SUDDENLY IT WAS WARM and in Central Park the first green tinged the winter-brown earth. Spring had not officially arrived, but each day offered another indicator that the equinox was coming, the season filling. Dori began to go out earlier in the morning, no longer needing to wait for the sun to cancel rawness and cold; she stopped at bushes to stare at their thickening buds and wonder when the first burst of color would come. Her daily walk became a sought pleasure now, and though she pulled herself at intervals out of her lazy watching and renewed the ordained briskness of her step, she saw proof each day that she had always libeled the city by saying that the change of seasons was imperceptible in it.
All at once the yellow feathering of forsythia sprayed the bushes she had been pausing before, and a day or two later on the last Sunday of March, a small tree was pinkly white with blossom. Was it dogwood? She had always been too much a city dweller to be sure, and she wanted to stop a mounted policeman and ask, but as she approached him she could imagine the words “Officer, is that dogwood?” and was embarrassed and passed him by. Other trees were budding, and with a start she noticed that every one gauzy with green was a young tree, still slim in its trunk, still slender in the spread of its branches. The old trees remained dead with winter, the great oaks and elms and maples, all caught tight with their years, slower to move and change, stolidly patient amidst the burst and thrust of life around them.
At home she telephoned her brother at the university. “Gene, don’t laugh at me, but could you ask Miss Pulley to get the name of the best book on trees and plants and flowers from the Botany Department? A beginner’s book, what things are named and when they bloom, that kind of thing. I’ve gone all-over interested and could order a copy.”
“My God, Dori, I thought it was pickles or something you were supposed to crave.”
“That comes later. Please do, Gene, and let me find out when a dogwood really blossoms. Maybe it’s magnolia.”
“If Pulley can swipe a copy up here I’ll drop it off on the way home. Have courage, hang on.”
She took his teasing cheerfully and felt an elation of interest. Who knew where hobbies had their genesis? Maybe this would become one of the lifelong kind that would never leave her. She was reading everything else these days, she might as well read about trees and shrubs.
She picked up the Times which she had only glanced at during breakfast, and prepared another cup of coffee to read it by. This had become a small ritual for the morning return from her walk; she recognized that it was quickly forming into a pattern, perhaps an unvarying pattern, and could only feel indulgent toward it. Surely you had the right to help things along with little rituals?
And then she stopped reading. She held the paper as if it were a bar of metal to cling to in a moment of weakness. She did not move. She forgot to breathe. It was true—she had not imagined it.
The smallest thump. Not a kick, it was nothing as firm and sure as a kick despite everything anybody had ever said or written. From within her, against the wall of her being, there was a small thump. The first one.
She waited unmoving. The newspaper slipped to her lap, the coffee was forgotten, she was electric with the waiting and then there it was once more. She suddenly realized that she was grinning like a maniac.
This was where the happy young wife was supposed to take the happy young husband’s hand and put it over her swelling body so that he too might feel the kick. But she wasn’t young and she wasn’t a wife and she hadn’t a husband. It must be marvelous, to share it. But it was also marvelous all in itself.
She sat on, immobile, inviting it, pleading with it to happen again. It did not, and she thought, Stubborn, hey? and a swell of feeling loosed itself in her.
It wasn’t a kick. It was more like, like—she tried to reproduce the sensation. With the knuckle of her index finger she tapped the muscle of her left arm; that was something like, but not exact. With the flat part of her thumb, she gently poked at her hard rounding and still small stomach, as if she were prodding a melon. That too was something like, but still not right. With the edge of her hand she lightly struck her kneecap, a doctor testing reflexes, and dismissed the result: too bony. It had been a tap, firm but not bony, a thwack, a tapped signal, a magic telemetry across the incalculable space between nonbeing and being.
She had an impulse to call Dr. Jesskin and tell him, but she held back. He had told her it would be happening soon, “the end of the fourth month, the beginning of the fifth, these are individual matters also.” She had been expecting it and yet it was totally unexpected in its arrival. It would happen again, but whether in minutes or in hours, there was no one to say. She would report to Jesskin after it had gone on for another day or two.
