“I’VE THOUGHT OUT ALL THE things you told me to think out, Dr. Jesskin. You were right, there were so many more than I had dreamed there would be. But I did. I’ve talked to my brother and to my closest friend.”
“And the result?”
They looked at each other in silence. His face was still what she had thought of as neutral. It was a waiting face, an interested face, not the face of an advocate or of a dissuader. Suddenly she looked again at this calm, unruffled man and found what she had always found. He was involved forever with life in its most primitive facets, conception and then birth, and nothing, nothing at all, would make him put up obstacles to either.
“And I am going ahead. Will you help me?”
Awkwardly he put his hand out on the desk and took hers as if in a handshake. “I am proud of you.”
“And will you?”
“You have known that I would.” His voice was still without stress but an animation shone in his eyes. “We will work it out step by step, between us.”
“Oh thank you.” Her voice shook but he did not notice. “Is it going to be awkward for you in any way, taking me? Miss Mack and Miss Stein knowing I am not married—”
“We will not start by worrying about me,” he said. “What are the worries about you?”
“Well, I do wonder about one thing. I’ve heard it’s a little risky to have a first baby as late as forty—is that true?”
“Certainly not. You are a fine healthy girl and forty is not regarded as anything but young today. Medically, that is. Cosmetically—that is perhaps another matter.”
She laughed outright. He was talkative. He sounded happy. “And another thing. I haven’t had any morning sickness yet—when does that start?”
“It is a variable. Sometimes it is immediate, sometimes it is never. In my own belief—I have no scientific data, just my belief—it is worst where the pregnancy is resented or unwanted and it is often not experienced at all when the woman is overjoyed to be pregnant.”
He made a note in the folder; she knew it was the medical equivalent of “no morning sickness,” and in her mind added a parenthesis: “(overjoyed).” She suddenly had a need to confide in him about matters more real than these two, and the certainty that he would permit it, find time for it, perhaps welcome it. “I do have one problem that I get a different answer to every day,” she said. “The biggest one so far.” He nodded, silent and expectant, as if he knew perfectly well that once the preliminaries were out of the way the real questions would come. “Things like where to go, when to go, what name to go under—those aren’t answered yet either, but I know they will be. The great big one pushes them all to one side.” Again she paused.
“You cannot quite make yourself tell me?” He put the pen down and shoved the folder away.
“It’s just that something in me doesn’t want this to be a secret, wants to tell it to everybody, wants to let everybody see me later on, big and pregnant, and let them think whatever they want to think.”
“Then why do you not?”
At once she felt combative as if he had said, “That would be better; that is the best thing to do.”
“Because where everybody knows,” she said with new stress, naming a famous actor, a famous painter, a famous movie star, all of whom had, willingly or via scandal and law suits, proclaimed to the world their indifference to conventional marriage—“because their children grew up to be neurotic wrecks. At school they must have been called ‘dirty little bastard’ from the first minute, and been taunted and whispered about and goggled at.”
“School-age children are savages,” Dr. Jesskin agreed, but unemphatically as if again he were turning neutral. His eyes strayed to the two photographs, easel-framed, standing on his desk before him, and he seemed to be studying their faces for reasons of his own. One was of a pretty woman, whom Dori took to be his wife, and the other was of a boy and a girl, about ten or twelve years old, looking enough like him to proclaim themselves his children. Were they savages too?
Dori felt rebuked by his speculative look as he gazed at the photographs. The stress and ardor of her words seemed girlish, the point she had raised suddenly tangential in this office, before this man.
“Oh, Dr. Jesskin, forgive me. These are things I shouldn’t bother you with at all; I forgot for a minute. I’ll decide for myself, and I suppose you will not disapprove either way.”
“That is so. I will not.” He pulled the folder back within writing distance and briefly she wondered what he had expected to hear from her that would not bear the recording in her history, already so full of other unrecordables. “In a moment,” he said, “I will have a look at you for some measurements, for the technical chart. For the next three months, I will want to see you every fourth week. Miss Stein will give you an appointment card and Miss Mack will take a blood sample, for hemoglobin, for an Rh test and so forth. This is all routine. Have you any directives to ask of me? Most patients do.”
“Directives?”
“You want to know whether you may continue to have intercourse. The answer is yes. It is normal. Indeed as the pregnancy progresses, the increased production of hormones is stimulating to sexual activity. That is, unless there is anger over the pregnancy, when resistance, even hostility, becomes a factor.”
