He awoke with Pauline in his arms. She had kissed him awake. “Mrs. Beaty let me come up when I told her I was upset and bad to see you.”
Levin, realizing it was no dream, sat up slowly. She moved back on the bed, looking worn, tired, lonely. She was hastily dressed and in doubt.
“How’s your hand?”
“Better.”
He lit a cigarette with his bandaged hand.
“I never saw you smoke before.”
“I go back to it sometimes.”
“What else do you go back to?”
“What do you have in mind?”
“Nothing really. I’m sorry I’m nervous.” She asked, “How do you feel?”
“I slept badly, thinking of the job.”
“But you knew you would lose it. Even if you had won the election you would have lost your job once people knew why I was leaving Gerald.”
“For a short time in my life I felt I was able to say what would happen to me next.”
“There are other jobs,” Pauline said. “But if you think you’re sacrificing the right thing for the wrong woman, you can call it off. Don’t be too proud to admit defeat.”
He said he wasn’t.
Pauline said, “Gerald left last night and went to the hotel until I leave the house. We had a nasty argument about the children. He said he’d contest my divorce and not let me have them. He accused me of deserting them in spirit long ago. I said the truth was I had long ago deserted him but hadn’t the courage to say so. Our marriage was in shreds after Leo left, but the children kept it together until I fell in love with you.”
She got her handkerchief out of her bag. “I’ve never seen him so hurt and unyielding. He asked me not to leave him, and when I said it was for the good of us all he got very bitter and said if it was a question of whose good it was, he would keep Erik and Mary.”
She blew her nose. “I’m blowing my nose,” she said. “He has been an affectionate father but I’ve always thought of them as more mine than his. I was the one who really wanted them. He made me wait almost six years before we put in adoption papers. After he left I kept waking up every hour and wanting to look at the kids. I went upstairs several times. I’ve been so positive he would let me have them and I almost died when he said no. Please help me get them, Lev.”
He had always known she would want them. I’m in so far already, he thought.
He said he would help her.
“I hate to burden you further,” she said. “But you really don’t have to marry me.”
“We’ve gone through all that,” he said.
“Why are you then?”
“I’ve told you.”
“Tell me again.”
“I love you.”
“Without feeling?”
“As I am.”
“You love me on principle?”
“Yes.”
“Is that all?”
“No.”
“How else?”
He was silent.
“I get afraid,” Pauline said. “It’s so easy to make a serious mistake.” She said, after a minute, “Will you talk to him? He wouldn’t listen to me.”
“Would it be so bad to leave them with him?”
“What would he do with them? Either he’d have to bring someone in to take care of them or send them to his parents. I don’t want strangers bringing up my children.”
“Couldn’t he take one and we’d have the other?”
“I couldn’t do that, they both need me. They’re still babies.”
“Suppose I said I didn’t want them?”
“I don’t think you would.”
Levin asked, “What do you want me to do?”
“Talk to Gerald and persuade him to let us keep them.”
“What makes him think he could take them from you?”
“He said he would tell the court I wasn’t a fit mother.”
“Don’t cry.”
“I wouldn’t if you put your arms around me.”
He did that, thinking he hadn’t planned to see Gilley again, either.
 
Pauline waited downstairs while he shaved and dressed. It took him longer than usual, partly because of his bandaged hand. When Levin came down, they were all in the kitchen, the kids playing with Mrs. Beaty’s pots. Pauline was having a cup of coffee with the landlady.
“Good wishes if I may, Mr. Levin,” Mrs. Beaty said.
“Lev want to marry Mama,” said Erik.
“Would you like a cup of coffee?” Pauline asked, reddening. “Mrs. Beaty very kindly made a fresh potful.”
“I’ll eat later.”
“You can now, there’s no rush.”
“I’d rather go now.”
Levin called the office but Milly said Dr. Gilley was staying at the Covered Wagon Hotel. They drove downtown in Levin’s car. Summer had come, the day was warm. They said little.
In the hotel lobby Levin asked, “Are we all going up?”
Pauline, tense, shook her head. “I’d rather not. I will though if you want me to.”
“Wait here,” said Levin.
“Tell him I want Erik and Mary and mean to have them. If he wants to go to court that’s all right with me.”
Then she said, “Maybe you’d better not say it that way. Speak to him nicely. Maybe he’ll relent. Do you think he will?”
