An April Afternoon

by Philip Wylie

  On my desk was an unfinished poem. I stared malignly at the last of what had been done upon it:

  ". . . no fugue.

  Boleros! Tarantellas! Rigadoons

  Storms of music, man! Monsoons!

  Tempests! Avalanching tunes!"

  Avalanching tunes. Terrible. But, then, I had written the thing in the morning.

  Virginia was on her way home. Now she was here--and farther away than when the ocean lay between us. My effort to be boisterous even at the cost of good prosody no longer kept time to my heart. And since my room could not include the sea at night, it became a closet. A closet where soon I and my degree and my verses would hang like an old suit waiting to be dropped to the floor at the end of a race between rust and the moths.

  That elaborate phantasy made me laugh at myself. One is scarcely an old suit at twenty-three--although it is, perhaps, the age when the feeling of moths and rust is strongest. I hope so, anyway. I laughed and then I stopped. For a moment I wished I hadn't thought about suits. Old suits.

  Because that reminded me of the letter. I hadn't seen the letter for a long while.

  Not since the night Jeanne had given me what she had afterwards described as "the air."

  Those very syllables--that short pair--had cured my infatuation. The air, forsooth!

  And now I had again rounded time to the letter. The only thing to do was to go through with it.

  I unlocked my trunk.

  It wasn't my letter. It had come into my possession when I was eleven, by an accident. It broke my heart and, mystically, it had heartened me, too.

  At eleven I still limped pretty badly, but I was determined to cure myself. I was enterprising. Connie and John sent all of us to public school until we had finished the eighth grade. They had ideas about childhood and snobbery, ideas about Americanism and democracy. If country day school could damage us, they said, then we didn't deserve to journey through life unblighted. So our friends wept alone in the awful exile of private schools until they were assimilated and toughened or made neurotic--and we Sheffields had a wonderful time a half mile down the road.

  At eleven, I was in the seventh grade. I had the nickname then of "One-Crutch"

  and I was proud of it. "Ma," the kids used to say, "you ought to see that One-Crutch swim!" and "Hey! One-Crutch! You steer the bob-sled, willyuh?" Virginia was in the second grade and I ignored her. Ivan in the sixth. Larry in the fourth. I'd forgotten that I had not been born a Sheffield--or almost. Once in a while the school kids asked me what

  'it was like to be adopted, but the question invariably baffled me. I could not see that it made any difference--except that you had an edge because you excited more curiosity than offspring arrived at normally.

  One October afternoon when the bees were in the fallen apples, I discovered the junkman. His place was a paradise to visit--and things could be sold to him--bottles, scrap metal, garments. I hurried home and in the attic I found a pile of half-remembered old clothes. Suits that had belonged to John, for the most part. I made a proposition to Connie and she laughed and refused to be cut in, so I loaded the stuff on my wagon and started around the cove to the village.

  It was pretty exciting and I was thinking in terms of dollars, and when I came opposite to the place where the oyster boats were hauled up in winter, a letter fell from one of the pockets in my cargo. I picked up the envelope and immediately reached a new apogee of pleasure. On the letter was a series of 1918, uncancelled, two center. I was collecting stamps, then, and this was quite a trophy for my modest album. I noticed only vaguely that the letter was addressed in John's hand to our Aunt Beatrice. But, little by little, an impulse to read it grew in me and I finally rationalized away my ethics by deciding that it was an awful old letter--so old, so to speak, that the statute of limitations had invalidated the code of privacy.

  I opened it and read it. The junk man gave me three dollars. But if he had given me three million, it would not have mattered. . . .

  Such is the first rite in the custom of reading that letter. I had lifted the lid of my trunk. I took the letter from the amateurishly constructed false bottom· I had made to hide it in. There was the uncancelled series of 1918 stamp and John's orthography smudged now. I opened it and I read it once again:

  "Dear Beatrice--

  "Connie and I have taken a step of which we are somewhat uncertain and before you come on to visit us, I thought I would explain it to you. As you know, we decided when Virginia was born to adopt a little girl baby to keep her company. The notion was Connie's and it seemed excellent. We can afford it and there are many deserving orphans of superb lineage who would profit by a home like ours.