This was so surprising a dissertation and so precisely to the point, though she would have had to make a conscious effort to raise the point herself, that she felt a remarkable surge of new confidence in Dr. Jesskin. Always before he had avoided any overlay of psychoanalytical talk; today he had spoken twice of resistance and hostility, or of the good normal opposites. He was giving her his blessings to go ahead and be made love to, but he was thinking of the “awfully decent man, no scoundrel betraying me,” while she was thinking of Matthew. She suddenly felt wanton, promiscuous and secretly pleased, but she looked down as if she were too shy to meet his glance.
“For the moment,” he went on with no perceptible change in tone, “I have only two prescriptions for you, but they are both important and both to start at once, please. First, to begin, a regimen of long walks, daily walks, brisk, not ambling, but a positive kind of walking. Three miles a day would be best. Second, begin now to do this.” He stood up, turned half away from her so that he stood in profile, unceremoniously held back his starched white coat, and then visibly pulled in his slightly flabby stomach, pulled it in with a sudden jerk, then released it, then pulled it in again, released it. Tall and thin, he was totally free of self-consciousness as he performed for her, and it was all she could do not to laugh. Automatically she imitated him, sitting as she was, watching him, fascinated at the unexpected sight. He saw that she was keeping time with him and nodded in approval.
“ ‘Suck in the gut’ is the not so elegant way to describe this exercise,” he said, dropping his hold on his coat and sitting down again. “The effectiveness is remarkable. You want taut muscles, strong, tough, and if you work faithfully at it, you will have them. As you see, you can do this exercise standing or sitting, wherever you are, in a car, at the movies, at your desk, when you are watching television, even in bed. I want you to do it ten, twelve times a day, beginning today, in batches of ten or twelve times each.”
She did laugh. She put her hands on her stomach and sat there practicing. She saw her hands jerk inward and she felt an immediate tightening of her muscles.
“The best maternity girdle of all,” Dr. Jesskin said with satisfaction. “You will build it right into you, just this way, and keep strengthening it and toughening it right to the end.”
“Couldn’t it do any damage to the baby? Pulling in that hard?”
He waved the baby out of consideration. “You can’t compress fluid,” he said as if he had suddenly turned physics teacher. “You can’t squeeze or pinch or decrease it.” He touched the buzzer and Miss Mack appeared, competent as always, her manner as always, her eyes revealing nothing.
School-age children are savages. As she walked home the phrase sounded again and again in her mind, spoken in the mild voice designed neither to urge nor to exhort, and each time a phrase of her own replied, I won’t let them be.
She had it within her own power to prevent those school-age savages from hurting, perhaps damaging, a five-or six-year-old boy or girl, and there was suddenly no question that she would exercise that power in the one sure way open to her.
Those future tormentors would never know. Their parents would never tell them because their parents would never know. Nobody would tell the parents. No shred of gossip would inform them, no hint would be whispered to them, no weapons would be handed them to be handed over to their school-age offspring. This much was at last settled.
Dori felt relieved. She walked quickly past shopwindows bright and commercial with Christmas green and red and tinsel, seeing no particularities, only a brightness to match her mood. As she reached her front door she could hear her telephone ringing brassily inside and she dived for her keys, sure she would be tantalized by silence once she reached her desk. But the ringing persisted, patient, stubborn, and when she breathlessly said “Hello?” it was Ellen, sounding embarrassed, sounding serious, asking if they might meet, perhaps today.
“Of course. Whenever.”
“Are you working? Or could I drop in now?”
“Come on, I haven’t even started.” But she braced herself and looked at her watch as if time had become a factor. Had Ellen ever before come over alone to talk to her? She could not remember even one occasion in all the twenty-four years she had been married to Gene. They had usually been congenial enough in a loose casual way that was only a cut above indifference, but private talks between them, private visits, private anythings, never happened. Since the night she had told them her news two weeks ago, she had heard several times from Gene, asking how she was, asking genially, “Anything else new, for God’s sake?” but from Ellen there had been only silence.
The sensation of being braced for trouble grew as she waited for Ellen’s arrival, and during their greetings and their exchange of mechanical cheer about Christmas shopping and Christmas plans, it became acute enough to be uncomfortable. “What is it, Ellen?” she finally asked. “We seem to be ducking it.”
“I’ve tried to avoid it altogether,” Ellen said. “For two whole weeks I’ve gone crazy trying to just put it out of my mind. But I had that awful feeling that time was running out—”
“Running out on what?”
“On telling you the truth about this. Gene won’t, not ever. Your friend Cele won’t either.” She looked defiant but also wretched.
“What truth?”
Ellen remained silent, managing to give off an aura of reluctance as if her being there was no doing of her own, as if this conversation were no choice of her own but rather a distasteful trap into which she had somehow been inveigled.
“Is this some truth about including Jim and Dan?” Dori prompted. “And their wives?”
