the piano, where I stood looking down at a stack of sheet music. I riffled the frayed edges with my thumb, thoughtfully. “I wouldn’t do that,” I said mildly.
“Yes, I am. The whole thing’s falling through. It’s no use.” She turned back again and plowed the floor with unsteady tread. “I’m going to kill myself.”
“Well, I’ve done all I can to talk you out of it.” I turned around, raising my arms and letting them fall. “When would you do it?”
“When?”
“Kill yourself. How soon?”
“I don’t understand how it all could have turned out this way. I only wanted to realize myself as a human being, and as a woman.” She no doubt fancied these to be words of a highly radical order, unaware how absurd they would have sounded on the stage.
“I imagine many a nonconformist has run into this surprise. Bohemian and artistic types think of themselves as too impractical for conventional life, whereas it’s precisely the unconventional situations that call for the utmost in being businesslike,” I said. “But to get back to the suicide thing, I know many people think of that as being ‘the easy way out’ and so on, but I have never been of that opinion. I think it takes courage. And I’ll give you credit. Sweetie, I’ll praise you everywhere.”
I had ample occasion to ponder in the next few days what I saw with sudden clarity that night: that people are often not emotionally up to things they may condone intellectually; that a course of professed independence is often steered out of weakness, the dull daily round entailed by attachment being the one calling for strength. Likewise, finding it imperative to look in on Sweetie on evenings when I should otherwise have had a choice of attending a Little League dinner, playing with Blitzstein and the children or bowling with the bunch at the office, I was able bitterly to reflect that conformity is after all the broad highway—it’s the way of the transgressor that’s strait and narrow.
Sweetie was barefoot next time she let me in. That and a white dress with more fluttering fringes than I had seen since the days we played grownup with garb unearthed from attic trunks hinted a further slipping back. She must have been in the brook, because her hair was wet as a Rhine Maiden’s. We were losing ground steadily. She was folding on me, all right.
“Chick!” she exclaimed, her voice gay now, no anxiety on her face as she took my hand and drew me in. “How do you do?”
“Peak, like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause.”
“Come into the garden. It’s wonderfully cool out there, and you can hear the water racing over the stones. The rain makes the brook allegro.”
I followed her along corridors through which she slipped with the ballet grace that always characterized her but which was more flamboyant than ever now. It was pleasant in the garden, though I had a splitting headache. I saw in the light those delicately bloody and lividly violet hues painters find it to contain. “What’s new, Sweetie?” I asked, sitting down on the glider. “Any house hunters? Has Feldkamp pried any of that money loose for you?”
“The market is still dead as
a doornail. And Feldkamp is trying, but he says it’ll take months and months to contest a will. Maybe years. But the most thrilling thing happened. I just had a telephone call from Eve Bickerstaffe. All the way from London.” She touched my knee for emphasis, and her voice was excited, like a small girl’s. “Guess what! I explained I needed money and she said she didn’t realize I was so badly off. She said she’s going to send some right away and will make all the concessions in the will business that seem right, but all that will have to be done through lawyers. She’s not coming, but she’s going to have her brother call on me. He lives in Pennsylvania. Colonel Bickerstaffe. She’s instructed him to look into this whole matter.”
“Have you told anybody what you need the money for? You haven’t done that, have you?”
“Oh, no. That’s our little secret,” she said with another coy gesture, and a chilling inflection that put Fitzgerald in dead storage.
“I thought you were going to kill yourself. What ever happened to that plan?”
“Let’s go for a walk in the orchard. It’s heavenly now.”
As she wandered off among the trees, I stood before the glider drawing a magazine from my pocket. It contained an article by a Japanese explaining the Oriental view of self-elimination as being, not a craven resignation, but a ceremonial declaration of great dignity, a form of communication. “I think you might be interested in this,” I called. But when she didn’t answer, but continued into the green grove, I shoved it back into my pocket, as something known to have been all along intended for my own perusal. As I overtook her, I said quite tersely:
“You’ve got to stop this nonsense. You realize what’s going on and that the time is passing, don’t you?”
She turned around and said in one of her moments of sharp sobriety, “Yes, I do. And I can tell you one thing. If I ever get out of this mess, I’m going to teach Sunday School.”
“I’ll be in the front row.”
The next time she was in the treehouse. I followed her shouts round to the rear but couldn’t find her. Another call brought me to the foot of the maple. Looking up through the dense foliage, I saw her face hanging from the old eyrie.
“Come on up,” she said, “and have lunch. I’ve fixed you some lunch. See?” She held up a bag of bananas and a box of Crackerjack.
“No, thanks,” I said, “I’m not hungry. And I’ve got to get back to the office.”
So there we were. What had been intended as the final step in her maturation began its reversal. The arch at which we had so long labored crumbled under its keystone, leaving our work in ruins at our feet. So Beth Appleyard was not, when the chips were down, up to it. Layer by layer the accumulated husk was stripped away, veil by veil the literary stuffs out of which her salvation had been woven were torn asunder and abandoned to the wind. Her history was being re-enacted in violent retrograde, like those movie films spun hindwise at top speed. We were back where we started. Worse. At least we had never played house up there, in the old days!
“Do you understand what’s going on, Sweetie?” I asked, squinting up into the checkered boughs.
“On?”
“Yes. Inside of you.”
“Sure.”
“What else?”
“I’m going to get all round in front, like a music cabinet.”