“I don’t know.”
“Try not to make him angry—any more than he is.”
He said he would try.
She pressed his hand.
In the elevator he thought: I’ve slept with his wife and here I come asking for his kids. He felt he wanted to give Gilley back everything he had taken from him and more.
Levin stood in front of the door five minutes before he knocked.
Gerald, in a seersucker robe, unshaven, dark half-moons under his eyes, opened the door.
“Oh, it’s you.”
“Sorry to bother you again,” Levin said, “but there’s one last thing I have to see you about.” He was ready to step back if Gilley slammed the door in his face.
“Come in,” Gerald said. The magazines and newspapers he had been reading were strewn around the armchair and base of the lit pink lamp in the darkish hotel room.
He looks like a misplaced bachelor, Levin thought, and I feel long since married.
“Pardon the small room,” Gilley said. He sat in the armchair, crossing his long red-haired legs. “I was hoping you’d show up.”
Levin sat on the edge of a hard chair. “I’m sorry I’ve been such a thorn in your side, Gerald.”
“More a pain in the ass,” Gilley said. “And if you’re so goddamn sorry, why don’t you close up shop and go haunt some other neighborhood? Why did you have to pick on me? I’ve worked doggone hard in my life and don’t know why I shouldn’t be allowed to live in peace with my wife and kids and enjoy the fruits of my labor.”
“The reason I’ve come,” Levin said, “is to ask for the children. They’ll miss their mother. She says they’d only be in your way.”
“If their mother wants them so much why didn’t she act like one? Why didn’t she consider their welfare before breaking up their home?”
He was haughty, embittered, so unhappy Levin found it hard to look at him.
Neither of them spoke until Gerald, uncrossing his legs, said, “I thought you’d be more than glad for me to take them off your hands, but if you’re asking to have them for her, that shows you don’t really have any true idea what you’re in for. Up to now you’ve had a free ride on my back, although I can’t blame you entirely, I suppose. I know darn well it wasn’t all your fault, and that’s why I opened the door to you just now instead of punching your eye. But the way you’re acting convinces me, if I haven’t already been convinced along other lines of the same thing, that you are a very inexperienced person. I mean with women as they really are and not as they pretend to be, or as they are when it’s a question of going to bed with them. I don’t doubt you’re in love with my wife. Duffy was too, but that’s not the whole of it. A lot you don’t know will pop up the minute you begin to live as man and wife under the same roof. Up to then the picture might as well be something you think you’re seeing whereas the real thing is something else again after it’s been developed. That’s why I thought I ought to talk to you before you go on with this.
“I appreciate it,” Levin said, “but I know what you mean.”
“You can’t,” said Gilley, “unless you’ve been married to her for years. First off, she has some qualities that would drive even the most patient man, and I am one of them—crazy. If you want to know why I want her back if that’s the case, and after she has twice deceived and humiliated me, the reason is understandable. I’m used to her and know what to expect. She can’t surprise me any more, good or bad, though this would be her last chance with the bad. I’ve had it. Yet I’d be a liar not to admit there are some wonderful things about Pauline or why am I bothering to talk to you now? But as somebody thinking of marrying a woman who has been married a dozen years, the best and freshest of her youth, you are due for some unpleasant surprises, and I wouldn’t be surprised myself in the least to hear that you and she break up within six months if you are so foolish as to marry her. In order to save you unforseen trouble I’ll give you some idea what she’s like.”