“That too,” Ellen said with such a pounce that Dori knew she had not even been thinking of her sons. “You can’t ask Gene and me to tell lies to our own children.”
“I didn’t ask you.”
“It’s far more involved than just keeping this to ourselves for now. For now that might be possible, but then there comes one lie, and then another, a whole series of fakes—we’ve never led them up the garden path—they would never trust a word we said from that minute on.”
In her indignation at being asked to behave so abominably, Ellen raced on about bringing up two boys like Jim and Dan, how basic, how indispensable, complete trust was between parent and child, until Dori finally interrupted to say, “You were going to tell me what it was that Cele would never tell me, or Gene either.”
“Yes I was. Somebody simply has to, and of all the things they’re saying, they absolutely are not coming out with what they really feel down deep, what they instinctively feel—that you’re making the most awful mistake, that this is the most terrible thing you can do.”
“Terrible?”
“Yes, terrible.”
“Terrible for whom?”
“For everybody. For yourself, and for Gene and me, for—for the future.”
“The word you can’t say is ‘baby,’” Dori said. “A terrible mistake for the baby.”
“All right then. For the baby. For the whole family. For yourself most of all. A terrible mistake.”
“I don’t think Cele feels that and isn’t telling me. Or Gene either.” Ellen looked away. “Does he? Does Gene? Or are you guessing?”
“Apart from Gene—look, now that you know you can have a baby, don’t you see how different things are? You wouldn’t ever again have the awful feeling you used to have, don’t you see that?”
“Now wait a minute.” There was a warning note in her tone but Ellen missed it and again raced on, immersed in her own earnestness.
“You would know that you’re cured at last and just knowing would make a whole new situation. So even if you—there’s still time, it’s still safe—even if you didn’t go on with this now, you’d know you could, and you might even marry faster, knowing it. And be so much happier in the long run.”
“You are telling me to have an abortion.”
“I’m only pointing out the true—”
“Did Gene know you were going to say this?”
“I don’t discuss everything with him.”
“Does he know you feel this way?”
“I’ve told him, of course I have. We’re family, Dori, what affects you affects all of us together.”
“Oh no it doesn’t, not from now on it doesn’t.”
Dori stood up, her voice suddenly loud. “This is nothing you need have one more minute of, not one more word of, not one more bit of news about. I will see you when it’s all over, a year from now, two years, but now let’s for God’s sake call it quits.” She started from the room.
“You might consider the way other people feel,” Ellen said behind her.
“And vice versa.”
“You’re being utterly selfish.”
“And vice versa.”
She waited at the door from the living room, not looking at her sister-in-law, not thinking, wanting only to be alone once more. As Ellen passed her, saying, “I should have known,” she answered, “That’s right. You should have known,” and opened the hall door. A moment later she was leaning against it, feeling for the first time the rise and swell of nausea.
School-age children are savages. They’re not the only ones, she thought furiously. Just now in these few haggling minutes, here in her own house, she had heard the taunt of “Shame, shame!” Damn it, Ellen, shame on you.
She had stood her ground, she had said the right things. Off and on for the next hour she warmed to a small private glow of accomplishment, and then suddenly she accepted the truth: she was shaken through and through.
How many thousands and thousands lived through shame, humiliation and contempt because they were pregnant without being married? Why wasn’t there a worldwide campaign to remake attitudes and emotions about it? They tested for the Rh factor, they watched for it, they knew it could be fatal to new life, but did anybody in authority check for the shame factor, the poisoning guilt that could be equally lethal, if not in the physical sense, then lethal to pride and self-worth?
The shame factor—if it were absent, how few young lives would be wrecked, how few hideous abortions there would be, the awful self-inflicted ones, the filthy unsterile ones, the slicing agony at the hands of the doctor who would not risk an anesthetic?
Dori shuddered. She hated Ellen for plunging her into these thoughts. Then she knew Ellen as Ellen wasn’t the point, only Ellen as symbol. If Ellen, why not somebody else? Not Matthew, of course not Matthew. But was Marshall Duke saying this sort of rubbish to Cele? Was Ellen giving Gene a nightly burst for being so easy and acquiescent?
Matthew was no Ellen, not even a Marshall Duke, but he was in love with her, or, to be properly wary of large phrases, he was falling more surely in love with her, and any news of this magnitude might jar him through and through too. It was such a fragile process, that transition from “I’m in love with you” to the simple solid “I love you.” Was it foolhardy to put it to any unusual strain so soon?