  "Unfortunately, it is more difficult to adopt a child than I had thought and we became involved in a protracted search for a suitable one. While we were examining candidates in an orphanage in New Haven, Connie was attracted to one in particular. You know the impulsiveness of her nature, and her unshakableness. So you can guess the rest.

  We adopted him.

  "Yes, him. And not an infant, as we had planned. Frankly, I am distressed about it. He is four years old-- older than Ivan--and crippled by infantile paralysis. Reasoning with Connie did no good. You will understand that. He is a foundling. Nothing is known of his origin and heritage, which may be criminal or besotted. There is no way to tell. I will say that he is an appealing and seemingly intelligent little fellow and his disposition is excellent.

  "But it is all so foreign and depressing that I have trouble accustoming myself to the idea. He uses crutches--and I've always had a revolted feeling about them. He stumps about the house and good food does not seen to relieve his scrawniness. Naturally, I shall see that he has every advantage of medical attention. I presume that--in two or three years his life may be taken care of by schools and camps. But I am worried. Connie is almost more interested in him than in her new child.

  "I would not write in this tone were it not for my deep feelings about it all. This sickly little stranger's handicaps may be a perpetual drag upon the whole family, and it is for my own children that I have a fear which explains these words. I want you to advise me after you have seen him. His name is Francis and we call him Frankie.

  My love to you,

  Distraughtly,

  John."

  That was the letter I had found when I was eleven. John had forgotten to mail it.

  At first, of course, that letter made in me a continuous explosion which devastated my world to its outermost limits. How many of the ruins still remain, I cannot say.

  Occasionally I stumble upon one of them--an ugly and ragged barrier in the midst of much reconstruction. I mean, I catch myself wondering whether or not John still bears me some of the same animus he expressed in his words to Beatrice. Or I look at Ivan and wonder if my miserable origin has in any way damaged his inward life. It scarcely seems so.

  I went home from the junk yard that day because of habit or gravity or some other unknown force which acted in a ;situation where the commanding part of me had become helpless. I even ate my supper. Connie noticed that I was--silent. John suggested that I had consumed too many of the ripening apples.

  I went up to bed. In my childish ache there was pride. To live with the Sheffields as a Sheffield was unthinkable after my discovery. All night I planned. In the morning, I ran away. It was an orderly and uncompromising departure. My wagon transported my belongings, which had been smuggled from the house: fishing tackle, a harmonica, a Scout knife and hatchet and cooking equipment, together with my sturdiest and warmest clothes. For funds I had my savings from my allowance--eighteen dollars and seventy-three cents--plus the money for the old suits which had contained the letter. My more elegant garments--Windsor ties and white linen knickerbockers--I left behind. Such things belonged to Sheffields and not to nameless persons like myself.

  To forestall search, I left a note:

  "Dear John, dear Connie--all of you--

  "Since I have now passed my eleventh year and
am practically grown I have gone into the world to make my way. I am terribly grateful to you all and if I happen to become a Success, I shall more than repay you for your millions of kindnesses to me.

  "Yours truly,

  Frankie--."

  That blank after my first name was the nearest I ever came to revealing my reason for running away. I was gone for three days. They found me camping uncomfortably in the woods about two miles from the house and the time interval was long only because I had stayed so near Reedy Cove.

  Seven states had been searched. The New York newspapers were carrying huge advertisements with my picture in them. John had hired a hundred special men and the services of two detective agencies. Connie had taken to her bed. A game warden had stumbled upon my bivouac while I was toasting a piece of bread over a can of solidified alcohol. There was a five thousand dollar reward for my safe return, so he would not listen to my bitter statement that I was a private citizen minding my own business. He grabbed me--and I bit him so badly that they had to take three stitches in his arm.

