by Pat Frank
The Secretary of State had been asked about the status of the two Mongolians, and he said he had the greatest confidence in the fair play of the Russian government, our loyal allies, and he was sure the U.S.S.R. would not hoard them. The Secretary of State suggested that hereafter any unsterilized males should be turned over to the United Nations. If I remember his words correctly, he said, “How can we expect the United Nations to become a strong and independent force for the benefit of all mankind unless it possesses access to the resources of all nations?” It was a brilliant thought, and I was surprised that he hadn’t thought of it before.
He pointed out what aid the United States had given Russia, during the war, and went all the way back to the Alaska purchase to recall our constant good relations with Russia. The very spirit of Communism, he pointed out, was devoted to the good of all peoples, and he reminded Russia that the two unsterilized Mongols were citizens of the world, as well as of the U.S.S.R.
There was a dispatch from Chungking hinting that the two Mongolians might not be Russian at all, but Chinese, and requesting that the case be put before the Security Council. London immediately announced it would vote along with China.
And then, just before midnight, a dispatch from Moscow said that the Russian government didn’t know a thing about unsterilized Mongolians. The story of the two Mongolians, Moscow said, was undoubtedly part of an anti-Communist plot.
An announcer talked about a laxative that was so soothing for those over thirty-five, and I said I thought it was horrible advertising psychology, and Marge asked why, and I said because it automatically eliminated everyone under thirty-five as a prospective customer. Marge said that wasn’t the reason I didn’t like it. The reason was because I was over thirty-five, and resented it whenever anyone reminded me of it. And I admitted that was another reason I didn’t like it. And Marge said she thought it was good advertising, now that Adam was finished and the two Mongolians were phoney, because eventually everybody would be over thirty-five.
I don’t think she liked the idea, because she was still awake, with her head couched in her arm, when I fell asleep.
I suppose everyone turned out his lights at the usual hour that night. Certainly there was no wailing in the streets.
CHAPTER 15
With Adam ruined, the two Mongolians a myth, the N.R.C. baffled and helpless, and the N.R.P. on the verge of liquidation, the situation was black as a British communiqué the day before Dunkirk. Yet the customs and habits of man kept him revolving in his orbit as inexorably as planets are bound to the sun. The world would not die in agony and convulsions. It would simply expire of old age.
The most popular slogan of the day was “Take it easy,” and Life Begins at Forty again went to the top of the list of best sellers. The only people who were extremely sensitive to the passing of each childless day were women approaching an age where they would no longer be able to hear children. They formed associations, and demanded that Congress and the Administration do something, but there was nothing to do.
Everyone acquired a little bit of the philosophy of J.C. Pogey, and Pogey himself said mankind was behaving exactly as he had expected. “It is this way,” he explained. “If the threat of destruction couldn’t jolt us out of our rut—and that threat was apparent long before Mississippi—then the fact of destruction can’t be expected to change us much either.”
Everything rocked along as usual. The Miami Chamber of Commerce announced that it was planning its biggest season, and that next winter, for certain, Miami would not be overrun with gangsters and racketeers. The airlines started five-day excursions to Paris and Cairo. There was an abundance of nylon stockings, but it became unfashionable to wear them. The housing crisis miraculously passed. Everything was normal—except in my own home.
In my own home the situation suddenly and violently departed from normal. It was Marge. Her entire disposition and character changed, and for the worse.
At first I put it down to delayed shock from the catastrophe that had overtaken Homer. Marge had been more than fond of Homer. Like so many weak men with stronger women, he apparently had appealed to all her protective instincts. In addition, she really had had a good deal of faith in A.I., probably acquired from talking to Maria Ostenheimer. Yet she had accepted the sterilization of Homer Adam without undue emotion.
Now she grew irritable, and touchy, and I blamed it on delayed shock. She was gradually realizing, I believed at first, that Homer’s suicidal disaster had doomed her to a barren marriage.