Day after day for the past two weeks she had been playing with opening phrases for the moment when she would tell him, but it had been a pleasant sort of daydreaming, with no sense of haste to prod her. Not just yet, it was too near Christmas, which he would be spending with his family; not right after Christmas either—he had promised to take his family off on a skiing weekend over New Year’s. He had told her all this with a care, as if in a wish to say “en garde” to her, do not let these family patterns distress you; they were established long before we met. She had understood, had told him that she knew why he was telling her so carefully, so far in advance, and that she liked his doing it. And she had thought, liking this too, that after the holidays were done with at last, the timing would be just right for her news, and that she also would use care and love in the telling, and then had gone on half luxuriating in imagining the moment when at last he knew.
Her hand felt again the pressure of Dr. Jesskin’s fingers, as if he were reaching out to congratulate her. I’m proud of you. She could hear the words again, but this time they were in Matthew’s voice.
She drew back. Over them, through them, around them, a shrillness sounded: You are making a terrible mistake. Terrible for whom? Terrible for everybody.
Oh yes, she had stood her ground, she had said the right things, but Ellen had won something just the same. If Ellen had not come over, would there now be this sudden anxiety about what Matthew would say? She was seeing him this evening and for a moment she wished she were not going to.
Almost automatically she turned to her desk. Work, the anodyne. The piece on Martha Litton was too long and she had been having trouble cutting it. Usually she could be dispassionate about cutting her own work, looking at each sentence with a skeptical eye that asked it, What’s your reason for existing? But this time that stern editor within her had gone fishing and a friendly defender had remained, rooting for each phrase, urging her to see its charm, if not its necessity. Now she turned on it in a violence of energy, slashing out entire paragraphs, rearranging sequences, slinging in new transitions as if she were back on the defunct Trib, on some late-breaking story, with a copyboy waiting at her elbow to rush each take down to the pressroom. When she saw that she was at last on the edge of completing the job, she telephoned the paper and told Tad Jonas she was in the neighborhood and could she drop in at four with the completed piece?
“Sure, come on. Remember—I liked it the way it was.”
By the time she got there she felt sure of herself again. She again had a sense of accomplishment, but this time it was real and it lasted. This came from work, her own work, and she knew how to do it, and when it went wrong she knew how to set about correcting it. This was not taking a good stance, striking the right note, this was her own self in operation, and despite her occasional envy of people with bigger talents, the mysterious something that might make her more than the writer of good pieces for a paper or a magazine, she found a full satisfaction in what her own self did manage to do well.
“Hi, Tad,” she greeted her editor, “I think you’ll like this better.” She opened a flat manila envelope, drew out about fifteen typed pages and laid them on his desk. “Two thousand words shorter and less wobbly.” He read the first paragraph and the last before he looked up.
“I didn’t think it was all that wobbly.”
“Maybe it’s me who’s wobbly. Or just plain stale. I think I need a vacation.”
“When are you taking off?” He sounded mock resigned to it. “Tough, not having enough dough in the bank to swing a winter vacation.”
She laughed. She liked Tad; they had worked together for years on the Trib and he had never let their friendship interfere with cutting her work when cutting was indicated. He was an editor with a built-in discontent, for he wanted either to be on a huge city daily again or else to have a fat advance from a publisher to write the novel he was always talking about, but he did precisely nothing about either desire except suffer over its denial. Despite his own failures, he was pleasant enough to work for, generous about telling you he liked something, never needling or mean-spirited about finding fault. If he disapproved of a piece of work, he said so, roundly, vulgarly, but straightforwardly to you, with his reasons for thinking so, usually cogent. It didn’t happen very often with Dori but she was good at forestalling it by behaving just as she had with the Martha Litton piece.
“Maybe longer than a winter vacation,” she said. “Tad, don’t get caught short if I do something wild one of these days. I just might.”
“Like what?”
“Like quitting.”
“You’ve got to be kidding. I thought you finally decided you liked working here on a nice slow weekly schedule.”
“I do, in that sense. But of late I seem to think of treadmills awfully often, and of getting into ruts. That means something, doesn’t it?”
“I guess it does. Maybe that you’re in love or that you’re going to write a book.”
“Heaven forfend. Forfend the book anyway.” She saw him look at her with the sudden attention that the first whiff of news or gossip commands in the human animal, especially the human animal trained to sniff out news. She slapped together the sheets of the Litton piece again and said, “Well, we’ll see. I hope you’ll agree this thing is better for all the rewrite.”
As she left, she thought, Laying the groundwork, that’s what I was doing. Write a book indeed. Poor Tad, that’s all he thinks of, so he ascribes it to me. He can’t face the fact that if he really wanted to, had to, he’d have done it years ago, the way other people have done, after hours, mornings, weekends. But me! Never.
