I was visiting my father one Sunday afternoon in late spring when, the intermittently shining sun having appeared to come out to stay, he rose from the window chair in which he had been dejectedly slumped and said, “Let’s go for a walk.” I bundled him into a coat, and we were released into the open air by an orderly with a set of keys.
I was pleased to find this turn of mood in my father, who had for months been so steeped in depression that no show of interest in anything could be excited in him, least of all a walk. The sanitarium grounds were pleasant, cool in the shadows but warm enough in the sun to which we kept, and as we coursed among the glimmering shrubbery he began to brighten further, even to the extent of greeting a few of his cronies, likewise promenading in the company of dear ones.
The novelty of the walk having worn off, my father resumed those protestations and complaints which were often all that ever broke his silences. They came on in familiar waves, to which one need not lend more than half an ear. His head ached, there was this “sour feeling” in his legs, his back killed him. He had a chest cold for which nothing did any good; cough medicine made him cough. Racking his memory for names was more than he could bear. My own back was killing me, truth to tell, after two nights in a motel with beds that were nothing to brag about. “I’ve got spots in front of my eyes,” he said.
“I can see them,” I answered, which was not as heartless as it may sound.
As we traversed what remained of a lane leading toward the women’s building, looking for a vacant bench in the sun, I saw, a short distance ahead, a couple whom I recognized. They were Mr. and Mrs. Wigbaldy. I had not seen them since my return from the West, since I neither attended church nor frequented any other circles where our paths might cross. The meeting was rather awkward. As they inquired about my father—receiving no dearth of answers for their pains—I appraised them, wondering who was visiting whom. While both had aged a little, neither visibly bore the scars of disturbance or hospitalization. As we talked, my father spotted an inmate who had recently left his ward and whom he was eager to see, and he darted over to greet him. I took the moment to ask:
“What brings you two here?”
They turned simultaneously and indicated a solitary figure seated on a bench behind them. It was a moment before I recognized Greta, or acknowledged that I did. She had lost considerable weight, and her face wore the expression of utter listlessness that one often encounters in such an environment, not to be confused with more aggressive depression such as my father’s. She had on a kind of housedress, over which was an unbuttoned coat. One hand lay, palm up, in her lap. She squinted into the sun as we made our way over to her.
“Hello, Greta.”
“Hello, Don.” She answered indifferently, not extending her hand or otherwise moving on the bench. I myself therefore sat down on it beside her, as did her mother. Wigbaldy remained standing a few steps off.
“How long have you been here?”
“About a month,” Mrs. Wigbaldy answered tersely for her. She seemed to have collected herself in an assertive readiness to answer any questions I might have, which I found disquieting.
“In for a little rest, are you?”
Greta nodded. “So they say.” She smiled faintly. “How are you?”
“I’m all right. O.K.” There was a pause, during which I gazed rather inanely down at two or three pigeons strutting about on the gravel path. “How long will you be here? Do they give you any idea?”
Here her vague manner changed abruptly. She spoke in a rapid whisper, looking around her as she did. “It depends. If they’d only stop it—the men. I’d run away, but where would I go? It would always be the same, the men looking at you everywhere. Their eyes, you can feel them, crawling over you like bugs.”
She looked off in the direction of the women’s building, in the doorway of which a nurse in a white uniform was beckoning her over for something. The Wigbaldys and I watched her go, till the glass door had closed behind her and the nurse both. Mrs. Wigbaldy now turned back to me. We were both on our feet again.
“Well, now you can see what you’ve done. I hope you’re satisfied.”
Wigbaldy said something indistinct, little more than an apologetic clearing of his throat, as he shuffled a few more feet away on the path. He was openly miserable.
“I had no idea …” I shook my head in pained confusion. “You mean that …”
Mrs. Wigbaldy nodded, her mouth a tight seam.
“She never got over the experience. It dirtied her. It dirtied her foul.” Mrs. Wigbaldy faced me squarely now, wringing every drop from every word. “It dirtied her good, what you started her out on.”
“Why didn’t she write me?”
