XXIV

He was glad at the prospect of seeing Owen Woodruff, a Southern awareness after so many New England ones, a home consciousness that could hear the right meaning in words by the pitch of them and the pace, weighing in what the hands were doing and the eyebrows, adding memories that reached back into other circumstances and other views (that might well shade the meaning)—the War over and gone and the “one chance in a thousand, in ten thousand” having materialized: Dexter back again, or someone that reminded you of Dexter, had much the look of him, answered to “Dexter,” but seemed another Dexter, impatient, sharp, short-tempered, prisons in his memory—Poland, Slovakia, Rumania, breakways, a week of cold hungry helpless freedom in the Balkans—that he sometimes mentioned bits of as you might mention an instant or two of a dream that had pursued you half the night, the left arm no dream, with a twelve-inch scar and triceps all but torn away, and the chest wound no dream, though it had been well repaired and seemed without effect; restless at home, as if civil life had been all but torn away too (his mother nearly as heavyhearted as without him). And all of a sudden one day, off in his car to Mexico; long silences, and letters noncommunicative when they came; one morning a telegram he was married to a girl in Tucson, silence again, and then a note he was teaching at a boy’s school in Sacremento, liked the West, thought he would live there (he sounded in better spirits); silence again and then a rather kindly letter and an offhand postscript that he hoped to celebrate his divorce in a week or ten days, “the Chief not as pleased about it as I am.” No mention of a visit East, or a visit West for them, discouraging one or two such hints from his mother; but more himself again: “… 12,000 ft. up on a pack trip out of Glenwood Springs last summer I heard somebody say, ‘Sudbury School.’ Like seeing a ghost. Joanna Something—forgotten—husband at the School now and then for music lessons …” hardly forgetting maybe, but anyhow healing in his own way.

A four-room apartment nowadays to fit contracted, and contracting, needs, and for the therapy in change itself, diverting her with colors to be chosen and curtains and the odds and ends of making it home, Anna for company, a Siamese that had been Flora’s, something “to love that we may not fall ill.” First a note from Owen on his business letterhead that he was coming (“consultation,” but in an offhand tone) and then, a week later, there in the door of the office in person, without ring or knock and as if slightly abashed at finding no waiting-roomful of patients, indeed no waiting room.

“Well, well! Come in! Come into The Thoughtery.” Except for his resemblance to Peter (and so to Ike) George wondered if he would have known him, older of course but more than older, formed. “Sit over there where you can see my view of the Charles. Does it remind you of the Savannah?”

“No!”

“It does me.—You look well, Owen. Getting to look more and more like your father. As one does.”

And he did look well, literally well; skin, eyes, movements, all the telltale indicators pointed to health—or enough of them did to leave him surprised when Owen after a while got round to saying he had had a sore throat for six weeks and thought he had better check into it, surprised not only because he didn’t have the bearing of someone with a serious illness but also because he might have “checked into it” much closer to home. He wondered if there was something else too and he asked about Louisa and the children, keeping it on the level of inquiring old friend rather than wily old physician and getting a sort of neutral response that he couldn’t interpret, though he suddenly realized that Owen’s “Fine, fine, yes, everybody well” were almost exactly the words he himself had used when Owen asked about him and Margaret. And he wondered while glancing at his throat and going on to take a canceled appointment for him in an hour with John Crowell, “one of the best throat men in the country” (superficially the throat seemed normal but it was not in his field), wondered if he might read into Owen-and-Louisa something of what the same words covered in George-and-Margaret, where everything was not at all “fine, fine.” “I’d lay a considerable sum you’re sound as a rock but we’ll let Crowell make sure. After that well get together and have a talk; Margaret will certainly want to see you.—Business thriving, I suppose,” as he wrote out Crowell’s address and his own and telephone numbers.

Owen didn’t seem to hear, but walking to the door he said, “Business, business,” as if half to himself, then turning about with a smile that seemed meant to reduce the weight of the words, “I said to myself on the plane, if this is a false alarm and I escape with a whole throat, or even a good part of one, I’ll go back home and close out the company for what I can get.” “Sell out? “Wife or no.”

George said, “Well, now!—Sit down a minute.”

“Some days, George, I think I sold my soul to the devil. Or pawned it and lost the ticket—”

“Not so fast now. I want to hear about this.” He wondered if he hadn’t heard a hint of something more to the point than the throat. “What’s all this ‘wife or no’?”