This sounded a little defiant to her, a little dishonest, for she recognized, and had for a long time, that it was something she regretted, that her natural scope was the smaller scope of articles, that she would never be able to encompass a sustained piece of work, hundreds of pages of work, on some given subject. What if she had to write a whole book about a Martha Litton, or even about a Benjamin Spock? There must be some mechanism within the talents of other people that kept them wound up, for a longer duration of interest and energy, but that mechanism was missing in her.
Fine. It was good to know what your limitations were. Knowing kept you comfortably back from the abyss of frustration that so many people lived with. She had had her one private abyss for too many years to play around the edges of a second one. She felt superior and it was delicious. Let Tad know frustration, let everybody and anybody; for the next few months at least she was safe.
Laying the groundwork. It might be wise to follow through rather quickly, before she needed to leave the paper. She might line up one or two actual magazine pieces right now, with some actual editors and some actual deadlines; the deadlines could always be extended if enough notice was given. She could choose topics which she would have to research abroad, so when somebody said, “Where’s Dori?” the answer would be “Oh, she’s doing a piece in Rome,” or Honolulu or Africa. People accepted such answers without paying too much attention; she had done it herself, except for people who were close to her. Casual people could be gone a year and when she saw them again, she had no idea of whether it had been a month or a few weeks or a matter of days.
Matthew was not one of the casuals. Matthew would know to the week how long she had been gone, just as she would know if he were to step out of her life now with some story about a law case that would take him away from New York. That could work with Tad Jonas and the staff, with most of her acquaintances and friends—how much fewer were the people one called friends with the passing of the years and the pruning of the tree. Was that merely a concomitant of maturity, or was it a dark kind of in-turning that robbed one of companionships and parties and amusements?
She didn’t turn from anybody who mattered. Her heart thudded as she looked at her watch; in three hours, soon after dinner, she would see him. He came to her deep in the evenings usually, about ten, staying until midnight. Saturdays and Sundays, not. She knew that pattern so well; like the big holidays, the weekends were for his children. It had been that way with Dick Towson too; before Dick, she had not yet been wise enough to accept the pattern. It used to affront her that she had to spend weekends and holidays alone, and all the timeworn clichés about affairs were really true. Then for no reason that she could name, some buried good sense had struggled up through the gravelly muck and had come to her rescue with Dick, making her see without rancor or confusion that this was part of the contract one made with life if one had an affair with a man who was married. And the only men any woman was likely to be drawn to, once the carefree teens and twenties were gone, were men who were already married. Conveniently widowed men were for television serials; in actual life the only bachelors of thirty or forty were the neurotics and misfits, the mothers’ boys, the homosexuals, the cranks.
It was intelligent, then, not to be confused or “insulted” by the necessities about weekends and holidays, and Dick had remarked on the fact that she wasn’t, complimenting her for “not being a Friday squawker like most dames.” Matthew had never spoken of it, but he couldn’t have felt any unspoken pressure upon him to see her over weekends, for it was nonexistent. Nor could he have felt any pressure to tell her about his family either, for she knew better than to ask about them. He still said little about Joan; it was his children that he enjoyed telling her about, and his work. When he spoke of his life apart from his lads or his cases, he still seemed watchful and less than free. One night he had told her a little about his boyhood, but he had grown somehow nervous and hurried and had ended, “I think I was so anxious to prove that I wasn’t drawn to the law by two silver cords that I got pretty rough about it at times.”
“That sounds natural enough,” she had said.
“Maybe so. But I can be a selfish bastard—better not expect too much of me in the nobility line.”
“I never expect nobility nohow.” They had laughed, but she had listened with all her antennae out, searching for the unspoken message behind his words. Now some faraway signal seemed to say, Don’t rush, take it a day at a time, think of the right way, there are plenty of other things you haven’t decided yet either. She actually enjoyed keeping some of them in suspension; it was pleasant to leave pending the matter of where to hide out, a kind of game as if she were thumbing her way idly through travel folders, trying to choose between a vacation in Jamaica and one in Europe.
By the time Matthew came, the anguish that had begun with Ellen in the morning had disappeared and Dori felt euphoric. It was the day before the Christmas weekend and tonight they would exchange their first presents. She could give him nothing that needed to be hidden or explained at home. After hours of telephoning and scurrying around and searching out of reliable opinion, she had collected for him the best recording known of each piece of music they had heard at their first concert. Actually, though she would only tell him this later, she had bought a duplicate of each of the four records for herself, so that she too might have that same concert whenever memory and emotion combined to ask for its rebirth.
He was touched, as she had hoped he would be, and he offered her his gift hesitantly, as if it were banal compared to the thought that had gone into hers. It was a pair of earrings of smooth white coral, domed and shining, thinly outlined in gold; she loved his wanting to adorn her, loved the earrings themselves and though she did not say so, loved him for knowing that she would have been disturbed if he had brought her something that cost more than she could have spent easily for herself.
