An April Afternoon

by Philip Wylie

  "If a person were only what he thinks he is--and not also what he feels he is and what he has forgotten he was--why--he'd be killed by the first passing automobile he wasn't considering in relation to himself; he'd never have any fun because fun is a feeling and not a thought; he'd be a joke. No--if she's going to try to solve a powerful feeling about a married man by 'not kidding herself'--Virginia is out of luck."

  "She thinks about her feelings."

  "How?" There was a trace of scorn in his voice.

  "Well--she--" I thought John was splitting hairs. It is difficult to describe to a hostile auditor how another person can think of feelings.

  "You couldn't answer me in a thousand years, Frankie. She can think about feelings she has had in the past. She can think up feelings she'd like to have--or fears she'd like to avoid--in the future. But nobody can think about a feeling that's going on.

  Nobody, that is, who isn't willing to admit that he may be kidding himself. Because that's what feelings are for--to make a louse out of the part of you that thinks. So that you'll pay as much attention to inward promptings as you do to the non-kiddable and highly unreliable organ you call your mind. See?"

  I didn't see--exactly. And a moment later I saw a little--for I caught myself wondering what would happen if I listened to my feelings instead of the principles and tenets of my "non-kiddable" mind. For a flashing instant the idea held me spellbound.

  Maybe that was the thing to do. Maybe there was a different order of behavior-and an equally moral one--a powerful and honest way of life--which did not entail endless internal argument, figurative picking at the coverlet, storm and stress, self-denial. But in merely revelling for a second over that concept I stepped out of bounds and I could hear my own voice whisper that such a notion was, indeed, the very substance of deceit.

  We were close to the place where we had parked the car. I could see a chrome gleam beyond the nearest willow. John's reel purred as he wound in his line. "I asked her to invite Bush up here."

  My feeling of lostness when Virginia had told me, became real and permanent. I wanted to yell a protest. And I knew, now, how he had felt about Connie and Colby. A long time passed before I could manage a proper response. "That was a good idea."

  "She's been so much a part of the family--she ought to see whether he fits or not."

  We were at the edge. I had hard going--boots weigh me down--and he took my arm.

  "Suppose--John--she decided yes?"

  His voice was clear and controlled. "Bush might be persuaded to divorce his wife-

  -"

  That hadn't entered my mind. It sealed what was already locked. I was glad when he went on talking. "At least--we'll know the answers soon."

  "Soon?"

  His pipe was spent and he tapped it against a tree. "She said she'd have him up as soon as Larry and Ivan got back from school."

  "Oh."

  "And I'll know whether my dilemma is real or imaginary--tonight."

  "Tonight?"

  "Didn't Connie tell you?"

  "Colby's coming? No. She didn't say anything to me. She--" I stopped talking.

  John had been stowing his rod as I had spoken. Now he stood still for an instant.

  "That's odd--isn't it?"

  I said the first thing that popped into my head. "There's a 'stone road' aspect to all this--isn't there, John?"

  "Yes. For both of us."

  I wondered about that and dismissed my wondering. "Is that why you stayed out here in the stream so late? Must be nearly nine."

  He brought back his attention from somewhere. "Hunh? No. Dinner was to be late. Ten." He started the car. Then, before going, he leaned out and looked at the treetops, the moon, the water.

  He and eleven other men had joined forces to buy the whole brook--from its source to the Sound--and all the land adjoining it. They had stocked it, now, for a decade and a half, and they fished it as they pleased. It was an expensive hobby to establish and fairly expensive to maintain. But I imagine that the cost was really small in view of the corporations which had been hatched in the limpid water, the plans contrived there, the strain relieved, and the refreshment given to the frightened, the fierce and the almost defeated.

  The moon set while we drove back to Fort Sheffield. The house was big with lighted windows and we left our waders in the garage for Berry to clean. Then we walked up and around through the garden. Pebbles in the path pushed on our socks at myriad places and massaged our tired feet. A car drove under the porte-cochère as we passed it and Connie opened the front door. We saw a shimmer of white flannels in an athletic leap, and a doffed Panama hat. It was Colby and neither of us intended to be spying or eavesdropping, but we were in our stocking feet and that was not our fault. Anyway, it shouldn't have mattered. But it did. It's impossible to understand quite how.