“I know what she’s like—”
“You think you do. I’ve already told you she is never contented, but I don’t think you understand what that means. She was born dissatisfied, as some people are—Fabrikant comes to mind, and I could mention others—or maybe she was brought up that way. Whatever it is, even when as a student she turned in some very good term papers to me, which I gave high A’s to, she never was satisfied. She always said she felt she should have done better. Not that she could, mind you, but that she should have, as though all you have to do to execute a better performance is to wish for it. I blame her old man for this, to some extent. I understand he was a fine physician and a nice thoughtful person—I’ve suffered myself from his virtues—but it’s plain to me that he gave her a blown-up idea of herself. She was an only child, too, be that as it may. If you make the mistake of tying yourself to her, more than once—I guarantee—you’ll wake up at six A.M. to hear her already going on about her life and how it didn’t pan out as she wanted it to. When you ask her what she had expected, all she can tell you is that she wanted to be a better peson than she is. And this, as is obvious, from a woman who admits to two extra-marital lovers in the last three years. Then you will hear in long detail everything she thinks she has done wrong, or those things she tried to do and had to give up, or everything she now does and does badly. She will never once tell you what she does well, which can get pretty monotonous. After that she’ll blame you for as much as she blames herself, because you married her—in my case when she was twenty—and didn’t do what she calls ‘bring me out,’ meaning make out of her something she couldn’t make out of herself though you may have broken your back trying to think up new ways to do it. I’ve suggested courses, taken her on trips, kept her on a decent budget even when I couldn’t so well afford it, given her a position in the community, a car, fine home, children just as real and lovable as anyone else’s, although adopted, and in general tried everything I know to make her happy. And when she’s through with that complaint she will have worked herself up into a nervous jag, so that unless you get out of the house early you’ll be having an argument with her that may run through the day and into the night, just to the time, let’s say, when you might be thinking of a little natural satisfaction. The next day it’ll take her half the morning to wake up because she hasn’t slept well, which happens more often than you would think. I’m not saying I hold these things against her, and I’m willing to bet that if you asked her right now she’ll admit I’ve always been considerate. Maybe it’s just the way her nervous system is built. It might be what used to be called ‘delicate.’ Almost anything can throw off her balance and start you both being miserable.”
Levin shifted in his chair.
Gilley went on: “If you happen to want someone who is a good housekeeper and will keep the house as neat and orderly as I’ve seen your office—I’m not talking about those fireballs who do canning, baking, gardening, civic activities, refinishing furniture, bean picking in summer, and play tennis besides keeping up the usual household chores—I am talking about a reduced scale of domestic efficiency—well, you’d better forget it. She has her periods of efficiency, I admit, usually in the spring and early fall, but there are times when for one reason or another she can’t get organized enough to clean the toilet and I have to do it after a full day’s work, especially on a day she has spent most of the time with a pile of cookbooks around her, cooking a dinner that should take two hours to prepare instead of seven, and is not anything super-special anyway. That’s why we don’t entertain as much as I would like. She doesn’t care for housework—it bores her, and even on days she is concentrating on getting it done, her resistance to it cuts down on her accomplishment. That’s why I frankly thought we were better off not adopting for a while because I knew she’d be more swamped than ever. As soon as I could afford a cleaning woman for her twice a week I agreed to having the kids. I know how finicky you are to order and punctuality, but if you marry her you can bury your clock for all the good it will do you. Not only does she resist time, she makes it her enemy.”
“I’m not such good friends with it either,” Levin sighed.
“What I mean is that for years—this started in her twenties-she has been keeping track of her wrinkles and lamenting the passing of her youth, which, I take it, was from eighteen to twenty-five, and I can’t convince her otherwise. With me around she has the advantage of my forty-five years as a comparison to her thirty-two, but with you and your thirty or thirty-one, you can imagine what that might do to her morale. She’ll be older with you than she is with me, older at every age and, believe me, you won’t find any advantage to it. Living with Pauline though it can be pleasant is generally no bed of roses.”
“I have never slept on flowers.”
“And then there are her health problems.”
“I’d rather not hear—”
“It won’t take a minute. I won’t call her health bad but she has her problems that you’d better know about. After thirty a woman doesn’t get any younger. She sometimes has constipation, which I won’t go into, but the real nuisance is her female troubles on and off. When you least expect it, she goes into her nine-day-or-so period that is caused by what they call anovulatory cycle or some such name. The doctor says that with her it’s more a nuisance than anything serious and could clear up on its own, which it sometimes does, but the result is that you never know where you stand when your instincts are up. No doubt she saved her best times for you but you’ll be making a mistake if you take her for a sexy babe. Once you’re married to her you can bet your boots that many times when you are looking forward to your satisfaction there is nothing doing that night. You might just as well beat your brains out then as argue with her to go to see a doctor. She’s afraid of them and resists till she gets so wound up from worry that when she finally does go, your bill is twice as high as it should have been. Think of that on your salary.”