“She did a few times, but all the good it did her.”
“I didn’t answer regular letters, no—it wouldn’t have been fair to her. But nobody told me about this.”
“It only just come up,” Wigbaldy threw in over his shoulder.
“And she had more pride. Anyhow, now you know what can happen to a girl when she gets mixed up with a—tramp!” Mrs. Wigbaldy turned on her heel and marched into the building.
Wigbaldy shook his head, as though deploring crime and punishment alike. He seemed to be prodding something in the grass with the toe of his shoe. “Don’t judge yourself too hard, boy. We all know it takes two.” In his awkwardness he seemed to me a symbol of eternally cheated mankind, of all betrayed decency. This estimate was slightly more than the facts warranted, since it turned out I was being railroaded and he knew it. All the same, he may have felt, without too much casuistry in his heart, that I had that coming to me. We often deserve our injustices; after all, we get away with murder.
Feeling that facts rather than hysterical charges were what I needed, I went in to see the psychiatrist in charge of Greta as soon as I had returned my father to his ward. This doctor shrugged a great deal, not as a man declaring ignorance of the answers or shirking the questions, but as if pleading the eternally constant, eternally elusive human element that makes everything unique and unpredictable. He accompanied each shrug with a gesture of spreading his hands above his shoulders, as though with each question I were “holding him up” for answers he had not truly in his possession.
“She’s been in a sort of funk as a result of a mess with a man. She felt, oh, not defiled by the experience. Well, yes, defiled. We’re often too quick to use the medical word ‘ego.’ Why not say her pride was shattered? Her woman’s self-respect.”
“Can it be restored?”
Now he really did “put ’em up” and, in keeping with the rules of his profession, declined advising directly. “All I will say is that I don’t think it’s too deep-seated, or necessarily permanent. Just a bad emotional tailspin that given the right circumstances she could pull out of. Or that someone could help pull her out of. Obviously a good relationship would be better than any medicine of ours.” The nature of my questions emboldened him to ask one of his own. “Were you involved with her?”
“Could it be family standards that came down on her like a ton of bricks, rather than the so-called sin itself?” I asked, declining to answer.
“Could Mama be at the bottom of the trouble? Coaching her into shame?”
This was so completely a stick-up that he flung his arms wide with a laugh. “That’s a large order, especially since Greta’s only been here a few weeks and I haven’t even met the mother.”
“Don’t break your neck.”
I may very well have spared the doctor the pleasure. I saw Greta on each of the four successive week ends I ran up there to visit my father. I received, I sensed, some unobtrusive co-operation from Wigbaldy, who saw to it that our talks on the green grass were not hampered by the presence of Mama. Each time Greta seemed a little better, a little rosier of cheek, brighter in spirit. She became her old self—a description not to be left unqualified by the reminder that she had always had a pensive and even somber side. Indeed, it had been her kind of brooding voluptuousness that had first attracted me to her. At last I asked her to marry me.
She pulled a dandelion from the lawn on which we were sitting and flung it away. “Don’t feel you have to.”
“No such thing. I ought to settle down too. And we did have some pretty good times together.”
“We strike fire where that’s concerned. Well, all right, let’s. Sure, Don.”
She blossomed under the agreement, as, truth to tell, did I, after what seemed now a feckless and fruitless period of my life. My relief at the decision was more than the moral elation of one from whose skies the clouds of guilt have blown. Greta, her buxom bloom recovered, left the sanitarium one Sunday afternoon and drove back to Chicago with me.
My mother died just around that time, and feelings of sympathy toward me drew Greta farther out of her shell. Attending the funeral, in fact, was her first re-emergence in our community. All the emotions in which we had so far been clogged and choked suddenly broke free, like a fire that stops smoking and catches ablaze. We set a date, showers were sprung on her by fluttering girl friends, and invitations issued.
It was in the midst of this whirl of preparation that I received a mysterious and anonymous note in the mail. It was written in ink on a scrap of paper evidently torn from a sheet of foolscap, and read: “Do you know about her past?”