  I heard Colby say, "Connie! Connie!" in a rich and excited voice and I felt John move as if to call and then relax and watch. They kissed, but that didn't mean anything.

  I've seen Connie kiss fifty men. Coquetry is part of her nature--but it's so obviously light and amused that nobody makes mistakes. Pity any man who did. This was a short kiss and they separated and held arms and looked at each other and kissed again. Still, there was nothing clandestine about it. He'd nearly won her, and they hadn't seen each other for more than twenty years. But I found myself thinking that she had behaved the way a woman would who had undertaken to perform a duty and performed it and was now free.

  He said, "Just the same! No! More lovely!" And that was no source for dismay. A platitude, under the circumstances.

  But Connie didn't reply. Not a word. She just stood and looked at him until he also stood rigidly. We couldn't see their expressions clearly from where we were, but there was that changing quality in their postures. Maybe it was her silence and his slow, gathering tenseness that mattered. John made a waving gesture and started forward, but before he spoke, Colby took Connie's arm and they went into the house. So John turned back to me.

  "You saw," he said.

  "I didn't see anything." My heart wasn't in that denial.

  "Of course you didn't, Frankie." He said that gently.

  "She was elated. Astonished. Pleased. Why shouldn't she be? Good Lord, John, your attitude will drive her from just playing romance into a real escapade of some sort.

  Make her do it just to even up suspicion she doesn't deserve. This is an adventure for Connie! Let her have it! Golly--"

  He looked at me. His large, square-shaped head arrested itself, facing me, but he took no cognisance of my suggestions. "To live with a woman," he said slowly, "you've got to be forever able to live without her." He walked along toward the porch. "Smell the lilacs," he said.

  When he met Colby, in the big living room, in his stocking feet, Connie did not exist for either of them. The white knuckles of their grip, the hands on shoulders, reached strongly back to playing fields in gone years, to classrooms, to forgotten serenades and victory fires and winks that humanised arduous examinations. Barney Colby was a man who turned the mind to the language of measured prowess. He must weigh, I thought, a hundred and seventy. Lean. He had the deepest and certainly the evenest tan I have ever seen; it looked indelible.

  "Hello, Barney!"

  "Hello, John!"

  Two strong figures in a man's world. Connie might split them--she had split them long ago--but she could not even enter the realm in which they lived as men. Whatever happened or had happened-made not the slightest difference in their meeting point. They picked up where they had left off. I knew John. And now, watching Barney, I understood why the ship news reporter had given him that gaudy write-up. He had the kind of eyes that had looked into every sort of danger and at every sort of death without becoming either chilly or mad. Fine eyes.

  I knew that they would go into dinner with their arms around each other. I knew that Connie would be dashed by it. I knew, too, that where she was concerned, they were ready to forfeit that friendship. They had done it b
efore. And I knew, finally, that she was concerned.

  I went upstairs to change. I met Virginia on the way.

  She was dressed for dinner and she had combed back her hair so that trouble was visible in all her features. The Sheffields are not preamble people.

  "Bill just called," she said.

  "Want to come in and talk to me?"

  "No." She hesitated. "I--just feel badly--that's all. He was coming up here next week. But his wife is having--some sort of spell. That's--I mean--she does. He goes up and lives where she is--to be near. Sometimes for days. Once for two months. He--he loved her."

  What could I say? She was looking into imaginary years wherein the man she loved might go to comfort the meaningless misery of a woman whom he had once loved.

  It was a ghastly vista. "Your boyfriend has guts."

  She smiled for that "Yes. He's a swell guy."

  And Colby was a swell guy. And John. Connie was swell. Virginia was above praise. But being swell seemed only to make the burn deeper, the scars stiffer, the blood flow more often.

  I took her hand and kissed it and went to dress.