She put them on and turned toward him. “How did you know I’m mad for white coral?”
“I know things about you.”
“How did you know? You couldn’t have asked Cele.” Before he could answer, she said in a rush, “You do know about me. That I’m Victorian about things like too expensive presents, for instance.”
“Books and flowers only?”
“And something lovely like these, but—”
“Not a mink coat?”
“Not a mink coat. Oh Matthew—you know so much about me, but there are some things still that you don’t and—”
“Important things?”
She suddenly went somber, and for a moment there was silence in the room. The records lay spread on the carpet, four glistening squares of color and design, and on the coffee table the small elongated jeweler’s box in which the earrings had come. He saw her hand go to her throat as if to quiet a too lively pulse there and he said, “Don’t answer that, darling.” It was the way he said it that moved her, the offer of patience and trust. “Don’t even try until you’re good and ready,” he went on. “If ever I start cross-examining you, on anything, no matter what—”
“You weren’t cross-examining. I brought it up in the first place, and it was a perfectly natural question with anybody you’re this close to.”
“But don’t answer it anyway.” Slowly he added, “Let’s try not to make all the young mistakes, Dori. We can’t crawl inside each other’s minds and feelings, and past and present, the way kids think they can. We can’t be in the same cocoon.”
“We’d fit though.”
They made love then and later, lying beside him, curled inside the curve of his body, she thought again, We would fit. A vision flashed bright, of herself tucked in an arc within the arc of his being while, unknown to him, another being, not yet an inch long, was curving within her own.
Suddenly she felt a sweeping singing sureness that everything about this would go well, would go smoothly, would be happy and good. She turned toward him again. “Oh, Matthew, even without you on Christmas or New Year’s, it’s being the happiest Christmas and New Year’s of my life.”
It was past midnight when Matthew got home; Joan was still dressed, waiting for him, though normally she was either asleep or in bed, watching some television celebrity show or an old movie.
“You weren’t at your office,” she said. “I tried three times.”
“No. Is anything wrong?”
“The school suspended Johnny.”
“Damn it. For how long?”
“The rest of the semester.”
“Does he know?”
“I told him. He raised the roof.”
“Did he know it was coming?”
“No more than we did. A fine time for them to do it, just to make sure we had a happy Christmas. I had a lovely evening with Johnny, you can believe it.”
“I’m sorry I wasn’t here too.”
“You’re never here.”
She sounded bitter and he could not blame her. Not ten minutes after he had left to return to the office, she said, Mr. Garry, Johnny’s homeroom teacher, had telephoned and told her the news. A formal letter was in the mail, apparently lost in the Christmas rush, since there had been no response from the Pooles before school had closed for the vacation, and finally, though Garry had left town on his own holiday, he had decided he ought to make sure they were notified without further delay.
“Was it about the hockey?”
“That and all the other things. ‘Repeated insubordination,’ Garry said.”
His heart contracted. He had seen it coming, had talked it out with Johnny, not too insistently, not too often. The boy had been in a roil of rebellion against going out for hockey practice, just as in the fall he had refused football practice and in the spring, baseball. “All that crap about team spirit, Dad, just makes me puke.”
“Suppose everybody at school just dropped things they didn’t like—what kind of school would you have?”
“You didn’t dish out that kind of stuff up in Boston to Jim Benting—the draft makes him puke.”
Anger had flared between them, but in him admiration too. Formidable at thirteen, that kind of logic. Johnny was growing into a loner anyway, aside from his rebellion against authority in any of its forms. His abiding interests were making ship models and reading, the one unexpectedly expert and detailed, the other unexpectedly catholic and widespread. In the past two years he had raced through not only all the Hornblowers but also Lord Jim and half a dozen others by Conrad, also David Copperfield and half a dozen others by Dickens. But making friends came hard; most boys made him bridle, most girls bored him, and except for his favorite subjects, his chief comment about school was, “Forget it.” Most of his teachers he dismissed as finks. The school rebels were his heroes, and the university rebels beyond them his gods. He was never going to be anything but a rebel himself, and like all rebels anywhere in any period of history, in any milieu, he was going to be hurt. And the people who loved him and valued him were going to be hurt with him.
My turn, Matthew thought, not pausing over the phrase. All parents knew pain as well as joy through their children; he had often wondered whether there was any greater joy in the world than that which came through a beloved child; now he thought that if that was true, then the corollary and opposite must also be true.
“Let’s have some coffee,” he said to Joan, “and talk. I’m sorry you had to take this on by yourself. I didn’t dream anything like this was about to descend.”
She didn’t answer and he knew he had protested too much. He either did that in troubled times or fell silent, speaking as if to somebody he hardly knew, as if speech came hard to him, as if he were a man of monosyllables.