Once more she tried to remember just how it had felt. Without knowing it, she again sent her fingers tapping at her flesh and bone, seeking, testing, trying for approximation. And then, her lips accidentally apart, she tapped her right cheek with the middle finger of her right hand, and thought, That’s it. She tried it again, this time opening her mouth wide and stiffening her cheeks so that the cavity within made a small hollow shell. She tapped again with a stiffened finger and at once thought with delight, If it came from the inside that would really be it. Life.
The movie would end in three or four minutes and as always she rose and made her way to the exit before the house lights came on, seeing the final scene standing, poised for instant departure. Under the brightness of the marquee, she paused, swiftly looking about her, seeing the faces of passing strangers with the familiar sense of satisfaction. All as it should be. It always was.
The sky was clouded and once she moved away from the lights of Broadway, the night was murky, warmer than early April evenings usually were. As she turned into her own street, the din of radio and TV voices seemed more insistent than usual, but she had already trained herself not to listen to them. Cars lined the curbs, their consecutive bumpers faintly shining, inches apart, but the usual beehive look of early evening was missing, the street empty of children as if some Pied Piper had passed through only a moment before and seduced them all away. Far ahead, at her own corner, a car deliberately double-parked, and she wondered at the gall of the driver until she remembered the doctor’s shingle in the window.
“The assassin’s bullet—”
One of the radio voices suddenly cut free from the surrounding din and pierced her wall of non-listening. The air was always vicious with shows of crime or terror or bang-bang-you’re-dead, but there was a horror in the voice speaking these words, a shaken excitement that proclaimed that this was truth, not playacting, and an answering horror and excitement rose in her through the jerking next words until she heard “Martin Luther King was shot.”
Oh God no. She heard her own cry, wrenched from her, torn out of her throat, and suddenly the circumambient din of voices that had been overlapping in the evening air turned into an unbearable repetition: Martin Luther King, Martin Luther King, Martin Luther King was shot and killed, Martin Luther King, Martin Luther King—
She began to run in a dark invisible need to get behind walls, to close out the voices. Running reminded her that she must not run, and she changed to a rushing, gasping walking. She was filled with fear, with pain, with hatred for the killer, for all killers, for all haters except the haters of haters; they were different, they were the good, the decent, the reasonable and loving, the ones who were flooded with fury at hate and death and killing.
She unlocked her door and bolted it instantly behind her and saw the night gleam on the shiny linoleum but before she clicked the switch of the lamp, she crossed to the low wood platform and clicked on the television instead. In the seconds that had to elapse before sound and image could appear she sank into the armchair as if she had been wounded, and when the first words came they were spurts of words clustered around the same shaken excitement she had heard on the street. “The assassin’s bullet” … “ambulance rushed to the hospital” … “possible conspiracy.” She was hurled back to that November day not five years before when other shaken voices were telling of bullets and blood splashing and assassination and conspiracy, and the two became one and she could scarcely see the small lighted screen through the scald of her sudden tears.
After a time she remembered that the room was still dark except for that one oblong at her knees and she rose to turn on the lights. The telephone rang. It was Gene.
“Do you know?”
“Oh Gene, I can’t bear it.”
“I’ll come over. I tried to call you before.”
“I was at a movie. Oh please come, Gene, it’s so horrible.”
She heard her voice waver, the “horrible” broken in half by the suck of her breath, and she thought, It’s the first time, and did not ask what first time she meant. Relief poured through her belatedly; this was no thing to bear alone and Gene had known it and was coming to sit it out with her, a loving wisdom making him do it. The telephone rang again. It was Cele.
“Are you all right, Dorr?”
“Yes, are you?”
“It’s brought back the whole thing about Kennedy.”
“For me too.”
“Where were you, how’d you hear it?”