He took two or three steps as if to get away from what he had said, stopped at the letter file and the photograph of Margaret, gazed at it as if not seeing it and sat down. He said Broughton called him a few weeks ago. “He almost put me out of business once—in a thoroughly friendly fashion. Now we’re like brothers; that’s the way the game’s played. Did I want him to look into a prospect he had got wind of? Quote him something in the seventy-eighty range? I told him Louisa owned a considerable piece, I’d want to talk to her about it.—I don’t want to bother you with all this.”

“What did she say?”

“She doesn’t want to sell.”

“I see.”

“In fact she put her foot down, or threatened to. Said she would vote against it.” “Women say things they don’t mean.” “Said it wasn’t fair to Pete, I ought to keep it going until he made up his mind. And it wasn’t fair to the girls either. Schools cost money, clothes, travel, ‘advantages.’ Wait until they married, settled down. And so on. Quite a scene. I told her there’d be enough income, less than now but enough. Then she changed horses: she was trying to save me from doing something foolish; this was just one of my ‘getting-out’ periods, it would pass, I would thank her. No conception of anything beyond material well-being.”

“She conceived three very good children for you.”

“Yes. But materialists, when you’ve been one as long as I have you begin to wonder—or a man does. I want something else. I want to paint. The sort of life I lead leaves too big a part of a man unexplored. Oh, I’m exaggerating; Broughton’s prospect may have amounted to nothing. But it did rock me to realize I couldn’t get out if I wanted to. Of course I could blast my way out, I control it. But I don’t like the look of a meeting where I vote against my wife; if your wife can’t go along with the management—”

“What did you tell John Broughton?”

“I told him we weren’t for sale. Enjoyed telling him so too.—But this throat business, George; whatever it is, it’s set me thinking. Time’s passing, the equipment’s deteriorating.”

“Some of the equipment’s deteriorating, some of it’s holding its own, some is improving,” stretching the truth a bit for the benefit of the patient, as one must do. He slapped the desk. “Let’s see what Crowell has to say. If he turns you loose we’ll put our heads together on locating your pawn ticket.—You’d better run now or you’ll be late. You don’t want somebody in your throat that’s annoyed with you.”

But the throat culture—and the waiting—left him with no inclination to talk and the news three days later seemed to remove the need to. George gave him Crowell’s report over the phone and he accepted it with a sort of glum equinimity that George recognized as probably false even before Margaret called to say Owen wanted them to have dinner with him to celebrate his escape. She had told him to come by for a drink first and he said he would be there about four. “Four, George! I think he just wants to be with somebody. He’s leaving in the morning. Come home early.”

Leaving in the morning. In the clear. Except for the pains not covered in his lucky clearance, the ones contained in “the life I lead leaves too big a part of a man unexplored,” and the ones in “time’s passing, the equipment’s deteriorating,” and in “fine, fine, everybody well”—none of them more the pain of Owen Woodruff than George Izlar, at the window before a view of the Charles-Savannah. Who might more appropriately be the one to be treated. And the wife included under his own “fine, fine.”

With a hurt now that was different from the one in Georgia, in origin, in severity (he hoped), and certainly not to be treated with the same medicines (for one sufficient reason, he was only half-a-doctor now, with by no means an “ask-anybody” reputation)—a hurt more easily seen in what it was not: happiness was not the be-all and end-all, but a person in health tended to be happy and she was unhappy. As to the cause, he couldn’t say. His own shortcomings? Sadness over Dexter? (not his arm so much as the estrangement he seemed to have brought back with him). The cause might lie behind her words one rare confiding night, “Oh, I hate to get old, George, get old and die”—a cause hardly lending itself to treatment. How much she drank he didn’t know; continuously, he thought, but within bounds, more sometimes than others, as you might take aspirin when the pain rose. And he didn’t know when it had begun either; with the telegram from Washington perhaps, or perhaps even before that, with “Fair stands the wind for France”; ending for a while when the miracle came to pass, then beginning again with Dexter’s vanishing into the Southwest. He had decided if it got no worse he would do nothing, not pretending it wasn’t likely to get worse but counting on the fact that sometimes the sensitivities naturally, and mercifully, dulled; deciding anyway he would meet that when he met it.

“Get old and die,” into the machine that could not choose but hear. “Freed of everything but getting old and dying. Freed of hope and poetry and love (the young don’t know the word, think it means coupling), freed of sin and shame, of worry. Illness? On the way out. Freed of guilt, all but free of gravity. Freed of God, who has evolved from the sun and fertility, through Zeus and his court, through Jehovah and his angels, into a vague Something about to be blown away on the rising gale of reason—his warm hand replaced by the slick plastic claw of Science. Unhappiness? Every prospect we may one day with medication be as happy as we were on all fours.… The meager satisfaction that a man can extract from reality leaves him starving.…”

Owen and Margaret were on the sofa with long drinks on the table before them, backs to the bright window open to the breeze off the river. “Owen says he’s a golf widower,” as he greeted them. “But it agrees with you, darling. He looks wonderful, doesn’t he, George?—Tell him about Ike, Owen.”