  CHAPTER V

  John handed the telegram to me at the table and I read it and things seemed almost normal again. It was from Larry. "Translate," John said. It was an unusually tough one--

  even for Larry:

  FLUNG TOO MUCH WOO DEAN FLUNG WOE FALCONED ORANGE PEELED

  TULIO NUVOLARI COULDNT HAVE AVOIDED LOCAL YOKEL THOUGH FIVE

  CS EXCESSIVE FOR IDS RUSTY ORPHAN IN JAIL ROT OR REPRIEVE

  QUESTION MARK LOVE LARRY

  "It doesn't mean anything to me," Connie said anxiously,

  "except--"

  "--in jail," Virginia murmured over my shoulder. "Falcon," I said, "is the name of a roadhouse near Ridgely. We used to go there, too. I'm surprised that Repeal hasn't put it out of business." "I suppose," Connie muttered with venom, "you realise that you are tearing the heart of an anxious mother?"

  I grinned. "You know Larry wouldn't have sent a wire like that if there were anything really wrong! Of course--it would have to be his idea of something wrong. Well, look. It means, 'Dear mother and father, I spent too much time with Wheezie--' I believe that was the girl's name--'and the dean flunked me.' He doesn't say in what subject or subjects. He then intimates he had a few drinks and was driving and spooning--a word you'll understand--when he ran into another car. Mr. Nuvolari is an international automobile racing champion, and Larry indicates that even he could not have avoided the accident. He goes on to say that the car with which he collided belonged to an oafish or loutish person who lived in the vicinity. The word 'orphan' refers to the car. It means that it was an obsolete make-one that is no longer on the market. It must have been severely damaged, not to say demolished, inasmuch as its owner wants five hundred dollars--"

  I paused there a fraction of a second--"for it. Though the sum may be merely an over-all settlement asking--price to cover indignation as well as repairs. Larry concludes by saying that he is in jail and wishes to be advised whether he is to resign himself to a long term or to expect to be bailed out."

  The telegram had reached us at breakfast. John, Connie and Virginia had listened to my extempore digest of it with varied and changing expressions. Now Connie chuckled. "I'll say one thing. Larry has mastered the telegram. He'd be invaluable as a foreign correspondent. A half dozen well chosen words would easily convey news of a fallen cabinet, a small war, and a scandal in high places."

  Virginia agreed. "Not only that, but spies and competing correspondents wouldn't make anything of his cables. They'd baffle the Black Chamber at Washington. Editors would go mad--"

  "The point is," said John, "something ought to be done. Shall I phone the headmaster now? I can't go up--with all hell brewing at the Bridgeport plant--"

  I didn't want John to phone, for reasons of my own. "You go and sit on your troubles at the factory. I'll phone--and then I'll catch a Boston plane in New Haven--"

  John nodded. His forehead was frowning and his lips were smiling. "I suppose,"

  he said, "that a father who has told his sons all his own boyish misdemeanors--and with relish--can't complain about a thing of this sort. Not categorically. But five hundred bucks is a lot of money. I recall that my father made me work out an eighty-six dollar damage bill one summer. I had incurred the bill by experimenting with the fire hose system in a public school. The way the water cascaded down the staircases was worth the work--

  almost. I think some such thing is indicated in Larry's case. Do you all agree with me?"

  "He's just young and gay," Connie said.

  "Sure. But in the same way that science is making war more terrible, it's making youth a bigger hazard--if you see what I mean. You can't skylark in a car."

  "It's called orange peeling," Virginia reminded him.

  John gestured an admission of the correction and rose from the table. "Right. And I think I'll put him behind a lathe or a drill press for about eight weeks this summer.

  Otherwise he'd just sail his boat and wreck more cars and peel more oranges. Have we got five hundred dollars in the safe, Connie?"

  "Easily. "

  "Good. You go up, then, Frankie. Take a stern attitude. And break the news that he is going to hold down a job during July and August. A hard, hot job."