“Coming home from the movies, I heard it on somebody’s radio and didn’t take it in until his name.”
“We were just leaving the house and Minnie began to scream, ‘They shot him, they shot Martin Luther,’ and we both rushed into the kitchen to her radio and the kids heard it on theirs and I’ve been trying to calm them all and wondered about you.”
“Gene is coming over.”
“Then I’ll come tomorrow night. God, do you remember at school, everybody telling just where they were when they heard about Roosevelt?”
“But that wasn’t assassination. He was old and sick and he died, but Kennedy and now—oh Cele, what’s happening?”
There was a pause. Then Cele said, “Don’t go out for a day or two, will you? They say rioting is starting in Washington and Memphis already.”
Long after she hung up, she sat staring at the television set as if in hypnosis. Gene was slow getting there, and obscurely she was glad. She needed time; she had to absorb, hear, let the tears come unheeded through the rerun of old scenes where Martin Luther King alive was speaking in the curiously rhythmic chant of his careful enunciation—move-ment, chil-dren, moun-tain—words grown familiar and dear by repetition. She had been right there in Washington on that hot August day in 1963 when he had first said those words and she had gulped over his dream. One day on the red hills of Georgia … one day even the state of Mississippi … a dream that one day my four little children—now she listened again to a replay of the same words and her throat locked. She had gone on the great march without knowing exactly why she went, knowing only that she had to be there too, had to walk with strangers too, bearing witness, peacefully. She remembered their walking, almost amiable along the wide and beautiful stretches of the capital’s avenues, remembered the sudden sting of tears when up ahead somebody started, “Mine eyes have seen the glory,” remembered the new song, “We Shall Overcome,” whose words and melody she had never heard before and could not then know she would hear so many times again.
And now this, unbearable. Again she thought, It’s the first time, but now she knew suddenly what the phrase meant. It’s the first time since Matthew that anything horrible has happened in the world, and he’s not here to go through it with me, not here to talk about it, not here to help me bear it, or want me to help him.
Her heart pounded, but this was not the happy beat of excitement and expectation; this was new, this was a heavy acknowledgment of disappointment, of disapproval. Could it be of something more than that? Of, perhaps, dislike?
She quivered at the thought, shrinking back as if she were the recipient of the word instead of its bestower. “Dislike” was too strong, but there was something. It was fine to say that you should never put your own yardstick along the stretch of another being’s acts, ticking off in a kind of lineal moralizing how much you approved and how much you found less than worthy. But that was theory. And right now at this harrowing moment there was something for the first time that made her draw back.
Gene arrived then. She was dry-eyed as she opened the door to him, but the first sight of his darkly somber eyes filled hers. “Oh, Gene, what’s happening to us?”
“It’s a good question, damn it.” He slung his coat off unceremoniously and asked for coffee. He sank into the armchair in front of the television set and began to listen again to the details he had already heard and heard and heard again, the white car speeding away, the Lorraine Motel balcony, the dirty brick flophouse across the street, the tall white man who was particular about the dollar-a-day room he had rented that afternoon, turning down one that faced a blank wall and choosing another that looked across the bare mimosa trees to the porch of the motel, owned by Negroes, for Negroes only.
“If he’d been able to stay anywhere he chose,” she said, “they might not have known where to go to pick him off.”
“It was bound to happen. He knew it. I suppose we have all known it all along.”
“Here’s coffee. Would you like a drink too?”
“Not yet.” He continued to watch the screen and she pulled a cushion from the sofa and sat on the floor to one side. There was silence between them and she thought, This is all anybody needs, to share it, not to take it square alone. But that was going back to her accusations, and she cut sharply away from that direction of her thinking, like a driver taking a corner on squeaking tires.
For perhaps an hour they listened and talked, listened again and talked again. They talked of violence and nonviolence, of the whiplash of white hatreds and the new militants in the ghettos, of the growing rebellions of the young everywhere, on every campus, in every nation, and of the burden those young felt, to put to right the world into which they had been born.