“I don’t want to hear about Ike,” before he could catch himself, too rude an answer to be taken seriously for she smiled and said, “Of course you do. Tell him, Owen. About the buggy,” and he poured himself a whisky and water while Owen was telling about a business trip into the country and meeting Ike on the road from Sharon, “Ike in his car with a hundred-year-old buggy in tow, colored man in the buggy watching the towline.” “Jim Bondy, you said, Owen.” “I couldn’t be sure.”

“Isn’t that pathetic, George? Owen says he’s still digging into that old case. And the accident. Calls Sharon ‘The Dig.’”

He said it was better for a man to dig than to strike what he was digging for. “Ike’s looking for a dream devil he can call Mr. Guilty-of-everything. He’s hard to find.”

“Owen thinks he’s not quite right. What did he say to you, Owen?”

“Oh, he talks about his ‘invincible mediocrity.’ And such things.”

George said it was quite a common complaint and she said, “I think it’s heartbreaking.”

He dismissed it with a smile and, “It doesn’t break mine.” At the door he said he was going to have a bath and change his clothes and would be with them in a few minutes.

He didn’t care what happened to Ike one way or the other, never thought of him he would have guessed, or if he did there were too many thought-years between them now to leave much definition. And too many well-placed miles—their voices coming to him in the bedroom on the back-to-front stream of air: “Married again, I suppose?” (They might have been speaking of someone else; yet Ike had been married.) “I couldn’t—” “I knew that wouldn’t last. No judgment at all about women, not the faintest.” “Women aren’t easy to judge.” “Owen! Of course they are. Where you go wrong is expecting something complicated. He is married?” “No, I don’t believe—” “Don’t you know?” And Owen laughing, “I’d say he wasn’t married—”

He drowned out the reminiscences with a quick turn-on of the shower.

But when he entered the bedroom again the subject was the same, as if she couldn’t leave it, voice lowered but clear enough, “You have to love him, Owen, because you can’t like him,” and then (with probably a nod toward the front rooms), “Did—you know—ask about him?” “It didn’t come up. We had other things to cover.” “That wasn’t why.” “I don’t understand.” “He can be very difficult.” “Leonard, yes, well I know.” “I don’t mean Leonard.”—A silence then, or a further lowering of voice or a shift in the summer breeze, as he started changing the cuff links she had given him once to a clean shirt, the world slightly shaking with his being “you know,” the detachment of it, the distance, the separateness of her so free of the cords that bound him; and slightly shaking too from the name of Leonard. And from the picture lighting up in his mind of her intent smile as she followed Dexter’s tale of visiting him. And the rising question that divided quickly into two; first, was it Leonard then, not Ike? And the tied-in question, Or was it both of them? Her voice clear again; a jingle of ice and, “Sometimes, Owen,…” street noises from below that seemed to have no firm duration, long enough for changing one set of links, not the other, then “… hates him. All these years since then, wouldn’t you think he—”

In the other bedroom where his ties were hanging her words were indistinguishable and he finished dressing in there, finding a magenta one that he liked and drawing it under his collar. Then pulling it out and flinging it away from him, any old place, and gazing at it caught on the bedstead, and at the pretense in it, of love, of sympathy, of closeness, then turning his back to it and sitting down on the bed—as many ways of breaking faith as there were faiths to be broken and faithless ones to break them! Making too much of it? Too distressed at such a trifle? Too long ago to care; except that it made him think less well of himself, then and now; and except that it lowered a veil of lacy question marks between him and his son, to match the one between him and his wife. Not a sudden lowering; he had seen it before, sometimes admitted he had, briefly, resting a moment from the effort of denying it. Not a sudden separateness between them, only a sudden weariness of denying it was there; but it left him suddenly sinking, as if he had jumped feet-first into the old pool at Five Springs, the “wooden O,” down and down to the mossy bottom and pushing up again, though this time the bottom seemed so deep below he wondered if there was a bottom to push against, down through the chill of admitting her alien, admitting two must be two, that one plus one was merely two ones—and down, in that other plunge, between the straight night tree-walls, hour after hour, as if there had been no bottom to the State, or to anything, and touching one at last (as if the black man showed him where), possibly in the cheap calendar picture of the lake that became, as he dreamed into it, the lake in Switzerland which, her hand in his, they had stood beside—

“George!” from three feet in front of him.