After my first burst of anger had cooled somewhat, I experienced a moment of wry amusement. Who but I, after all, had contributed to that past? Thus my informant, whoever he was, had unwittingly addressed his warning to the culprit rather than the victim. But then his (or her) not knowing the actual truth began itself to eat at me, as did my not knowing the identity of the writer. This uncertainty harrowed me for days. What troubled me too was a nagging familiarity about the handwriting. Whose was it? Where had I seen it before? I longed to show the note to Greta, but of course chivalry barred that resort. Then one evening the mystery was added to. After a week of stewing, during which Greta had struck me as behaving rather nervously herself, she asked me point-blank whether I had received an anonymous communication in the mail. Feeling that this released me from knightly obligations, I showed her the note.
“I wrote it,” she said.
“What kind of game is this?”
“It’s not a game. There’s something I’ve got to tell you.”
“Please do.”
She poured us stiff highballs, a unique measure in those parts and feasible only because her parents were out and unable to protest such use of the family medicinal bottle. We both paced the room, our glasses tinkling merrily throughout the following far from festive passage.
“After you went away, I had an affair with a man,” Greta related. “Nobody you know. He wasn’t Dutch Reformed. It was the boss in the office where I had a job for a short while. I got pregnant and had to go away and—” Here her voice broke as she lowered her head in tears. I waited for her to pull herself together and continue.
“Where I went—I can’t say ‘we’ because he behaved like a perfect cad—I won’t say. Some place out of the state. I left the child in the home there and—that’s all there’s to it, really. He was married. Not that he couldn’t have helped out with a little money. Men can be rats, all right, just as women can be fools. I don’t know which is worse.”
“Does anybody know about this?” I asked in a voice that seemed to be strained through some kind of dense but immaterial batting temporarily stopping my mouth.
“In Chicago? Not a soul.”
“How about the writer of the note?”
“You still don’t believe I wrote it. Just a sec.”
She went to her bedroom, where through the chattering of my ice cubes I heard a drawer being slid open. She returned holding in her hand the remainder of the sheet of paper from which the note had been torn. She set the two fragments side by side on a table and matched them into a whole, like parts of a treasure map of which individual pirates hold only a portion, requiring validation by the group as a unit.
“Why didn’t you tell me without going through all this rigmarole?”
“I couldn’t. I tried over and over to get up the courage, but the words just wouldn’t out. You know that feeling. I had to have them dragged out of me. I wished some busybody would tell you about it, so they would be. Like if you’d get an anonymous note or something. So I wrote such a note, and now the thing has been dragged out of me. It may sound crazy to you, but it’s off my conscience.”
“Conscience! You seem to have one that’s easily satisfied.”
“Please don’t. You’re free to go now. I won’t hold you to anything.”
“After the invitations are out! A fine thing that would be, wouldn’t it? What a rat that would make me out. You waited till I was nicely hemmed in by—”
“Oh, please!” Her voice broke again. “Can’t you imagine what I’ve been through? If they seem tricks I played, let them prove how desperate I’ve been to keep you. I begin to see only now how much I’ve wanted you. The engagement needn’t bother you. I’ll say I broke it. That’s what’s done in these cases. If you think you’d be getting damaged goods—”
“Oh, that’s not the point, and you know it. We don’t hold one another to virginity any more—and wouldn’t I be a great one to. The fact that you got into a mess doesn’t make any difference.”
“You mean you don’t mind?”
“Oh, Greta, of course I mind. In the same way you do. The affair itself was just an affair. It could happen to—”
Here my train of thought broke off, interrupted by a burst of illumination about another aspect of all this. The revelation must have shone in my face, for Greta looked at me and said, “What’s the matter?”
“Then it wasn’t I who caused your nervous breakdown. It was him.”
“Yes.”
“Pretty lousy of your parents to make me think I was the villain.”
“That’s why I had to tell you.”
“It doesn’t absolve them. What’s their excuse for doing me this dirt?”
“Old-fashioned morality.”
“Come again, please?”
“They figure you were ultimately responsible. You set me on the primrose path.”