“Gene,” she said, sure he would follow the unspoken transition, “do you know a good lawyer I could go to, for the actual adoption?”
“Not offhand, but I’ll ask Dave Weiss. I think it’s a special field.”
“How much would you have to tell him?” Professor Weiss was on the law faculty and a close friend of Gene’s, but she had never met him.
“That somebody I know wants the name of a lawyer for adopting a child. What else did you think?”
“He’d assume it would be through the usual adoption bureaus.”
“I’d tell him it wouldn’t be.”
“He’d assume it was a married couple.”
“I’d tell him it wasn’t.”
“Wouldn’t he need to know anything more than the simple fact that ‘somebody you know’ wants a lawyer for adopting some little old baby?”
“Probably whether I’d got myself into a jam, but he wouldn’t ask me.” Unexpectedly he laughed. It was a blessed relief to be talking of this instead of the other. “I’d assumed this was all arranged by now, the way you’ve arranged everything else.”
She looked suddenly away. “I sort of had assumed it too, that a man I know, a lawyer, would help me with the legal part of it. But I—I’ve lost touch with him.”
He glanced at her inquiringly but said nothing. For a moment he turned back to the television screen, thought better of it, and without asking her, went to her small kitchen for more coffee. She followed him with both their cups.
“He’s not the villain who’s responsible,” she said, too lightly.
“I didn’t think there was a villain.”
“There isn’t. I don’t know why I’m trying to make jokes.”
“I do.”
“Oh, Gene, thank God you came over tonight. Was it all right for you to be here with me all evening?”
“Ellen isn’t pregnant,” he said shortly. He heard the snap in his own voice and added, without emphasis, “Anyway, she has more sense than we have about something like this. If you call it sense.”
He stayed for the eleven o’clock news and then on for another hour until he saw that she was getting sleepy. She had not pretended the sleepiness but the moment he left, drowsiness vanished and she turned compulsively back to the set. There was a necessity she could not explain, to hear all of it again, and once more, and then once more, as she had done during the hours and days after Kennedy was assassinated, right through until the first flicker of flame upon his grave.
At one thirty she went to bed exhausted. But the dreaming began, as it had begun that other time, the sudden start came again, the clutch of shock, the piercing longing that it had not happened, that it was only nightmare. The horror had been greater over President Kennedy’s assassination because he was the President, but the jagged edge of this shock was just as bloody, and the next morning on the street when she passed a Negro woman she wanted to stop and say, “I feel just the way you do.” But she thought, It would sound patronizing and I would die.
It was during the final mile of her walk that morning that she was suddenly driven by the need to settle the matter of the lawyer. She had not even thought of it as one of the problems during those early days when hideouts and false names and new banks and mail had preoccupied her. So sure had she been then that her lawyer would be Matthew, or if a specialist were needed in this field, then somebody Matthew would select and recommend and, in a sense, watch over.
All at once the thought of Gene’s asking Professor Weiss was distasteful. If she herself knew Weiss, if he were her own friend, it might be good and right and natural to turn to him, but for her brother to be delegated by her as an agent to a stranger—suddenly the idea upset her. This was too personal, this matter of the attorney who would have to know all about it, who would guide her through the maze of papers and documents and laws and statutes—she should have realized that going to an unknown lawyer recommended by an unknown colleague of Gene’s was an agitating notion at best. She had not thought the thing through at all; she had let it slide; never had she put it on any list of majors and minors, and suddenly it loomed very major indeed.
She hurried home and telephoned the university. Gene was in class; she said to Miss Pulley, “Would you just ask him to delay on that legal matter for a day or two—he’ll know what I mean. Thanks a lot.” She hung up, convinced that he had already had it all out with Professor Weiss, and her spirits fell. This sudden preoccupation with the matter of a lawyer was excessive, but that insight did not end the preoccupation. Was she still remembering Matthew’s quick offer to check out New York adoption laws with people at his office? Was she still assuming that somehow, some way, it would still be Matthew who would see her through this final, and tremendous, chapter?
