MARGY STARED HUNGRILY out of the trolley window. Familiar scenes had a clear unfamiliar look like scenes in a foreign country, read about, but seen for the first time. Details stood out sharper, colors seemed more vivid and the street sounds had fresh meaning.
She was disappointed when she didn’t have that same fresh sense of sharp discovery when she walked into her home. It was like something she had left behind a long time ago. It seemed small and shabby and dusty. The seam in the tapestry that she had hardly noticed before now stood out like an ineptly healed scar. There were pockets of dust within the petals of the artificial red roses in the black bowl. The few slender shabby books made the heavy bookends seem silly. And there was too much blue everywhere. She found she didn’t like blue any more.
She went to the hope chest where she had stored the little dresses and slips she had made for the baby. Might as well get that first stab over with, she thought. To her relief, the tiny garments were gone. She surmised that her mother had taken them away.
She took down the blue tapestry, shook the dust out of it and put it and the bookends in the hope chest. She threw the artificial roses in the trash bag.
The icebox smelled musty. The few odds and ends of food she had left there were moldy. She threw everything into the garbage can except the bottle of ketchup and two eggs which she hoped might still be good. She opened the windows and the icy wind that came in and filled the folds of the curtains and made them stand out like pennants felt good to her. She swept, dusted and washed until her little home was fresh and clean again.
In cleaning the bathroom she saw a pile of Frankie’s soiled linen lying in the tub. Suddenly she felt very tired. She wanted to lie down but the bed was up in the wall. She felt it might be too heavy to lift down so soon after coming from the hospital. She felt cold. She found she was trembling. She closed the windows and got a blanket from the closet. I did too much, she thought, the first day home. She opened the oven of the gas range and lit it. She sat before the warming oven wrapped in the blanket.
As the warmth entered her body, she relaxed and felt again the pains of emptiness—the ones the doctor called afterbirth pains. She wanted to cry but she had the same feeling she had had when her mother kept slapping her the time she was lost; that she mustn’t give in and cry. Her eyes grew hot and her face settled into ugly sullen lines as she fought down the desire to cry her eyes out.
She looked into the warm black cavern of the oven and thought: Many women sat this way before a gas oven after they had turned it on and not lighted it. I wonder what their thoughts were.
She leaned forward and saw the gas flame flickering through the round holes of the bottom of the stove. As she looked, the flame sucked inward and disappeared. She jumped up in a panic and turned off the gas. She looked fearfully around the little kitchen as if she feared some malignant presence was there fixing things so she’d die.
And she didn’t want to die! No, not ever. She wanted to live—to keep on living, no matter what happened.
She noticed that she hadn’t closed the kitchen window all the way. She felt relieved knowing that the wind coming in had sucked out the gas flame—that no invisible evil being was responsible.
After a while she put fresh makeup on, brushed her hair and went out to the stores. She remembered there had been mail in their box when she came home. But she hadn’t had the key. She took it from its place under the alarm clock.
There was a letter from the furniture company, the gas company and the insurance company. Of course, Frankie hadn’t been home to pay the collectors when they called. She stuffed them unopened into her purse. There was a letter from Reenie and one with the Thomson-Jonson letterhead.
She read the letters as she walked along. Reenie wrote that she just didn’t know what to say. She was so sorry and she hadn’t come to the hospital because it would have made her feel too bad. But she’d come to see Margy as soon as she could at home. There was enclosed a card with Father Bellini’s name engraved on it. The card had a message. It said: “Do not lose your faith, my child.” Clipped to the card was a smaller card with a Sacred Heart medal attached to it.
The other letter was from Mr. Prentiss. He had heard of her loss, he wrote. No words that he could say . . . but he knew she’d take hold somehow. . . . He had so much confidence in her strength. Into each life some rain must fall, he wrote. However, each cloud had a silver lining.
The words of a popular song came to Margy’s mind. “Look for the silver lining. . . .”
Sunny. Marilyn Miller’s show. I was going to buy my girl ballet slippers, she thought. I was going to call her Marilyn.
She walked down three steps to a basement store. As usual, the door on which was chalked TONY. ICE. was locked. Summer and winter it was always closed and locked. Yet she had expected it to be open this time. Why, she didn’t know, except the world seemed to have changed so much she thought this, too, must be changed. There was a grubby pad on a hook and a stub of a pencil on a string. She wrote instructions for resumption of ice delivery. Ice wasn’t needed in winter if people had a box attached outside the window. But the landlord didn’t like boxes on the sills. Just the same, resolved Margy, I’m going to put up a box. I can save sixty cents a week that way. And if the landlord doesn’t like it, he can get another tenant. I’m tired of always considering other people and being afraid to do this or that.