“When things go wrong, you just clam up.” That had become her accusation of recent years and it was true enough, particularly when a quarrel threatened. He could not stand the discussions, the explanations, the repetitions, but-you-said, but-you-never-said. The maddening paraphernalia of a quarrel stifled him, choked down his capacity to yield, to understand, and left him in stone-hard silence.
Except when it came to a fight for a client. In court he could feel the flow of power and will to proceed as the attack deepened; it was like a perceptible surge of adrenalin that he could see, a bright emission, life-rich and potent. Perhaps because he was himself not under attack, that withdrawal never occurred in court; on the contrary, words bubbled up, arguments, rebuttal, all urgent, clamoring to be spoken, leaving him with a sense of release and elation.
He felt again the racing exhilaration that had flooded him as he had argued for Jim Benting; he had felt an endless strength, to fight all the way, right up to the Supreme Court. Whatever one thought of Benting’s turning in his draft card to symbolize his protest against war, surely no just man could condone the draft board for wiping out his student deferment, reclassifying him for immediate military service, using the draft as a whip to flog a dissenter.
No, he hadn’t clammed up on the Benting case, he never did on something that deeply mattered to him. Perhaps that was the key clue, that phrase “deeply mattered.” He glanced at Joan, silently drinking her coffee. As she habitually did when she entered the kitchen, she had flicked on the switch of her record player and he tried not to see the pile of song records on the turntable, or the upper stack, pegged up in the air waiting. The volume was low as it always was and it should have been easy to ignore the ceaseless thread of sound, but an unwelcome snobbery climbed within him. From morning to night she listened to this kind of thing, twelve hours a day as a background for cooking and cleaning and knitting and sewing and all the things she said she really enjoyed. It mystified him, this difference between them about music, to name just one difference that had not been there at the beginning; for years her music had seemed mindless to him, automatic, just there, like humidity or sunshine, cloying or pleasant but mindless. He thought of the four records in his briefcase.
Again he was mystified at the many other distances that had grown so inexorably between them—music was only one of twenty such distances. How had it all happened, when they had started out as closely knit as any young couple in the first rapture of love?
And since it had, then how could any reasonable man ever expect any love to endure beyond its first beginnings? Could it endure between him and Dori? Given enough time, given life together in one household? In the deepest sense he was glad that this one valid test could not be made, would never be made. He was in love now with the insistence of a young man’s love; the continuing desire of a young man’s passion, and the fantasies and imaginings of a boy. But he knew, as a boy could not know, that there was no future for this kind of love, and that knowledge was his protection.
The affairs in between had never raised these questions; they had been for the most part brief and manageable; he was, he supposed, a selfish man when it came to emotional entanglement. He had been quick always to sense the shifting of the gears, as it were, in the mechanism of any affair; when the going was effortless and smooth, all was well, but when it became necessary to shift into middle gear and then into low because ease and smoothness were disappearing, then he grew watchful and unwilling. He had wanted no basic entanglements. He wanted no guilt. He wanted never again to reproach himself for being callous or cruel.
“I’ll call Garry in the morning,” he said at last.
“He’s in Ohio for the holiday. He called from there.”
“I can call Ohio. I’ll talk to Johnny first.”
“I’ve shopped so, for Christmas.”
He saw through the non sequitur, and again he could not blame her.
If it wasn’t Christmas night, he would phone Dori, late as it was. It had been an exhausting and endless effort to keep the semblances of a happy Christmas day; the two days before had been bad for everybody, edgy at best, violent and hostile at worst. Johnny was miserable and infuriating. Today had been a farce of Tolstoy’s happy family, all the proper sounds of joy and surprise and gratitude at each new present, and underneath always the heaviness. And there had been no sudden collapse at suppertime into baby-sleepiness; Hildy was still awake in her room and Johnny had just slammed off to his.
Joan was exhausted too. Matthew sat sprawled in a big chair, silent. To say now that he was going to the office would be insulting, so palpably untrue would it be. Yet he had to get off for a while; he had been with them all through every moment of three nights and days and he needed to get off as he needed to breathe.
“I’m going for a walk,” he said. “Want to come?”
Joan looked up in quick surprise and said, “I think I’ll straighten up the rest of this mess.”