The habit and pattern and tradition of our life together—the small things that two people do together that make them one—were blemished or vanished entirely. These are very small things indeed, but of surpassing importance. There are the private jokes; and the ritual of who wakes first, and puts on the coffee; and who gets what part of the Sunday papers; and my growls because she uses my razor.
The business of the razor ordinarily used to go like this: When I started shaving I would discover that my razor had had it. I would curse and say that there were a few things a man could have in private, and one of them was a razor, and that if she wanted to shave her legs she could easily run over to the drug store on the Avenue of the Americas and buy a razor all her own. And she would say she had bought countless razors, but hers were always dull, and mine was always sharp. And I would say that was because I put fresh blades in mine, and she would say that was part of a man’s duty, and I would say I was going to cure her entirely, and take up electric shaving.
And there, ordinarily, was where it ended. But one day in June I was covering an exhibition of electric gadgets and a manufacturer presented all the reporters with electric razors.
The next morning I was running it over my chin when Marge saw me and immediately burst into tears. “You horrid man,” she said. “You don’t love me any more.”
“I don’t what?”
“You don’t love me any more. For years you’ve tortured me with threats about buying an electric razor, and now you have gone and done it, simply to show your contempt for me.”
I looked at her, and saw she actually was crying. An absurd and maudlin scene developed, at the end of which I threw my electric razor into the trash barrel.
Then there was the matter of getting up nights. Ordinarily Marge sleeps as if she had been hit on the head, until morning, but she began to develop a habit of waking up, at four or five, and then waking me up. “I want a bag of peanuts,” she would say, nudging me or kicking me from the other side of Smith Field. Sometimes she would wake up and say she wasn’t sure the front door was locked, or would I please get up and bring her a raw egg.
It was all inexplicable, and most unlike her.
The worst of it was her newly acquired jealousy and suspicion. Marge had never been jealous. For one thing, it is silly and futile for a newspaperman’s wife to be jealous, just as it is silly and futile for a doctor’s wife to be jealous. The uncertain hours and nature of his job provide a newspaperman with so many unimpeachable alibis that if a wife suspects him she will just run herself crazy, and never prove anything. In the second place, Marge simply wasn’t jealous. I don’t know whether it was confidence in herself, or in me.
Now, each night when I returned from work, she began to drop little fishhooks of questions into her conversation, trying to catch some fancied admission that would prove me unfaithful.
She fished in all the years of our marriage. Incidents that I had long forgotten, and girls of whom I had only the vaguest memory became subjects for hysterical accusations and violent scenes. One evening Marge casually put a magazine aside and said, “That secretary of yours in Washington, Jane Zitter—you saw a lot of her, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” I said. “She was a big help. Swell girl.”
“Stephen, you sort of lived with her, didn’t you?”
I saw what was coming. “Now look, Marge,” I said. “There wasn’t anything between Jane and me except that she was my secretary, and a very good one, too. And i
f you’ve got to exercise these silly notions of yours, pick on somebody besides poor Jane.”
“Well, you’re pretty excited about it, aren’t you,” she said significantly. “Actually, she did live with you, didn’t she?”
I knew I was going to blow up, and I began to pace the floor to relieve the pressure. “Marge, you know as well as I do that sometimes Jane spent the night up in the hotel. In her own bedroom. In her own bed. Nobody with her. Now lay off!”
“You’re shouting at me again,” she said. “You always shout when you’ve done something you can’t explain. Just because you make a lot of noise doesn’t make you less guilty.”
I was tired of it. I was tired of Marge and her incessant third degree. But I didn’t say anything more. I put on my hat, and went outside, and it was good to be alone. I realized that lately I had been leaving for work earlier than necessary, and returning home as late as possible. I walked over to Fifth Avenue, and then down to Washington Square. I found an empty bench, and sat down and tried to think.