The bakery man seemed pleased to see her again. He knew she had given birth to a baby and that it had died. Frankie had told all the tradespeople when they inquired. The bakery man said nothing. But after he had wrapped her coffee ring, he slipped a sugar cookie under the string, the way he did sometimes when shy little children came in to make purchases.
The delicatessen woman was less tactful. “I hear you lost your little one,” she said.
“Yes,” said Margy.
“It’s tough. Sure is tough.”
“Yes,” said Margy.
“How did it happen?”
But Margy didn’t want to talk about it. “I’m in a little hurry,” she said. “I’ll take a stick of butter and a pint of milk.”
“I can see you didn’t change any,” said the woman, huffed because Margy had changed the subject so abruptly. “You forgot your empty again.”
“If my head wasn’t tied on . . .” Margy began her familiar apology.
“I got to charge you a deposit.”
“That’s all right. I’ll bring in two bottles tomorrow.”
“Make sure they’re from this store.”
“Listen,” said Margy. “We all have our faults. One of mine is that I forget to bring back bottles. That doesn’t mean I’m a crook and would put over a different bottle on you—not that you’d let me—for the sake of two cents.”
“No? Well, you wouldn’t be the first that tried to put a ringer over on me.”
“I’ve been dealing in this store a year now and I’ve never done that. Furthermore, this isn’t the only store in the neighborhood. You can keep your butter and your milk.”
“Don’t be like that just because I want my own bottles back.”
“I’ll be any way I please.”
She walked out of the store trembling. It was the first time she could remember quarreling with anyone over a little thing. She bought butter and milk at another store.
She had the potatoes peeled for supper before she remembered that Frankie didn’t know she was home and that he’d go to his mother’s for supper.
HE GOT HOME at nine. After a lingering supper at his mother’s home he had gone out to the hospital. He had had a pinch of fear when he saw another woman in Margy’s bed. The nurse had explained. It had been Frankie’s turn to bring ice cream that night. He brought it home because he had been too surprised to leave it at the hospital. There was a lot of it. It was runny on the outside but still firm in the middle. They ate it.
Afterward they sat at the kitchen table and went over the little pile of accumulated bills. There was a gas bill, an electric bill, a polite but subtly threatening note from the furniture company saying they’d like to believe that the Malones had overlooked two weekly installments on their furniture bill by accident and trusting that it wouldn’t happen again. A printed slip from the insurance collector stated correctly enough that he had found no one home when he came for the weekly premium and trusting that someone would be home the next time as it was a serious thing to let a policy lapse, he was very truly yours.
Frankie produced the undertaker’s bill last. She read: Item: To Burial, Malone Infant. There was the imprint of an oblong rubber stamp that said Paid with the date written in in ink and someone’s initials. He put two pawn tickets on top of the paid bill.
“It took everything I could scrape together to pay that one bill,” he said. “It made me feel bad to have to pawn your wristwatch and the silverware but there was no other way out.”
She shoved the bills, notes and pawn tickets away from her and stood up.
“Going to bed?” he asked.
“I’d like to write to my old boss, first.”
“But why?”
“Maybe I can get my old job back.”
Very carefully he arranged the papers in a neat pile and put them in the kitchen-table drawer. Without comment he walked into the living room, got the bed down and brought out the bedding from the closet. She followed him into the living room.
“It would help out,” she said. “We’d get out of debt. We have to get out of it or we’ll be sunk the rest of our lives.”
He said nothing. He went into the bathroom, leaving the door open. He turned on the water. When she went to him, he was washing his hands. He turned one hand over the other in rhythmic, anguished movements—the way she used to do when her father and mother quarreled. She knew how he felt. She put her arms around his waist from the back and looked at him through the mirror of the medicine chest.
“Why do you object so, Frankie? Other men’s wives work. Times’ve changed. No one looks down on a man any more because his wife works—especially if they have no children.”
He shrugged her lightly holding arms away as he turned off the water with one forceful twist of his wrist. He reached for a towel and dried his hands thoroughly before he answered.
“What are you trying to do,” he cried, “put a finish to our marriage?” He threw the towel at the bar. It missed and fell to the floor. He walked out of the room.
She thought: My going to work won’t finish it. It started to end the first time you pulled away from me when I put my arms around you.
It took her a long time to pick up the towel and an even longer time to smooth it out and hang it up. When she went out into the living room, she saw him standing at the window, expectant, as though he were waiting for her.
“Margy, what are you trying to do to me?”
Suddenly she became alert—wary. So many unformed thoughts—nebulous questions in her mind. And now the answer was coming.