“A likely name for it!” I dropped into a chair, feeling as though I were being physically stoned. “Does their position make any sense? I mean I’d rather it did. I mean one would rather think he was a stinker than be getting them for in-laws. So explain it to me a little more. Justify it.”
“It’s perfectly simple if you look at it in their light. You were my first. You seduced me, or whatever word you want to use. All the rest followed from that. Therefore, the child that resulted from an affair I might not have had if it hadn’t been for you might as well be yours. It is yours morally,” she concluded, taking on rather the tone her mother herself might have in this summation, were she capable of decent English.
“Can you get it back?”
“No. It’s too late for that. Oh, Don, don’t let’s torture ourselves with that. I for one have certainly been through enough.” She bent her head again, moaning the last words, and twisting her fingers about in her lap. She had set her drink down and was seated beside me on the sofa. “You’re sure you …”
“After all we’ve been through? The world is too many for me, baby. God knows I can’t make head or tail of it alone. I doubt whether two people can either, but I guess there’s no harm in their trying.”
We sat a moment in the deepening dusk. There were no lamps lit. As I brooded on all that had happened, and was happening, still another aspect of the whole situation struck me as deserving an airing now while everything was terrible anyway. Greta was quite herself again on the surface, but who could guess what might not lie beneath, what rocks and tangled growth composed the bottom of this calm sea. I therefore thought the point worth bringing up.
“Do you think people should marry if there is any—well, nervous history?” I asked.
She slipped an arm around me and drew my head toward her.
“Silly boy,” she said. “It’s not your father I’m marrying. It’s you.”
I sold the disposal route for five thousand dollars to a church elder who owned a chain of them, and with the money finished my college education, of which only a year remained. I did not return to the University of Chicago but enrolled in a downtown school with a lower tuition and a good business-administration department. Wigbaldy had advised me in the sale and offered to help me in any tiding over I might later need in my transition to a better career—which was decent of him, though hardly more than the family owed me in the circumstances.
There was a slight skirmish over religious matters, which I thought it best to have out in a preliminary way at least. For one thing, I proposed a civil ceremony. I was clamorously reminded that you can’t have such a thing at a wedding. I yielded this point, sensing that Greta was only trying to spare her parents’ feelings, not hewing to views of her own which might clash with mine. But I made an issue of the precise wording of the vows. I wanted liberalized ones, with no outmoded Pauline nonsense exacting from the bride the promise to “obey” the groom. Here I put my foot down, rather in the manner of a husband determined to show at the outset who was boss. “I’ll have no obedience around here!” I said, banging the table. “Is that clear?”
“Is it an order?”
“Yes.”
“But you can’t ask Reverend Van Scoyen to use any but the official church form.”
“I suppose you’re right.”
The danger of our being given a model home was narrowly averted, Wigbaldy having just sold the last “unit” in his latest development, preliminary to doing a little traveling with the profits. In fact, he and Mrs. Wigbaldy were sailing for Holland two days after the wedding—“a second honeymoon for the missus and me.” Our honeymoon consisted of a week end at the Windermere, that Hyde Park hostelry whose name, you may recall, had always so potently conjured the Worldly life I had from boyhood promised myself, and which in young manhood I had sighted more closely as, dallying on the rocks at Lake Michigan, I had gazed northward at the lights along the shore.
We made the most of our few days there, dining the first evening on roast pheasant and champagne at a table laid in a window of our room affording a long, sweeping view to the south. Greta insisted on having a second bottle sent up after we had polished off the first, and nursing that, we talked about where we might like to look for an apartment. We were to stay in the Wigbaldys’ bungalow for the three months of their absence, during which period we would have to conduct our hunt. Rentals were scarce.
Carrying her glass, Greta came around and knelt beside my chair. She nibbled the lobe of my ear. “We’ll live at the foot of Gingerbread Lane, in a house nailed together with cloves.”
This gave me rather a turn. My legs stiffened as with an old disquiet, a kind of horror almost, under the table. Then I laughed as I realized to my relief that she was drinking far more than was good for her.