“Yes. Oh yes.”

“Why are you sitting there? Are you all right?”

“Oh fine, fine. Just changing my shoes.”

“We’d better be going.”

“Fine. Just about ready.”

And as she left him, feeling himself rising out of admitting into denying and up again, the tie under his hand, then round his neck and into a careful bow—which she touched right and left for him in the living room (to Owen’s indulgent smile), a pat to each side with the backs of fingers and a judicial, quick, beautiful cock of the head. “Don’t you like his tie that I made for him, Owen?”

“I do. My wife’s not—”

“Honey, Owen says one of the main reasons he came to Boston was to see our marriage. That’s sweet of you, Owen,” taking his face between her palms and kissing him. “Sweet of you.—I’ll go run a comb through my hair.…”

For months he listened for something to the effect of “I’d like to go down and see how Ike is getting on,” or even “Don’t you think you could go down and help him?” But that was the end of it; a casual reference to it once or twice and that was all, and after a time the scratch was healed—the gash, the incision.

2

It was quite dark now, an early November dark, turning cold, maybe coming on to snow—there had been none so far—a wind off the harbor whipping coats and hats with an un-Georgian testiness, earlier than usual for him to be going home but too late to go back to The Thoughtery and when he caught a taxi at a main street he gave the driver the Beacon Street address.

And returned to the Georgia memories his last half-hour had filled him with: the patient he had just left, in bed with a mild whooping cough, was Jim Bondy’s grandson. The father had called him, as he had once before, down with influenza while studying at the Conservatory, Peter Bondy (with probably no idea where “Peter” came from), singing now in a nearby night club, Southern no longer, a wife from Detroit who had never seen the South and a son with the un-Southern name of Gregory. Nothing Southern in his voice as he showed the doctor out. “Now, Doctor, I owe you for two visits. If you sent me a bill for the other one I didn’t get it.” “Wait until we clear all this up. Don’t worry about the boy, a little pertussis is nothing. Remember me to your father when you write.…” the memories leading him on to Owen Woodruff and the letter from him so long delayed after Owen’s visit he hadn’t been able to put together what “pawn ticket” Owen was talking about. “I may have found that pawn ticket in St. Louis,” Owen’s annoying little cryptograms, fuzzy little metaphors. But he had sounded in good spirits again, “painting now and then,” or some such thing. Still, what did that have to do with a pawn ticket?

He had put on a disc and started a letter to him, some foolishness about tails, he thought, something like, “Do you suppose, Owen, that the genesis of our feelings of anxiety and insecurity might be simply the loss of our tails?”—feeling good that day, at home with serene old Anna and her tail, Margaret in New York for a few days with Barbara and due back that afternoon. “That, shed of this handsome and reassuring rear guard, we became apprehensive and edgy and suspicious, as contrasted with the integrated calm confidence of those of us with tails? That our concern at this untoward exposure may have evolved into worries lively enough to lead us to discovering God and immortality and Paradise (where possibly at heart we hope to be re-tailed)?…” At about which point the phone had rung and Margaret’s voice in tears and almost unrecognizable said, “I’m in Providence, George.” “Providence!” “I stopped off in Providence.” “Are you all right?” She said she was all right; she had lost her wallet, or had it stolen, lost her checkbook, everything but her train ticket and some change; she couldn’t pay the hotel bill. “Hotel? You spent the night in Providence?” No; she had stopped off, wanted to see the furniture in the Pendleton collection; waiting for a taxi she had begun to feel ill, not ill really, just weak, faint, dizzy. She had come to the Biltmore, taken a room, slept a while, was perfectly all right now but she must have dropped her wallet as she was paying the taxi driver. He said to stay right where she was, he would be there in no time. “Oh no! I’m fine now. But I can’t pay the hotel.” Would he wire her some money? however you did that sort of thing.

He had talked to the manager on the phone, he would be responsible for the bill, Dr. Izlar, 1016 Medical Arts Building, and so forth. She had seemed almost herself when he met her at the station; somewhat wan, rather upset by the experience, but all right. Examining her at home he couldn’t find anything that called for a further looking into; he gave her a sedative and put her to bed.

And they had hardly mentioned it again—once, next day, when she seemed to read his mind and said she had not been drinking (percipient indeed, for in spite of himself he had wondered if she were telling the whole story, the stopping off reasonable enough with her interest in old furniture but the rest of it most easily explained by too many drinks and having to sleep it off). She stuck to what she had said though, which he pretended to accept. And wasn’t sure but that he did.—But Owen’s letter had gone unanswered, disappeared in fact; he couldn’t remember what he had done with it after the phone rang. Or what had become of the disc.