She drew back sharply. The one rule, the basis, the foundation: no sentimentalism, no daydreams, no girlish refusal to face whatever reality there was. And God knew one reality was that there was no Matthew.
On her next visit to Dr. Jesskin she could ask him about the final step of the adoption itself. Why had she not thought of asking Jesskin long before this—she had asked him about everything else. Probably, he saw ahead to it as clearly as he had seen ahead to that room on the eighth floor of Harkness and the two names on the door.
The knowledge soothed her, pacified her, and yet a few moments later she thought, My next visit is on the fifteenth, a Monday, and this is the fifth, a Friday. That’s two weekends to get through and the week in between.
She dialed quickly. “Miss Mack,” she said, “this isn’t any emergency, but something’s come up, and do you think I could talk to Dr. Jesskin before he goes off for the weekend?”
“Can we call you back? He’s with a patient.”“
“Of course. If he’s not too rushed.”
“About one or one thirty then. You sure you can wait till then? Nothing going wrong?”
“Really not. Thank you.”
She looked at the clock and then at the morning paper, black with headlines about the assassination. She still had not come to grips with it in print; she had read headlines and set it all aside for later, just as she had permitted herself radio news for a few minutes this morning and then set that aside for later too. The assassin had not been caught. Knowing that single fact, she had forced herself to wait through breakfast and through her walk. Now she edged toward the Times, unwilling to open herself to pain again.
The telephone rang and it was Dr. Jesskin. “Miss Mack said you sounded ill though you said you were not,” he stated quietly. “I thought it best not to wait till one o’clock to call back.”
“Oh Doctor, I’m not ill, but I had such a hideous night, I was so horrified, I couldn’t sleep—”
“I think many of us couldn’t sleep last night,” he said. “Have you any physical symptoms? Miss Mack said you did not sound like yourself at all.”
“No physical symptoms, only terribly upset, and that seemed to tie into something else upsetting and I—well, I wondered, Doctor, if I could possibly see you for ten minutes today, or if you weren’t too rushed now to talk a little by phone.”
“I’m not too rushed.”
“It’s just that I had thought at the start that a lawyer I know would take charge of the formal adoption process, in court or however they do it. But that’s all been changed and I haven’t faced up to it and when I got upset last night I also got awfully upset that anything so important should still be up in the air as late as this and I got wondering if by any chance you might know a good lawyer who—”
“Miss Mack was correct,” he said calmly. “You do not sound yourself. But you do know how one anxiety tends to trigger off another?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Do not be sorry. Will it quiet that anxiety if I say that some weeks ago, for my own education, I did already discuss with a first-rate attorney how one would go about legally adopting one’s own child? He does not know the name of my patient, but he is my good friend and he did educate me completely. It is entirely feasible and if you should wish me to arrange a meeting between you and him, that is simple.”
“Oh Dr. Jesskin, there never was a doctor like you.”
“There is a disadvantage,” he said and she thought he chuckled. “As with Harkness, I seem to run to expensive solutions. This lawyer is a senior partner at Cox, Wheaton, Fairchild, Tulliver.”
“I know of them.” It was one of the great law firms in the country.
“Just as one does not expect an illegitimate birth at Harkness,” he went on, “so one does not expect an illegitimate baby to become a client of Cox, Wheaton, Fairchild, Tulliver. Is that not correct?”
This time he did chuckle and she could only say, “It is correct and it’s just marvelous. Would you go ahead and tell him about his new client and about me? Honestly, Doctor, I just don’t know how to thank you.”
The day became bearable. For a long time after she hung up, she sat in a benign relief, like warmth. Then she turned to the telephone book to look up Cox, Wheaton, Fairchild, Tulliver and wrote on the last page of her desk calendar their address and telephone number. Which one was the senior partner who was Dr. Jesskin’s friend? Would she one day be known to Mr. Cox or to Mr. Wheaton, Mr. Fairchild or Mr. Tulliver? Would that day come before July twenty-third, or afterward? Soon after or not for six months after when the time came to go to court?