“I always wanted to support my wife like a normal man. And I could have done it, too, if it hadn’t been for the baby. Now don’t get me wrong. If that child had lived, I would have wanted to support it the way I want to support you. I would have done the very best I could for it.”
But you wouldn’t have been able to love it, she thought, no more than you are able to love me.
“But I was right in the first place. People like us just can’t afford to have children. If I had a better job, more pay, it would be different. You can’t see it my way, I know. But I’m right. And a lot of other people would say so, too.”
Yes, he was right, thought Margy. There was a class of comfortably fixed, educated, altruistic people who made a profession or a hobby out of uplifting the masses. They would claim that Frankie was right—that there should be no children unless economic conditions were favorable.
But she was right, too, in wanting children. Her want went beyond the logic of economics; it was rooted in nature—the survival of man. She knew women who said: “Of course I want a child. But not until we can afford to give it everything.” She considered that these women were cowards—using a modern economic cliché to hide their cowardice.
She didn’t argue the point with him as to who was right; who was wrong. Bad quarrels come when two people are wrong. Worse quarrels come when two people are right. Anyhow, it was over now, and there was no use arguing.
“You said something,” she said. “What did you mean? When you asked me what was I trying to do to you?”
“Skip it.”
“No, Frankie. It’s time you told me. It wasn’t fair that you didn’t tell me from the beginning. I knew there was something wrong with our marriage but I didn’t know what.”
She sat next to him on the bed and waited. After a while, not looking at her, he began to talk.
“People are born a little a certain way,” he began. “Then as they grow up things seem to happen that make them more that way.” He thought over what he had said and wasn’t satisfied with the way it had come out. He tried a different approach.
“My father was always rough and ready. My mother got to be that way, too, in competition with him. But underneath she was different. I was the first child. She kept me pretty close to her. She was always talking to me, trying to make me different from my father. He got on to it and did the opposite. He tried to toughen me; made me go out and fight with the boys; went out of his way to talk dirty in front of me. I didn’t want to be the way she was making me—a sissy. And I didn’t want to be his way—loud mouthed, dirty jokes all the time. So . . .
“But don’t get me wrong,” he burst out. “I don’t want to go around sleeping with fellers. I . . . I don’t want to sleep with anybody. That’s about the way it is,” he said.
“I like girls—always did. But after I’d take a girl to a dance and we’d stand in the vestibule and she’d want to . . . it used to disgust me. But I felt different about you. You seemed sensible—your feet on the ground—no baby talk; no lovey-dovey stuff.”
“I’m sorry,” she murmured, “that I fooled you. I didn’t mean to.”
“The whole thing’s not your fault,” he said. “Not mine. It’s just one of those things. But I did want to marry, have a home of my own and support my wife in it. Just to prove that I was like any other man.”
Why didn’t he want a child, then, to prove it? thought Margy. Ah, well, she concluded, when someone is mixed up about certain things, it’s hard to figure out what makes him want one thing and not another.
“But in the long run, I shouldn’t’ve got married,” he concluded. “I had no right . . .”
“Of course you had . . . have a right,” she said. “Only it should have been a different type of girl. Someone who fitted in with you better—who didn’t brood or expect a husband to be a sweetheart all the time. Yes, someone like Sandy, the girl in your office, who calls you feller. Only someone not all the way like Sandy.”
“I guess I don’t look so good to you any more.”
“Don’t belittle yourself, Frankie. No. Please don’t. You’re so decent and hardworking and honest. You always try to do the right thing. You turned out fine, considering what your mother and father did to you.”
“Margy!” he called out. There was pleading in his voice and a little fright, too.
For once her woman’s instinct failed her. Her first impulse was to take him into her arms and say, There, dear. But she hesitated because he had repulsed her too many times. Yet maybe this was the time to take hold again; to put her arms around him. Maybe he needed her now—wouldn’t push her away.
But she wasn’t sure any more. She did nothing.
“Margy,” he said, “don’t write that letter to your old boss.”
She waited a long time before she answered. Then she said, “We’re both very tired.”
He waited a long time before he replied. He said, “It’s been a day.”
She turned out the light.
SHE LAY BESIDE Frankie in the dark. And she felt lost and unhappy. She missed the child she had carried within her during the summer, fall and early winter. With sudden aching desperation, she put her arms around Frankie and held him tightly. She waited, holding her breath. If he relaxed in her arms, she knew she’d weep scalding, cleansing tears. They would be one together in common trouble and common understanding. She would try to fall in love with him.