He was glad and knew it. Outside he walked in the direction of his office—so much for habit—but for the first time in all that troubled stretch of days he could think fully of Dori. It was going to be a crowded week, one trip to Washington, another to Boston; if it were not so late now he would call her, but she probably had had a strenuous time of it too. Any number of times during yesterday and today he had longed to talk with her, to hear her voice, to tell her about Johnny and the blow it was, not for anything practical like advice or counsel, just for solace and the sense of sharing a problem. But how much could she understand this sort of thing, since she had never had children? How much could anybody understand who had never known the sweeping pride or the fierce dismay your child could give you, so dissimilar from any other pride or dismay in the world? How much did she regret not having children? The one subject she rather shied away from was this one of children; she had told him of her marriage and her divorce with enough completeness to make him see both clearly, but about the marriage being childless she had sounded constrained and somehow artificial.
“We did want children,” she had said. “The one mistake was the timing. Practically the first minute after we got married, so we stopped it. But then when we did want to start a family—”
He could still see her palms outflung, to gesture “nothing.” He remembered his discomfort at having embarrassed her and again thought, as he had then, But why embarrassed? He would have understood regret, or relief that there had been no child to suffer from the divorce, but there had been something else that he could not understand.
He glanced once more at his watch. Twenty after eleven. Much too late. It was a clear cold night, dry and frosty; around the streetlights, the air seemed to sparkle and the crisp night renewed him. At Fifty-eighth he paused and looked about him. A block to the west, across Fifth Avenue, the old bulk of the Plaza rose to its modest height, dwarfed by the new skyscraper being flung up across from it, and he turned toward the hotel, planless except for the idea of stopping in for a drink to feel better. Inside he ignored the bar and made for the row of telephone booths. A drink with her instead, a half hour of talk, no bed, no sex, just being with her for a little while; suddenly he wanted nothing else.
Five minutes later she was opening the door to him, a short wrap of some kind over her brief nightgown, her legs bare in the abbreviated wisp she wore, as short as a little girl’s party dress. How beautiful she was this way, without makeup, with her hair loose, and how important in his life, and in so swift a time.
“The school suspended Johnny,” he said abruptly. “Once before they warned him, but it’s bad to have it really happen.”
“Oh Matthew, why did they? When?”
He told her about the last two years of growing worry over his son, finding comfort in the intensity of her listening, the absorption of her listening. As if she’d been through it herself, as if she knew the sinking of the heart that came with this sort of trouble.
“Dori, don’t you get bored hearing about somebody’s kids?” he asked unexpectedly. “Most people get bored; you can’t talk to them about that part of your life at all.”
“Of course I’m not bored. If I had had children, I can’t imagine—” She broke off abruptly as if the thread of her thought had been snipped by shears and now fluttered, dangling, in separated halves.
“What is it, Dori?” He reached for her hand and held it between his own. “There’s something that makes you change, whenever we talk about kids. What happens? What sort of thing is it?”
“I didn’t know I changed. What do you mean, ‘change’?”
“I can’t say exactly. But two or three times already I’ve come smash up to a stone wall closing you off. If you want that wall there, all right, but if it’s something you want to talk about—”
She felt her eyes sting, and she thought, But don’t blurt it out, not now, not ever. Wait one more day, wait until tomorrow—just to be sure you’re not acting on impulse, not now, not ever.
“Oh, Matthew,” she said, “you don’t know about one of the greatest parts of my life, that started when I was married, when we began to want children, and didn’t have any, and didn’t, and didn’t, until I finally went to a doctor to see why I wasn’t getting pregnant, a Dr. Jesskin, who was specializing in that branch of medicine. Nearly thirteen years ago, it was, the first time I went.”
Now it was Matthew who listened with the intensity of total absorption. Talking, she lived again through the long-ago tests, the long-ago promises, the disappointment and hope and disappointment again, the fearful pendulum. She felt again what she had so often felt as she watched women and girls going and coming in Dr. Jesskin’s office, some happy, some disgruntled, some with an anxious look about them that made her sure they were there not because they were pregnant but because they could not be.
“My poor girl,” he said once.
At his words, at the tightened handclasp, her eyes filled with tears. But she felt good because she hadn’t lost control, hadn’t blurted out too much; now when she did tell him about being pregnant he would know the whole story of it, know the years behind it, see it as she saw it.
“Did you ever think of adopting a child?” he asked at last.
“We had even set a timetable. We were going to give Dr. Jesskin one more year, and then if it was still nothing, we were going to start seeing adoption agencies. But after the divorce even that was finished.” She looked at him in sudden curiosity. “Could I have gone ahead? Could a woman alone adopt a baby? Or is it true that only couples are allowed to?”
“Not that I know of.” He became the attorney, alert, wary of the quick reply. “I’d want to check out New York adoption laws at the office with people who specialize in them, but I seem to have read of cases where single women did adopt.”
“Don’t bother looking it up. I just wondered.” She suddenly sprang to her feet. “I haven’t even given you a drink. We got talking right at the front door. But oh Matthew, I’m so glad we did.”