In her research for her two articles, still only roughed out and nowhere near completion, she had found out that in New York State, unlike certain others, a waiting period of half a year was mandatory, a six-month trial period between the time any baby went into any adoptive home and the time the legal process of adoption could be taken to court. The city of New York would send a social worker of some kind once or twice during that trial period, to judge the prospective parents, the prospective home, the general prognosis for the baby’s future.
Suppose one of them came to see us, Dori thought now, and turned me down? She began to laugh; It was impossible, of course, but it was high comedy even to think of such a scene. Or high horror.
Cox, Wheaton, Fairchild, Tulliver wouldn’t let it happen. They would know, or one of them would know, their archives would know, where secret papers were held in camera, and they would not let the State of New York interfere. God bless Cox, Wheaton, Fairchild, Tulliver, separately and aggregately.
She smiled and her eyes fell on the deserted Times. A sweep of guilt invaded her, that she should so soon be turning from its intolerable burden to her own good fortune. But that’s it, she thought, that’s all part of it, the systole and diastole forever.
Cele came late in the afternoon, bringing three days’ pile-up of mail from home. It was mostly requests for donations, but the April rent bill was there, a department store bill, the telephone bill, and a note from Tad Jonas saying the Martha Litton piece was still pulling mail and why the hell didn’t she drop people at least a postcard and a clue about whether she’d like it forwarded or not? “I must write him,” she said, showing Tad’s note to Cele, “or it’ll twig his attention, but for now, let’s get on with these.” She opened her locked suitcase for her real checkbook.
Rapidly she made out the checks, addressed envelopes bearing her real return address, handed them to Cele to put straight into her own purse again for mailing on the way home. She also returned all the original envelopes that had her name on them and any letters where her name was typed to show through the envelope window. These Cele also put back in her purse, to dispose of in some street bin.
Then only did Dori say, “I can’t talk about it anymore, can you?”
Cele shook her head. They had talked of it already, before they began on the letters, talked until they each felt spent. Through supper they watched the evening news in silence; they listened as if bludgeoned to the inevitable recapitulation and then the nature of the programs changed; now they were scenes of rioting in dozens of cities, of burning buildings in a dozen black ghettos, of crowds and looting and tear gas, of the smashing of windows, of screaming sirens and troops and police and the National Guard, called out by this governor and that mayor, of havoc across the face of the nation.
“Forty cities,” Dori said once. “He said ‘in forty cities.’ Did you hear that?”
“I heard a special bulletin that said ‘sixty or more.’”
“All in ghettos?”
“Of course, ghettos.”
“But it’s their own neighborhoods they’re wrecking.”
“If it were white neighborhoods, they’d be shot by the dozens.”
“Sixty cities,” Dori said, awed. “Could it be the start of another civil war? Time would promptly dub it Civil War Two.”
“Let’s quit talking about it. You look terrible. I’m going to get the fruit and cheese.” She snapped off the television set and went to the kitchen. Dori went to the mirror in the bathroom, combed her hair and freshened her lipstick.
She did indeed look terrible, frowning and tight-faced. She also wanted to stop talking about it, and she made an effort to sound more cheerful. “I do look fierce, face-wise, as the ad boys might say. But figure-wise? It’s five and a half months, and sure, you can tell I’m pregnant, but not the way I thought I’d be by now, not good and bulky and obvious. Are they holding out on me or what?”
“You’re going to be the servant girl that carries on till the last minute, with the mistress of the house not suspecting a thing. You look great, if not yet ‘great with.’ So stop hurrying.”
“First you say I look terrible, then that I look great. Which do I believe?”
“Both.”
“Okay, it’s easiest that way.” Then matter-of-factly she added, “That lawyer I met at your house, Matthew Poole, have you seen him again?”