But almost frantically, he struggled out of her arms, saying in something like horror: “Margy! It’s less than ten days since . . . you can’t be thinking of . . .”
She let her breath out in a shuddering sigh.
The end!
“No, dear,” she said gently. “That will be the last thing in my mind for a long time. It’s just that I feel so alone and I want to be close to somebody and I thought maybe you felt alone, too, and I thought it wouldn’t hurt if we held each other a while. Nothing more than that.”
He took her in his arms, then, and they lay talking in the dark. They talked about little inconsequential things; the gossip of the neighborhood; news of Cathleen and Marty, her husband; about how Mr. Malone was talking of giving up trying to learn the undertaking business and how Mrs. Malone was screaming about all the money wasted on lessons.
“And that reminds me,” he said. “I’m in a sort of a fix. I didn’t think you’d be home for two more days and . . . well . . . my mother expects me for supper tomorrow night.”
She thought: Let him have his mother. Let her have him. It will be good for him to have someone when I let go. She said: “That’s all right, Frankie. I’ll go over and eat with Mama and Papa. Your mother will be happy and my folks will be happy. It works out fine.”
“You won’t have to bother cooking,” he said.
“That’s right,” she agreed.
That’s the way it’s going to happen, both thought in their different ways. First there’ll be the eating apart for a while. Then we’ll decide it’s foolish to pay rent on the apartment when we’re never there. We’ll live apart pretending it’s just for a little while. We’ll see each other every night for a few hours. Then things will come up—excuses—a night when it’s raining too hard or one of us is too tired. Meetings will be skipped. We’ll go back to having dates once in a while. And in time the whole thing will be over and we’ll pretend that we don’t know how it ever happened. And people will say: “But they always seemed to get along so well!”
His thoughts left hers and went off on a personal tangent. Maybe I should go west, he thought, and start my life over. But what do I know about the west? Nothing, except I always read in books and in history that a person always went west for a fresh start or to find a fortune. I might get out there and find it’s no better than here and I might have trouble getting the kind of work I’m used to. No, I’ll have to stick it out here. I’ll work harder and try to save more. Only I don’t want to live with my mother any more. I’ll stay there a while to please her and then I’ll get a room nearer my work. Save time—maybe carfare that way.
Thus he made plans to reconstruct his life.
People say, thought Margy, that a sharp clean break is the sensible and kind thing. I don’t believe that. Marriage is too important to be ended by a sudden announcement. He’ll stay at his folks and I’ll stay at mine. As time goes on, we’ll see each other less often—have even less to say to each other than we have now. And there’ll come a time when the marriage isn’t there any longer.
She thought of Mr. Prentiss. I mustn’t make a mistake the next time, she thought. Maybe he lived with his mother too long. Maybe . . . still, he likes children; he’d be a good father. I always think of him. She sighed deeply and decided she’d cross the bridge that was Mr. Prentiss when she came to it.
Frankie heard her sigh and his arms tightened about her. She felt him draw closer to her. Her desire to love him was gone. It would never come back. But the need to comfort him was still there.
“Go to sleep, dear,” she whispered, “and forget everything. Don’t worry and never be afraid. Let me hold you the way I’d hold my child. And you can make believe you’re a little boy again, safe with your mother. Just for tonight.”
He was the first to fall asleep.
THE DREAM STARTED before she was fully asleep. She moaned, trying to cut off sleep and avoid the sad dreaming. But she was so tired—so tired. Her day had started in the hospital and ended at home. She had done so much—thought so much. The dream formed relentlessly and went forward inexorably.
She felt the hot summer wind on her legs and looked down at her new brown sandals. Again she was a child lost on the streets of Brooklyn. Then she came to the gates and as she reached out her hands to touch them, a change came and she was no longer a child. She was a woman. She pushed the gates open and walked through. The way ahead was known to her. She would never be lost again.
SHE AWOKE SUDDENLY as if a spring had been released inside her. Frankie was lying on the edge of his side of the bed and she on the edge of hers. There was almost a whole bed space separating them. She listened to his even breathing for a moment. He was sound asleep.
She got out of bed quietly and felt her way into the kitchen. She switched on the light after she had closed the door. She felt the radiator. Some heat was still coming up. She got her box of stationery and a bottle of ink and a pen from the cupboard. She started to write a letter.
Dear . . . she began. But the D was too thick and there was a scratch on the paper where the e should be. She held the pen under the hot-water faucet and watched the crusted ink wash off and briefly discolor the porcelain of the sink before it ran down the drain.
The pen point looked shiny and new. She took a new piece of paper and dipped the pen in the ink bottle.
Dear Mr. Prentiss, she wrote. I am writing you this letter . . .