“Excuse me,” Levin said. “What I came about is the children—”
“I was getting to that,” said Gilley. “They also have their troubles, as all kids do. Little Mary is generally healthy but has eczema all summer, and the pediatrician has warned Pauline she could go into asthma overnight—it’s some kind of strong allergic condition. She gets shots that are costing me over a hundred dollars a year. And Erik never stops having colds he can’t shake off, that either go into bronchitis or ear infections. One month this past winter his antibiotics bill alone came to sixty dollars. He’s also had strep throat three times and the pediatrician is always testing for a possible low-grade rheumatic fever as a result of the streptococcus. He doesn’t think Erik is such a sick kid but Pauline has yet to stop worrying about him, and when she worries, brother, you worry.”
Levin, fanning himself with his good hand, continued to listen.
“I said before there are some wonderful things about Pauline —I wouldn’t in the least call her a flop. Though you mightn’t guess it she plays a good game of golf. She also began to learn how to ski a few years back, but I can’t, so we don’t go often. She’s also good around the garden. She reads a lot, listens to music—I built her a hi-fi—and she has knitted me some nice sweaters and socks. She has wanted to go to work but I’d rather have her at home because that’s what needs the most attention. It all boils down to what I said before, that she is dislocated by nature, and in the end there is a better than even chance she will tell you what she has told me, that maybe the cause of it is she didn’t really love me when she married me. I’ll tell you this,” Gerald said with bitterness, “I know love in a woman when I see it, and believe me, I saw it in her. I have her letters to prove it. Once she begins to question herself, nothing is sacred any more. And to top it all, at times she’ll get so low and unhappy that more than one night I’ve had to comfort her, as for instance after she had deceived me with Duffy. You may be doing the same with her some day over some other third party. Don’t think your situation will be much better than mine.” “It’s the chance you take—” “The odds are not in your favor.”
Levin again mentioned the children. “She’d be miserable without them. We could work out some sort of arrangement so that you could have them part of the year—maybe the summer.”
Gilley stared at him. “You expect to go on with this after what I’ve told you?”
Levin laughed badly.
Gilley snapped off the lamplight and rose. “In that case she can’t have them. When she deserts me, she deserts them.”
Levin sat humidly on the hard chair. “How can you hurt her if you say you love her?”
“The same way she hurts me. The way you do. The way I want to hurt you.”
His eyes were dark with distaste and anger. “If you want so much to have the kids, there’s only one way—”
Levin, in pain of anticipation, leaned forward.
“Are you willing to give me your promise you will give up college teaching?” Gerald said.
Levin jumped up in rage. “Are you crazy? That’s a fantastic blackmail.”
“Take it or leave it.”
“It’s unconstitutional,” Levin shouted. “Inhuman, barbaric, immoral.”
“And what is it when you steal a man’s wife and children from him?” Gilley thundered. “Is that so g.d. moral, since you use the word so much?”
“Pauline is a free agent.”
“Can you say the kids are, or that she deserves to have them, a woman who had two lovers?”
“Will you use them any better than you used her?”
“She used me. She played me for a sucker.”
“How am I supposed to support them if I can’t teach?”
“I didn’t say you couldn’t teach. I said not in any college. You can go back to a high school. They generally pay better anyway.”
“What’s the difference whether I teach in a high school or college?”
“You’d do less harm in high school. You’re not fit to teach at the college level.”
“What a low form of revenge.”
“It’s your own fault. I want to get at least something out of this mess.”
“I won’t agree to it. We’ll fight for the kids in court.”
“You won’t get anything in court when I testify she engaged in adultery with Duffy, then with you–during which, as she has admitted to me—she sometimes left the kids unattended. She isn’t a fit mother.”
“You’re not in your right mind if you say that.”
“I’ll argue about it when the time comes.”
“You’ll have no evidence. She won’t testify against herself.”
“I have all the evidence I need—on tape.”
Levin groaned from his shoes up. “You mean you took a tape of her talking, without her knowledge?”
Gilley blanched. “So would you.”
“These goddamn gadgets will destroy you. I’ll testify as to the kind of pictures you took of her.”