I told myself that I was letting my nerves harass me into a point where I would reach an impasse with Marge, and there would be a divorce, although a divorce since W.S. Day seemed almost as futile as marriage. Then I began to analyze her actions. I tried to place myself in the role of a disinterested spectator. And particularly I began to analyze her spasms of jealousy and suspicion. I told myself that there could be no doubt of it, Marge was ill—mentally ill. She had all the symptoms.
It was quite the most horrible and dismaying conclusion I ever reached. I had never realized, before, that insanity in one close to you is far worse than physical illness, for when a person’s mind goes they are completely gone from you, as in death, and yet their body remains. Of course I had to be certain, and once I was certain I must see that she got the very best neurotherapy. I told myself that it probably wasn’t incurable. I would ask Maria Ostenheimer and Tommy Thompson over the next night and, without alarming Marge, they could tell whether it was so.
Before I returned home I stopped at a drug store, and called Maria, and told her the whole story, as unemotionally as possible, and from the questions she asked I could see that she was worried, and she promised to come over the next evening for bridge, and she would bring Tommy.
I went to sleep that night trying to remember what I knew of Marge’s family. Certainly her mother and father were quite sane, but I knew hardly anything of her grandparents. Maybe it didn’t matter.
So Maria and Tommy came over the next night—a Tuesday—ostensibly for bridge, but actually to put Marge under quiet observation for a few hours. It started off tamely enough, but it developed into quite a remarkable evening.
We started playing bridge in the usual way, talking about the usual things—the Transylvania question, and Manchuria, and wasn’t it shame about A.I.—but I could see that Maria and Tommy were watching Marge closely as if they had her in the hospital. They watched the co-ordination of her hands, they watched her eyes, and they dropped deft little, seemingly unrelated, questions into the stream of our conversation. And Marge, I do believe, appeared completely normal for the first hour or so, until she suddenly put down her cards and exclaimed, “I must have a dill pickle!”
“What’s that?” Tommy asked.
“I must have a dill pickle!” Marge repeated. “If I don’t have a dill pickle I shall go mad. Stephen, go to the delicatessen at once and get some dill pickles!”
“But, Marge,” I protested, “that’s absurd. We can’t break up the game just because you have a sudden yen for a dill pickle!”
“Stephen, you hate me, don’t you? But I must have a pickle.”
“I think,” Maria interrupted quietly, “that you had better go get a pickle, Stephen.”
So I trotted around to the delicatessen and bought some dill pickles. “Don’t slice them,” Marge ordered when I got back. “I want them whole.” I expected her to devour them whole, on the spot, but she bit into one, nibbled at a small piece of it, and then shoved them aside.
“Is that all you want?” I asked, indignant at all the trouble for one puny bit of pickle.
“That’s all,” she said. “Whose deal?”
I looked at Maria and Tommy. Obviously they were puzzled. Perhaps startled is a better word. Particularly Maria. “Darling,” she asked Marge in a soothing voice, “do you often get a sudden hankering for a certain kind of food, like that? So you feel you must have it, absolutely must?”
“She certainly does,” I said, “at the oddest hours.”
“Shut up!” Marge told me. “Shut up! Haven’t I any privacy in my own house?”
Tommy didn’t say anything. He began to deal the cards. Maria kept her eyes on Marge, a queer, puzzled expression—you might call it compassion—shining out of her small dark face.
And then, in perhaps thirty minutes, Marge got up from the table, and slipped on her coat, and said, “You people will excuse me for a few minutes, won’t you?”
“Where are you going?” I said. “Marge, we’ve got company. We’re playing bridge.”
“No, Stephen, I’ll go myself,” Marge said. “I don’t want to bother you. It’s so much trouble for you to go out and get something for me.”
“Now, Marge,” I said, “just tell me what you want and I’ll get it.” I found that I was afraid if she went out she would not come back. I recalled all the stories I’d written in my life about wives who got up from the bridge table, or left a cocktail party, and turned up at Bayonne, N. J., or Birmingham, ten days later with a beautiful and impenetrable amnesia.