  I finished my breakfast and went to my room to pack. For the past ten days I had allowed my anxieties to be lulled. Nothing had happened--and a helpless fool will embrace any paradise. The romantic Mr. Colby had dined and spent the evening, regaling us with bizarre stories, and he had gone into the silences I'd had a feeling while he talked that night that he was saying to Connie, 'I did all these things from loss of you; I wanted to die'--but telling her that indirectly had apparently satisfied him, and he had not presumed farther upon the emotionally descriptive meeting John and I had witnessed.

  As the days had passed, I had even discounted that episode. And I had suggested to myself that Colby's instantaneous resumption of his friendship with John had erased most of his attachment for the former, remembered Connie.

  Besides that, Virginia had heard no more from Bill Bush. At least, I had no knowledge of any communication, and I was--again--permitting myself to hope that the luckless necessities of Bush's life would demonstrate the uselessness of martyring her own. That hope--it was a selfish wish--seemed to be favored by her actions. She and Connie were preparing to compete in a flower show; she attended all of the country club dances; she swam and rode every day; she appeared, in short, to have reached a level where she could regard her problems with detachment.

  But now Larry's telegram had sounded a new and unguess able alarm--and that alarm had wakened the others, so that I packed with a disheveled feeling. Perhaps the threats of May were still breathing and breeding in the background and June had not abolished them. I was thinking that and folding a tan silk dressing gown when Virginia knocked on my door. She came in and dumped everything from my suitcase. Then she started packing allover.

  "Frankie?"

  "Yeah."

  "That telegram."

  "You noticed, eh?"

  "It couldn't have been accidental. He might have forgotten."

  "Forgotten the 'Five C's'? Do you think so?"

  "No."

  "Neither do I." She stopped work for a moment. "What do you think is the matter that would make him unwilling to have John and Connie know?"

  I grinned as much as I could. "How can I tell? He's seventeen. Capable of any sort of malfeasance. Capable, also, of getting in a terrible uproar over nothing. I judged by the telegram that it hadn't dampened his spirits--whatever it was--"

  "And I judged it had."

  Virginia looked at me solemnly and I looked at her--and we each knew that the other was worried. Because there had been more in the wire than I'd said. The Sheffields-

  -especially Ivan, Virginia--and I--had gone through our early teens during the height of the gangster era. Our childhood had been colored by
it. Cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians, the James brothers, and the northwest mounties--all the lore and gore of past generations of kids had been supplanted by a far more vivid and immediate melodrama detailed every day on the front pages and portrayed weekly in the motion picture theatres.

  Naturally, we had formed a "mob" with the neighborhood kids. Ours was the Crimson Mob. There had been a long period when I was the "brains" of the organization-

  -for two reasons: in get-aways I was handicapped, and there was a tradition that the leader of such secret and nefarious societies was generally a dwarf, or a one-armed man, or a fellow with a scarred face. Indeed, my affliction had become an asset. Known--

  privately--up and down a couple of miles of the Connecticut shore as "The Spider," I was supposed to have come by my limp not through a filterable virus, but through the roaring choppers of a rival organization.

  Of course, we had had a password. Our password served notice that the gang was to meet, or that its employer wanted a moment's secret conference. It was used frequently to protect members from adult surveillance. In those days, a "G" did not mean a federal man-it meant a thousand dollars. A "C" meant a hundred. And our password was, "Five C's." The "C," naturally, referred to century. We extended its use with puns in order to increase its variety and add to our own self-admiration, Thus we could give the password by referring to "five century plants" and by asking such questions as "Which of the five seas has the highest tide?" We would also whistle five identical notes--which were assumed to be middle "C" on the piano. Of such stuff is a great deal of childhood composed.

  We had a "territory" and when we sneaked out of our beds at night we paid the gardener "protection." Our "racket" was largely swiping food and decorations and equipment for our "hide-out," and Virginia, I remember, was a "gun moll." But the password was sacred and it meant that whatever was coming next was to be kept an inviolable secret from our elders.

  Larry had sent that long unused password in his wire. Virginia had spotted it, too.