“Picture, damn it, and she was naked in it with a man, not I. I wish now I had had the sense to print more than one copy. As for whatever evidence you have to give, I’d advise you not to or the judge might be interested in hearing a lot more about you. I don’t want to bring this up just yet because I haven’t finished investigating it, but one of the boys at the Alpha Zeta fraternity, which I am the faculty adviser to, recently became engaged to a girl who told him one night in his car that she had had intimate relations with one of her English profs, who she didn’t name. Out of curiosity I looked up her record and found that three people in the department had taught her, Avis this spring, Leopold Kuck last winter, and you back in the fall. Both of them gave her C’s. You gave her a C first, then petitioned to change it to a B. I remember that business very well and was suspicious when you wanted to raise her grade. Her name’s Nadalee Hammerstad.”
Levin felt as though Gilley had broken a lead pipe on his head; but the bleeding was internal.
“The grade she got was the grade she earned,” he muttered.
“You are now shown up for the first-class scum you are.” What else could I expect, Levin thought, given who I am? “Well, take it or leave it,” Gilley said.
“I’ll speak to Pauline.”
“Tell her how goddamn moral you are.”
He descended three flights of stairs in a stupefying daze. Pauline was sitting on the lobby couch, Mary on her lap, Erik by her side, turning the pages of a picture book.
She looked at Levin in fright. “What happened?”
He told her Gilley’s terms and she was furious. “Oh, that’s awful. We’ll see my lawyer. I’ll sue for the children.”
“You may not get them,” Levin said. “Why did you tell him you had left them alone while you were with me?”
“It slipped out as we were arguing. I was afraid to tell you I had told him.”
“Suppose his lawyer asks on the stand if you had slept with Duffy. What would you say?”
“Please lower your voice,” she said, lowering hers.
“Would you deny it?”
“No.”
“And with me?”
“I lie so badly.”
“You’d never get the kids.”
She hugged the baby.
“Under the circumstances are you willing to give them up?”
“No.”
Erik, still looking at the pictures, began to cry.
“Don’t cry, Erik,” Pauline said. “Lev wants me to have you and Mary.”
“Suppose the court doesn’t?”
“I’d die.”
Erik continued to cry and the baby began.
“Then we have no choice,” Levin said.
“I can’t ask you to give up your career for us. The whole thing’s mad. It’s Gerald’s revenge against me. Isn’t there some other way?”
“Not that he offers.”
“What will this get him? When he’s himself again I don’t believe he’ll hold you to it.”
“When he’s himself will he let you have the kids?”
“I’m afraid to take the chance. But I don’t want you to hate me all my life for bringing this on you.”
“I brought it on myself.”
She opened her purse.
“Don’t cry.”
“I have to.”
Levin climbed up the stairs to Gilley’s room.
“I agree to your terms.”
“You’re batty,” said Gilley. “You’re cutting your throat.”
“You’re cutting it. Do you want me to sign anything?”
“I’ll take your word, you’re a fanatical type.”
“Isn’t there some better way?”
“Yes, go away and leave my wife and family alone.”
Levin opened the door.
“Goodbye to your sweet dreams,” Gilley called after him.
“I hope yours are sweet.”
“An older woman than yourself and not dependable, plus two adopted kids, no choice of yours, no job or promise of one, and other assorted headaches. Why take that load on yourself?”
“Because I can, you son of a bitch.”
 
They drove to the house. Levin went unwillingly in, the signs of the husband still around. Pauline fed the kids, then put them down for naps. She made sandwiches and they sat in the kitchen. Levin ate, looking at the stump of the leaning birch tree in the back yard; Pauline said Gerald had chopped it down in the spring.
After coffee she said, “He gets the house and car and I get a cash settlement. All I’ll take are my clothes and the children’s things. I’ll send the crib and Erik’s bed, my two trunks, some books and records, to my uncle’s, and we’ll have three bags for the trip, plus yours.”
“How long will it take to get there?”
“Two days without rushing. Three if we want to look at things along the way. Don’t worry about the driving. I’ll spell you.”
“Let’s make it two days. I want to get there and look around.”
“You’ll have weeks while I’m in Nevada.”
“I want to get started.”
“How do you feel now?”
“The same.”
“Please take my hand. My feeling for you is an ache.”
He took her cold hand across the table.
“It makes me sad that you’re still this way,” she said, “but now that you’re with me I feel you’ll want me again. Maybe not so intensely but so long as it’s love I’ll have no kick.”
He said nothing.
“My maiden name was Josephson,” Pauline said. “Think of me as Pauline Josephson. Joseph was my father’s name and he wanted a son but I was his best-beloved daughter.”