“I was just going out and get some lemons,” Marge said. “I’ve got a frightful craving for lemons.”
“Aren’t there some in the refrigerator?” I said.
“No, I’m afraid I ate them all,” Marge said. “For days I’ve been devouring lemons. Dozens of them.”
Maria said, as if she was repeating a witch’s incantation, “Pickles and lemons, lemons and pickles.” She touched Marge’s arm and said, “Dear, I want to see you alone for a moment, in the bedroom.”
“But my lemons,” Marge said.
They went into the bedroom together. “What do you think of that performance?” I asked Tommy. I was shocked, but at the same time I was glad it had happened, because it gave Maria and Tommy such a perfect insight into the strange things that had been going on in the Chez Smith.
Tommy hunched his enormous shoulders and let his chin sink on his chest. “There’s something in the back of my mind,” he said.
“Don’t you agree,” I said, “that there is something wrong, mentally? These wild whims for food—and the jealousy. Of course you won’t get a chance to see her when she starts accusing me, because she won’t do it until you’re gone. But it’s really pathetic.”
Tommy shook his head. “She’s not crazy,” he said. “She’s emotionally disturbed, but she’s not crazy. There’s something pushing against her subconscious that gives us these symptoms. Brought into the open, they’d probably disappear. I just can’t imagine what it would be, unless—”
“Unless what—”
“Skip it,” Tommy said brusquely, and then Maria poked her head out of the bedroom door, and said would Tommy please come in for a moment. She sounded excited. Tommy went into the bedroom, and shut the door behind him, and my imagination began to play a rhythm of fear and apprehension inside my head.
Now you could see, I told myself, that it was serious. Maria taking Marge into the bedroom, like that, showed that she suspected something. And calling Tommy into consultation showed that she wanted him to confirm it. Once I thought I heard a sound like a frightened squeal. They remained in the bedroom for what seemed an unreasonably long time, although probably it was no more than fifteen minutes, and by the time they came out I was pacing the floor, a drink in my hand, and my hand was shaking.
I began, definitely, to hear noises from the bedroom. It sounded like Marge’s laughter, but it was probably groans. Then they all came out, in a silen
t, tense little line, like the first three coming out of the jury room. Maria was first, Tommy second, and Marge last. If I remember correctly, they were all crying, or laughing, or both.
They walked over to me and Tommy took me by the shoulders and said, “Unless we are both mistaken, and we are both willing to stake our reputation on it, Marge is going to have a baby!”
I remembered staring down at the shattered glass that I had held in my hand, and the pool of soda bubbling around it. I found that Tommy was holding me up. “Stephen!” Marge said. “Stephen, what’s the matter?”
“He’s out on his feet,” Tommy said. “He’ll be all right in a second. Bring him another drink.”
I drank it, and I looked at all of their faces and I could see that they weren’t joking. For a long time all I could say was, “Impossible!” and then I sat down and began to think.
I thought very rapidly, and asked how long Marge had been pregnant, and Maria said about two months—probably a little longer—and I ticked the months off on my fingers, backwards, and arrived at Marge in Washington—with Homer Adam. Marge said, “I know just what you’re thinking, Stephen Decatur Smith, and it isn’t so. You’re a suspicious, dirty old man.”
“Oh, my,” I said, “if it wasn’t Homer, then who was it?”
“Him!” she said. She put her arms around Tommy’s neck and kissed him on the mouth.
“Oh, no, it wasn’t him,” I said. “He’s in exactly the same shape I’m in. You can’t fool me, Marge. It was Homer. I can’t say that I blame you. If you really want a baby, that was the only reliable way to have one.”
“Oh, you darn fool,” said Marge. “You don’t understand at all, do you?”
“Naturally, I don’t understand. What husband ever does understand?”
“Shall I explain?” Tommy asked.
“No, I’ll tell him,” Marge said, “although I really shouldn’t. I really should let him think it was Homer.”
“Go ahead,” I said. “From now on I can take anything.”