“Not since. Have you?”
“He asked me to a concert.”
“Did you go?”
Dori nodded. “It wasn’t long after I met him.”
“We like him but he’s not the social type and we don’t see him often either.”
“I liked him too.” The brief interchange surprised her. Cele was gazing at her with the mildest air of encouragement, but she ignored the invitation. She was not certain why she had never said anything to her about Matthew; she had known she would not talk about being in love, but she had not planned a specific reticence about seeing him. Now suddenly she was bringing him into the conversation without pretext of pertinence, just idly speaking his name, the trick of the loving—or lovelorn—and with, of all perceptive people, Celia Duke. She nearly laughed. Yet without meaning to, without even knowing how she had managed to, she certainly had given Cele the wrong impression. They didn’t see him often either. Maybe if you once embarked on lies you became so adept at the techniques that you soon lied out of habit, in a fine promiscuity including people you had never deceived in your whole life.
There was a pause; they ate fruit and cheese.
“I wrote to my brother Ron in London yesterday,” Dori said, again matter-of-fact, “and asked if I could use him for a mail drop for six weeks or so. I didn’t say why, just asked if I could send him an occasional letter to put British stamps on and mail out from there.”
“How will he take it?”
“He’ll say yes. His secretary will do it—it won’t be more than a few times at most. He’ll decide I’m having an affair and need a cover for that, and he couldn’t care less.” She could see Cele trying to put this train of thought together with the one that had made her mention Matthew. But Cele remained matter-of-fact also.
“And Alan? Did you write him too?”
“I tried to write the same damn letter to him, actually typing off the same words. But it stuck tight; I could imagine his passing it over to Lucia and the look between them. I might just up and phone him at the office some day. This note of Tad’s—it’s his second one.”
Cele glanced at her watch. “It’s only ten of five out there.”
“Call him now?”
“Obey my impulse, Dorr. Get it done. Get your mind off everything awful, and back onto yourself.”
For a moment Dori hesitated. Then she went to the telephone. “Person to person to San Francisco,” she said and gave the operator Alan’s name and office address. “His sister calling.” In less than a minute she was saying, “No, not a thing, Alan, everybody’s fine here. I’ll tell you in a minute why I called. How’s everything with you?”
She listened and Cele, watching, thought how animated she looked again, how pretty; she had forgotten the TV set and the bulletins and the dead body lying in that final darkness—God, why should she not? She felt protective and loving as if Dori were her sister or her child.
“It’s going to sound wicked as hell,” Dori was saying into the telephone. “And I thought you might not want to tell Lucia, so I called you there instead of at the house.” He said something that made her giggle. “Not a movie star, no, nor a millionaire. But for a few weeks I’d love it if I could mail a few letters to you, for you to mail out with a San Francisco postmark. Not many.”
She looked even more animated; Cele thought, She’s actually in a tizzy as if she really were going off with a lover. She waved a hand to catch Dori’s eye. “Tell him it’s secret even if he can’t do it,” she whispered. Dori nodded.
“Lucia of course, but not one single other? Oh your secretary, she’ll have to—no, I know she won’t. Well, thanks, Alan, thanks a lot.”
When she hung up she said, musing, “It’s the first time, I swear to you on the Koran, the Talmud and the Bible, the very first time he hasn’t been a stuffed shirt.”
“Then he will?”
“Yes, but he’d die of disappointment if he knew I wasn’t having an affair at all.” Suddenly she shoved away from the telephone. “Oh, Cele, I’m not having an affair, but I was, and it was real, and it meant everything and now it’s over and—”
Her voice suddenly caught and she turned away so that her face was averted. Cele did nothing. It must be Matthew Poole. It couldn’t be. Dori never had sudden loves; she was never casual about friends or politics or books or what she read in the morning paper, then how would she be casual about sex? With sudden concentration she tried to recall exactly what it was Dori had said about Matthew Poole and that concert, whether she had said that was the first time she had seen him or whether she had specifically said that was the only time she had seen him. Already it was too far back in the blur of the evening to remember precisely.