She was looking out of the window. “Imagine, we’ve never been for a walk together.”
Afterwards Levin asked her why she had picked his application out of the pile Gilley had discarded.
“You had attached a photograph,” Pauline said, “although you weren’t asked to.”
“It was an old picture. I wanted them to know what I looked like.”
“You looked as though you needed a friend.”
“Was that the reason?”
“I needed one. Your picture reminded me of a Jewish boy I knew in college who was very kind to me during a trying time in my life.”
“So I was chosen,” Levin said.
 
That night, after packing his few possessions, he caught sight of his doubtful face in the mirror. Am I in my right mind? He sat in a chair, head in his hands. His doubts were the bricks of a windowless prison he was in, where Gilley’s voice endlessly droned the reasons he ought to quit. Every reason was part of the structure. The prison was really himself, flawed edifice of failures, each locking up tight the one before. He had failed at his best plans, who could say he wouldn’t with her? Possibly he already had and would one day take off in the dark as she lay in bed. Unless the true prison was to stick it out chained to her ribs. He would look like a free man but whoever peered into his eyes would see the lines of a brick wall.
He left the house and walked to the river. What if he beat it now, sneaked back, and when the old lady was snoring away with her ears turned off he would lug his suitcase and valise down to the car and drive away? He could head north to Canada, and then east. No one would know where he was or was going. He would leave a note, “Sorry, I don’t think it will work. Too much has happened. I do this for you as well as myself. Sincerely, and with regret, S. Levin.” He would slip that under her door and fade away. All she had to do when she found it was unpack and call Gilley at the hotel. She would cry a little but could say, “He wasn’t worth your little finger. I made a dreadful mistake. The children miss you—please take us back.” And Gilley, the forgiver, would hotfoot it home, holding flowers. They’d go on as before.
Or if she were really sick of him, she could take the train to SF and stay with her uncle. She would feel bad for a while but sooner or later some middle-aged gent would show up who would want to marry her; she was that type. Let somebody else marry her, Levin thought. He had from the first resisted becoming her savior, or victim. She had in a moment of unhappiness after the death of a former flame picked him by chance from a pile of discards. She had marked him x in a distant port and summoned him across the continent. Did this casual selection make him responsible for her for life? Was he forever bound to the choice she had made? That was stretching kismet too far. Who was a man if he surrendered freedom in a prior time?
The town was quiet as he walked, all but deserted since the college students had gone, the houses dark, silent. He met no one. At the river, after watching the moving water, he turned back, avoiding downtown and his reflection in store windows, still roaming, after so many years, the stone streets of the past. The city haunted him tonight. While others were sleeping Levin, in stinking clothes, had sneaked out of the bug-infested room he hid in during the day and wandered along long dark streets, peering into the houses of strangers for drops of light. Many a night he had walked in anguished desire of a decent future; failing that, another bottle. He drove the seasons away after hounding them to appear: winter, sniffing the icy wind for the scent, the breath, of spring; yet a time of flowers drove him wild; amid summer foliage, in ascetic heat, he obsessively hunted dead leaves and found them under every bush; autumn inspired his own long death. This went on for too many years to remember.
He came by a roundabout way to her house and stood under the ornamental plum tree across the street. The house looked already empty, except the lit living room where, through a half-open window, he could see her packing. She wore a shapeless shirt and her toreador pants, and with a cigarette in her mouth, was putting kids’ things into a suitcase. Who is she? Levin thought. What do I really know about her? He thought if after she got back from Nevada he was still not sure how it would work out, he would call it quits. That would finish the promise to Gilley and he would, after a year in graduate school, try again to get into a small liberal arts college and teach there. With luck he might make it.
Pauline was holding a yellow dress against herself to see how it looked. She put it down and with a cloth, rubbed something on the table. When she picked it up and placed it under her chin it was a violin. She tried the bow, then played. Levin listened till he recognized the music.
Overslept, he awoke with a bang and was splashing cold water on his face when the landlady knocked. “Mrs. Gilley called and said to come right over, it’s very important.”
This could go too far. He hurriedly dressed, shaved, and left the house, leaving behind both his bags for protection.
When he drove up, Pauline, watching at the window, opened the door for him.
“What’s wrong?”
She seemed not to want, or be able, to look at him. A massive excitement seized Levin.