“That is correct,” I said, my flesh creeping under my shirt. “And do you know why?”
The head hung in space, a round blank of interrogation.
“Do you know what caused the way you are?”
“Yes. We went to bed all bare.”
She had recovered the crystal wonder of childhood. She was clean out of this. I knew she would be no damn help to me in having this baby; I would have to see it through alone, and that with the added nuisance of her tagging along because of the technicality of its being in her belly.
Why couldn’t I go mad? Everybody else was. They were dividing like amoeba all around me, taking refuge in fantasy and make-believe, snug in their retreats. Must I stand alone in the chill blasts? Apparently.
Sweetie’s head had vanished from the treehouse doorway. Now it reappeared wearing a straw bonnet with flowers on it, while a bunch of bent stems in her fist completed that air of trampled innocence that had always been her pathétique with me. She tossed a few blooms down to me. Daisies, dandelions, and kiss-me-at-the-gate fluttered toward me among the wavering leaves.
I stood watching like a man truly, horribly, utterly up a tree.
12
IN the days that followed, days that tramped heavily by like the feet of some huge beast that threatened to trample him—oh, how he wished they would, to death!—Charles felt something weigh on his conscience. It was an uncommitted act—that he might commit. It seemed to be connected in his fevered mind with some kind of heavy literature that he had once read, not Russian but even worse, that lumbered its way over you with those bone-crushing elephantlike feet of the days that Time went by like—yet with what snail’s pace!!—that the memory of was as onerous as the fear that he might commit the act it portrayed was acute. Even when he said, “Sweetie, let’s go down in the basement,” and she said, “Why?” and he said, “Oh, I don’t know. We haven’t been down there in a long time. I’d kind of like to see the old place again,” even then he didn’t dare admit to himself what his thoughts were luring him toward. He pretended they were early Thurber. “I want to kill you. There ought to be a piece of iron down there I can do it with—come on,” he said, leading the way downstairs—“or coal.”
When they reached the basement he saw that one end of it had been converted into a gymnasium. He remembered Appleyard’s obsession with keeping fit. There were bar bells of varying weights, parallel bars, tumbling mats, and, of course, the rowing machine that had put him, Appleyard, to bed. He paused over a dumbbell lying on the floor, and stood looking down at it with a thoughtful air, trying to guess its weight. It appeared to be about fifty pounds.
“You going to hit me over the head with that?” she giggled.
“If I can lift it.” He stooped over to heft it. It was too heavy to raise with any degree of ease, let alone wield with murderous intent. He looked around some more. His eye fell on a set of chest pulleys attached to the wall. “I’ll have to build myself up with that first,” he said.
“Well, all right. How long will it take?”
“Not too long. I’m a little out of trim. It shouldn’t take too long.”
“I have other things to do, you know.”
“So have I.”
She stood hesitantly, watching him. “You want to kill me, don’t you?”
“It’s one possible arrangement, that has a lot to recommend it. Do you see any bugs in it?”
“Are you going crazy?”
“If I can arrange it.” He backed against the wall and gripped the handles of the chest pulleys. He experimented with the stretchers, pulling them a few times. “This is a cinch. It shouldn’t take much of this to tone me up. I’ll be right with you.”
She watched him a moment longer, then ran her own eye around the basement. She hadn’t been down there herself for some time. “What will you do with the body?” she asked.
He finished his workout, breathing a little heavily, but not too much so. He was glad to see he could do that much without winding himself. He was what is called a good insurance risk, and proud of it.
“The body?” he said, coming back. “Bury it in the woods behind the house, probably. Or I may dismember it and leave it in sections at the checking rooms of different railway stations.”
“Are you trying to scare me?”
“No—why would I do that? It would only make it harder to do. You’d get skittish, panic, and then I might panic. It’ll take enough doing as it is. Don’t be so impatient. Women always want everything right away. They’re always nagging you to get things done.”
“Well, I wish you’d hurry. I’m getting nervous down here. I have some marketing to do. To market, to market, to buy a fa
t pig. Then home again, home again, jiggety jig,” she said. She paused in the light capers that had accompanied this snatch of song, and regarded him narrowly. “What will your wife think when she finds out about it?”
“Finds out about what?” he asked, looking nervously away.
“That you’ve done me in.”
“She’ll be proud. Every woman secretly likes to think of her husband as a lady-killer.”
He didn’t like her expression, which always preceded her attempt to broach the subject of “us”—which was what she had been doing in a roundabout way now. He knew he couldn’t keep up the pretense that this was Thurber very much longer; that any second the whole thing would shift gears into that other he dared not name even to himself. It was all too grimly embodied in the rowing machine, off which he had all the while been unable to keep his eyes. When she began a fidgety movement toward him, he gestured at it impulsively and said, “Get in. I’ll row you across the lake.”
She laughed as she sat down in the seat at his elephantine fancy, her cheeks as flushed as the dawn. When he tried to “get in” beside her he saw there was only room for one, so he said, “I’ll sit on this box over here. You row me across.”
“The girl do the work?” she said.
“It will do you good. The exercise is what you need.” He shook his head at the whole situation. “How to keep fit to be tied,” he muttered.
“All right,” she answered trustingly, “if you say so,” and going along with the playful mood she bent to the oars with a will, even saying, “Heave ho, my hearties.” He gnashed his teeth.
The Tents of Wickedness: A Novel Page 17