  Some families--most, perhaps--might have greeted my homecoming with the rage that so often accompanies relief. But not the Sheffields. Connie kissed me easily a thousand times and she cried over me for weeks after that. John was summoned by phone. He came tearing up the drive in the red car of a police chief and there were tears in his eyes, too. They all assumed that a fierce feeling of humiliation over my leg and my origin had driven me to flight--and I couldn't tell them the truth in the presence of the welter of real love which was shown me.

  John wooed me with small boy magic--and with hard allegory. He got me a ride on a hook and ladder to a real fire and another ride in a switch-yard locomotive's cab. I blew the whistle and rang the bell. At eleven!

  A couple of nights after I had been A.W.O.L. John took me for a walk and told me the story of the stone road. He applied it to my circumstances--and I applied it to something else--but the story did me good and I have used it since in: moments of inescapable duress. The story was the foundation upon which I rebuilt my relations with the Sheffields--and the new structure became so strong that they never think of me now as other than one of them.

  It wasn't really so much of a story and I'm sure he invented it. We walked in the drugged air of an Indian summer night--John and I. He had taken me on walks oftener than he took Ivan or Larry--which was a very shrewd sort of understanding. The idea of farming me out to schools and camps must have left him soon after he had written the letter to Aunt Beatrice.

  He often told stories.

  This one was about the Romans and a barbaric province which the legionaries had unsuccessfully attempted to subjugate. Finally they had decided that it would be necessary to build a road into the land in order to conquer it. John went into considerable detail about that road--its deep foundations, the colossal blocks of stone cut to give it eternal durability, the arched viaducts painfully lifted along its way, the months that became years, the feet that lengthened into miles, engineering problems met and solved, raids by bands of the natives--all the clank and glitter and death of ancient history.

  Then he told me about the barbarians' leader--a man with bull horns tied on his head and a tiger skin around his loins. This man allowed the Romans to build on and on into the territory he considered his own not because he was afraid, but because he had a scheme. It was his plan to let the Romans build. He had no use for a road and did not want it. However, he perceived that some day the invaders would be far from their bases and ships, deep in hostile territory, and therefore easy victims of their own ambitious effort.

  And that day arrived, at last. Two thousand soldiers and ten thousand slaves--I believe John called them "workmen"--found themselves exiled at the road-head, cut off from aid, and surrounded by a horde of screaming savages. They fought for days--

  seventeen, according to John--and died one by one, piling the enemy around the road, slashing as they fell. But, in the end, they were all destroyed. Rome was swept from its own highway, the barbarian prevailed along it, and rain washed away the blood.

  The enemy feasted and rejoiced and their leader was greatly extolled for his cunning.

  (At that point, I had felt routed and wretched, for John had made certain poignant analogies, and it seemed that I was doomed.)

  The scene next changed to Rome and the arrival of the ship which brought tidings of defeat. There was public sorrow and vast indignation. But--were the Romans resigned to their disaster? Not a bit of it! The savages could, indeed, massacre legions if they outnumbered them greatly. But there remained still--the road. The indestructible stone thoroughfare.

  So a new army was sent into the dreadful dominion. But this was an army which did not have to hack footpaths through the forest. This army had a stone floor direct to the heart of the enemy's land. And over that floor horses could move-and elephants-they could bring up mighty engines to hurl a hundred arrows at a time--catapults--materials for forts--food, arms, reinforcements--all the heavy gear of battle. And now the enemy was beaten. Greater power and a superior guile made their crude tactics futile. The Romans moved in.

  That was the story. And that, John said, is how a man is--inside himself. He can be licked for a while--but, if he has built for himself a road of stone--

  There was that.

  And there was the never-ending example of the Sheffields themselves. As pages snowed from the calendar of my life, as the years melted its cruelties, I began to see that I myself had been for John a beleaguring barbarian--and he had conquered his revulsion toward me. In so wise and generous an atmosphere, I could not sustain my own sneaking inhibitions--so I lost them one by one--or most of them. Now--when I sign "Francis Sheffield" to a verse or write it on a check, if I stop to reflect that my real name isn't Sheffield, it is only to have a flush of pride in the one which I have been loaned.