Meeting his eyes at last, she murmured, “I’m about two months’ pregnant.”
He remembered then to remove his hat. The blood in his brain gave his head the weight of a rock.
“Mine?” he asked.
She smiled wanly. “Not Leo’s.”
“I mean Gerald—no, I guess I don’t.”
“I suspected something last month,” Pauline said, “but thought no because I had a slight flow at the more-or-less usual time.”
“I didn’t think of the possibility of conception those last times.”
“You want the right feeling for every event?”
“Don’t you?”
“Yes,” she said. “I called you as soon as I knew for sure. I happened to think last night that my period was late. Then I checked the calendar and it was very late. I called the doctor and was examined this morning. There isn’t any doubt I’m pregnant. I didn’t want you to think I had come back to you because of that. I thought I’d tell you before we left in case you want to call it off.”
“What would you do if I did?”
“I frankly don’t know. I could try to abort.”
“No.”
“Are you saying that with your steely will or pity for the human race?”
“I want the child.”
Pauline said, “I’m so relieved. I wasn’t sure how you’d take it.” Then she said, “Touch my breasts, they’re beginning to grow.”
Levin touched them.
“They’ll shrink after the baby is weaned but at least you’ll know how I look with little ones.”
He returned for his bags, passed up eating from the cherry tree and said goodbye to Mrs. Beaty. On the way back he saw Bullock in a new red station wagon. George had expected to be director of comp but Gerald, Pauline had said, was combining that job with his own.
Pauline was ready with both kids but instead of three bags she had four, a duffel bag, and a violin case. Levin, in a sweat, was thinking of a luggage rack for the roof of the car, but then the Buckets came along, Algene heavy-bellied in her ninth month; Joe helped Levin get five bags in the trunk, and two, with the violin case and his umbrella, they put in the back of the car.
“No rack needed yet,” Bucket said. “‘A penny saved is a penny earned.’”
“It’s the earned penny that worries me,” said Levin.
“‘God tempers the wind to a shorn lamb.’”
“Lev’s no lamb,” said Pauline.
“I speak for myself,” Bucket said.
Levin lifted Erik into the back seat. “I’m your father now.”
“I want my real daddy.”
When they were in, five counting Pauline’s baby, Levin started the Hudson and the Buckets waved them off. What if I had bought a seven-passenger car? Levin thought.
Mary sat in the baby seat, in front, the sores on her arms covered with ointment. Pauline’s hair, brushed bright, was drawn into a bun. He thought she would be wearing the yellow dress he saw last night but she wore the sleeveless white linen he had first seen her in. When they drove off she gazed back at the house, then turned away.
Levin drove to the edge of town for a last look at the view to the mountains. The clouds were a clash of horses and volcanoes.
“Beautiful country.”
“If beauty isn’t all that happens.”
They drove through the campus, the trees in full leaf, arched above the narrow streets, shading the green lawns.
“I failed this place,” Levin said.
“You got The Elements kicked out after thirty years.”
“A hell of a revolution.”
“Gerald is also thinking of offering some of the instructors doing graduate work a literature class.”
“I still want to teach,” he said.
“Don’t undersell yourself.”
“It’s what I do best.”
“What else have you tried?”
“Too much.”
They saw Fabrikant, a stogie in his mouth, hurrying to the office.
“He’s growing reddish whiskers,” said Pauline.
“I hear the dean asked him to handle the Great Books program.”
“That was your idea,” Pauline said. She said, “Gerald wouldn’t keep that promise if he had made it to you.”
“That’s the point,” Levin said.
She rested her head on his shoulder. “Trust me, darling. I’ll make you a good wife.”
Her body smelled like fresh-baked bread, the bread of flowers.
“Wear these.” He gave her the gold hoop earrings he had kept for her.
She fastened them on her ears. “God bless you, Lev.”
“Sam, they used to call me home.”
“God bless you, Sam.”
Two tin-hatted workmen with chain saws were in the maple tree in front of Humanities Hall, cutting it down limb by leafy limb, to make room for a heat tunnel. On the Student Union side of the street, Gilley was aiming a camera at the operation. When he saw Levin’s Hudson approach he swung the camera around and snapped. As they drove by he tore a rectangle of paper from the back of the camera and waved it aloft.
“Got your picture!”