After another minute of silence, Dori said, “Let’s see if there’s anything new about it,” and crossed the room to the TV set. The click of the knob was sharp in the quiet room.
Suddenly Matthew knew what it was. He was not thinking of Dori but suddenly there it was, the truth, the thing he had not been able to name. Perhaps because he had not been thinking of her, because he had not been at his relentless prodding of his thoughts about her, it suddenly skimmed along the surfaces of his mind, and he caught at it, netted it and held it carefully as if it were a fragile creature that could be wounded or destroyed.
It was an April night, raw, sensitive, and fresh, and he was walking home from his office, tired and dispirited. He had lost the Benting case; it would now go to appeal before the circuit court. He had never been trapped into hope on the first stage of the case and had been careful to prepare Jim and his parents for this first defeat, so that they too would know all along that the ultimate decision was still months off, perhaps even a year. The Spock indictment had, curiously, encouraged them, though he had tried to explain why the idiot charge of conspiracy in that case cut through any bonds of similarity with Jim’s own. Jim saw it, but his parents persisted in feeling that even if the Spock trial, coming up soon in Boston, ended in conviction for him and his codefendants, the verdict would be so outrageous it would certainly be reversed someday by a higher court, and thus by some esoteric logic it was more certain that a reversal would someday be forthcoming for their son as well.
How strange, parents. How strange the persistence of his own hope that the bad times now with Johnny would reverse in some golden process as time went on, that in three years or so when Johnny the boy became John the college student, there would be a magic shift in his son’s personality.
His intelligence told him not to hope but he went on hoping. He knew as surely as astronomers know three years in advance just where a star will be in the cosmos, so he knew that on a day in 1971 his son would be part of some great campus protest, would be arrested or suspended or expelled from the college of his choice, and that he would applaud him for his courage and his principles and at the same time know the stricture in his own heart at his son’s newest struggle. When your kid’s in trouble your heart is lead. A lifetime went into making your children happy and when they were happy your whole world was right. You knew what it was all for, you had done it, or helped do it—
That was when he suddenly knew. Dori was happy and he had had no part in it.
Suddenly he remembered the change that had come over Jack’s face that night he had told him about Dori. And you offered to help her, Jack had said. It wasn’t like that, he had answered, she didn’t want any help. He had gone on to give Jack the whole background, all the years of tests and doctors, and Jack’s expression had altered; a kind of comprehension had entered it, as if something had suddenly opened. But Jack had only ordered more drinks and they had got rather drunker than was usual for either of them.
All at once he knew what Jack had thought, knew why he had kept still about it, thinking it better for him to come to it himself. If she were crying to you for help, Jack had thought, you’d have stood by her, but you couldn’t take it that she was happy about it.
She was happy in the profoundest sense and he had had no part in it. She was pregnant at last, and in the profoundest sense also, he was excluded from it. She had done this without him and she would go on without him. She was already, on that day she told him, already going on without him.
There was the crux of it and he had not faced it until now. He had talked of a blast of buckshot, but that was only alibi for his protracted silence and absence. Buckshot? It was more like napalm, to sear and scar. But that was alibi too.
At last he had isolated the truth. He had at last “got it into some sort of shape.” Twelve weeks had gone by in the attempt; it seemed twelve years, it seemed twelve minutes, so endless was it, yet so hot and new. He no longer sweated out nightmare hours, but he could not recall even one moment of peace, of pleasure. She was away somewhere; he had tried two or three times to call her, the last time the night of King’s assassination. Not even that time did he know what he could say, once he got through talking of the murder. That he was still trying to get this into some sort of shape? That he was still on hell’s own wheel? That this was merely an interim call, meaning nothing? Each time he had been relieved that she did not answer. Now he suddenly felt that he could wait not an hour longer to face her and say, God forgive me, I’ve been in hell because you’re happy.