  Such is the final rite of the letter. I fold it up and return it to the bottom of the trunk. Sometimes that last formality makes me smile. Sometimes it wets my eyes. But either mood is an expression of the same feeling--of courage given to me, of loving deeply and being deeply loved.

  I put the letter away that night and thereby exorcised what bitterness I could from a dream relinquished. There was a great deal in my life that Fate had given with wanton generosity. To ask more was to tempt the Gods. How could I look at my rare estate and expect more? I who felt a sickening kinship to all the short, blunt bits at the bottoms of newspaper columns: Homeless man dies of malnutrition; Circus visits orphanage; Twelve year old boy robs delicatessen; Mother, two children found asphyxiated?

  I closed my trunk and locked it and went down to the porch to watch the fireflies for a while--quietly so that none of the others would be wakened.

  Virginia was there--in the swing--asleep. She, too, had come out of doors in search of the solace of sky and earth--and the very perplexities of her vigil had exhausted her, so she had fallen into a deep slumber. I bent over her, seeing her clearly. No matter how perfect a loved one may be, description is almost useless. For that which is tangible is commonplace--and that which one loves cannot be captured. I suppose nature produces thousands of external Virginias--though it's profligate--and I've even seen as fine and flaxen hair, a brow as moving, a nose as inquiring, such exquisite delicacy at the corners of lips, and forms combining as much sveltness with equal female proclamation--but I have never seen another Virginia, and I know I never shall.

  She stirred a little as I looked at her and the movement let fall from the corner of her eye a solitary tear which glistened as it crossed her temple. The back of her hand pressed it away. She pulled the flimsy stuff she was wearing more closely to her and opened her eyes. She saw me at once, and smiled.

  "Hello, Frankie."

  "Hello."

  "Have you a cigarette?"

  "Yes."

  I handed one to her and she sat up. My match showed her face and the place on it where the tear had been. Then I sat down in a rocker.

  "Let'
s not talk," she said.

  CHAPTER III

  The next morning, by accident, we all had breakfast together. John and I were down first. Breakfast in bed was not tabu at what the family called "Fort Sheffield" or

  "The Fort"-but it generally meant that the pabulo-cubicularist was sullen, piqued, introspective, or slightly hung over--so--since no Sheffield was ever very much hung over and none was often sullen--the luxury was frowned on not for its self but for its implications.

  My mind was in Spain. A little town in which I had spent a great many afternoons watching grille shadows move across cobblestones, drinking earth-flavored sherry, and listening to a girl whose name was Mirabella sing ecstatically of disillusionment--a sweet, sun-latticed village--had been moved beyond all sun and song by a blizzard of bombs. That frightened me a little. Our world's so close together now that in the echo of distant wars is a harmonic Whispering, "Who next?"

  John said, "Good morning, Frankie."

  I looked up. I looked out of the window at the fallen rainbow in the garden and made out of those sententious responses. It was good here, I said, but with a few rocket-tailed canisters of t.n.t.--

  John nodded. He liked mackerel in white wine sauce for breakfast and he had several mouthfuls before he said, "What's the matter with Virginia?"

  "Why--" That was all I said, because that was all I was allowed to say.

  He smiled in his other way--a grave and engaging way. "I shouldn't have mentioned it--should I?"

  "I don't think there's anything the matter--really."

  "Yeah. I asked, I guess--just to get your assurance that she wasn't in any sort of fix that needed my shoulder at the wheel."

  "She'd have told you--in that case."

  "Sure. Being a parent produces its own neuroses. All right.

  She, can handle it herself it it's--" his eyes traveled idly through the window-- "--one of those things like falling in love with somebody too old, or somebody we wouldn't like, or somebody married--"