He thought he would put on a new one tomorrow, disc him a letter on some such subject as freedom or blame or value—something not too close to the heart or he would find himself talking of age and death and the disintegrations on this side of the grave, the others didn’t matter. Or of the merciful Conductor (the image had come to him waiting for the train from Providence) who sowed such cumulative discords between His paired passengers that eventually either one could leave the train to the nearly complete indifference of the other. Or of the almost-poem he had almost written (long ago in pre-discord days) in which he told of receiving a kidnap note, “my dear and I, the writing so unclear” they couldn’t be sure whether it was to “Mr.” or “Mrs.”: “Make ready for abduction”—one of them. “No word of when, or how, or where. Of which. And if there were?…”

The taxi had stopped at a light on some corner he wasn’t familiar with, neon signs, a second-rate hotel on the far side, a taxi stand beyond his window, a “scene” on the sidewalk in keeping with the neighborhood: a man and woman emerging in argument from a bar, the man annoyed, brushing the woman’s hand off his arm—too many night shadows to see much, the light changing and the taxi off in a swoop and George turning to gaze through the rear window (for no reason at all, he would have told himself), unable to see the woman again for the cars between and the people on the sidewalk then catching a glimpse of her, alone now, hand to her face, the man getting into a cab at the stand; not Margaret of course but tenuous reminders enough to leave you murmuring There-but-for-the-grace-of-God—

And to leave him, too soon, standing at the door of the apartment, key in hand, reluctant to go inside, reluctant to learn whether or not she was there, knowing very well that even if she were not it didn’t imply any connection with what he had seen. And continuing to tell himself that, when he found the apartment dark; it wasn’t late, there were any number of friends she might be with. And when she should come in and mention where she had been he would accept it, or pretend to, as with the Providence story; and be not quite sure but that he did. As he was pretending now he didn’t believe the woman was Margaret, when he knew that was what he did believe (why else had he watched for and found the name of the street?), the belief seeming to have grown in his mind all the way home until the dark apartment was really not an ambiguity as he insisted but a confirmation (or was he seeing now what wasn’t there, having failed in Georgia once to see what was?—as he had warned himself he would be doing the rest of his life, the new Florida morning blowing in across the flats).

But seeing it so clearly that, walking into the bar, the questions in his mind concerned the circumstances in which he would find her; he had little doubt left he would find her—glancing about as he entered, the lighting so dim that no one was much more than the dream he wanted to be, standing a moment then walking through. She was at a table alone, a half-empty glass in front of her in which the ice had all but melted. She didn’t see him, or didn’t recognize him, until he sat down beside her and then she looked at him and looked, without a sound, indignant for second after second, the indignation changing slowly as her search for words seemed to produce nothing, her hand going to her face in the movement that had probably started him unconsciously watching for the name of the street.

When he woke up in the morning he didn’t realize for a few minutes that the emptiness he felt was more than the one in himself, which seemed broad enough to encompass emptiness in all its forms. Then he walked barefoot through room after room each one heavier with the truth. When he understood that she had taken Anna with her it was like a scribbled note, impulsive and illogical but in her writing, that said “North Stonefield,” and his mind jumped to wondering if he might not get there sooner by car than train, the timetable probably unchanged from Flora’s day.

And then he knew he was getting ahead of the facts. He couldn’t say where she was. She might have gone to Barbara’s; or even Tom’s, though Alice was not congenial; she might have gone to a hotel, not wanting to talk today any more than she had last night—and not guessing he had no more wish to talk than she. He had better do nothing, wait there, with his uncertainties that were mercifully so much easier to bear than once they would have been; wait for some word from her.

A little before twelve, as he ran a close-cut fingernail down the page for Tom’s phone number, Barbara called him from New York. Margaret was in Stonefield, sounded all right but wanted to see her; Barbara was taking a plane to Fitchburg, would get a car there. “Was she at the house?” “Phoning from the village but going to the house, yes. She seemed all right, George, but I want to go.”—He was getting into his coat when he noticed that the catch on his doctor’s bag was unfastened and he sat down at the phone again and called the operator in Stonefield and got through to the doctor who had phoned them about Flora.

When he hung up he called Western Union without knowing just what he would say. Give him some sort of signal, some sort of warning; and not by phone, for the time involved but more especially for the questions. “Mother ill will phone you tonight. Father,” that would have to do.—In the hallway, as the elevator was making the climb, he thought of the afternoon before and went back into the apartment and turned on some lights for a make-believe cheer when he should return.