An April Afternoon

by Philip Wylie

  "I used to wonder why you youngsters went around whistling the way you did,"

  she said. "And why you kept talking about century plants. There wasn't one in the whole of New England, as far as I knew." She stopped--and thought for a long time. "There isn't anything I can do--is there?"

  That let coldness and fear into my veins. I've learned to behave as if I were thirty-

  -most of the time. But there are occasional instances when I am made to know that I am twenty-three, and it is an inadequate age.

  "You mean--you're going to keep on--see Barney--and--" It was inept.

  "Right now--I think I'd rather be dead than know I'd never see him again. Later--

  some day--I may get over it. I haven't done anything shameful, Frankie." Words burst from her passionately, torrentially. "It hit me like a bullet the instant he came up on the porch. Infatuation--maybe. Love? I don't know. Maybe it's just an event typical of my age. But it has some sort of tremendous significance I can't yet comprehend. When I married John--rather--when I agreed to--I hardly knew whether I loved him or Barney more. Then Barney went away and did all those crazy things. There was the War for him first, and I read his name in the papers more than once. John's too--but Barney's war was gay. John's was somber. After that--exploring and his anthropology--his African mines.

  It's a kind of a dirty trick--isn't it--for the loser in a romance to make himself the more romantic figure? It was the same when John and Barney were there for dinner. John's commanding and steadying. Barney's commanding and--quickening. They were always like that. And perhaps, when' I married, I tried to be wise rather than honest. Plenty of people predicted a dramatic but rapidly-approaching end for Barney. Do you understand any of that?"

  "All of it--I guess. Connie?"

  "What?"

  "Don't tell John--now."

  "No."

  "I'll write Larry. God knows, he won't say' anything. Neither will that unsanitary schoolmate of his. And if you see Barney again--I mean, when you see him--really hide, will you?"

  "I feel like such a--such a beast."

  "You are," I said. "Maybe it's worth it. That's what you've got to decide."

  She turned into the driveway. She wasn't angry or wounded. "The Sheffields don't let themselves or each other off easily, do they? Perhaps it's a good thing. Perhaps my answer lies somewhere in there. And--thanks, Frankie."

  I put the car up, leaving her under the porte cochère. Afterward, I started down to the fiat rock.

  When I had gone half way, I was running as fast as I could, and tearing off my clothes as I went.

  CHAPTER VII

  At the same time I tried to run, to strip off as many clothes as possible, and to think. Because Virginia had fallen down in her canoe a couple of hundred yards off shore, hit her head, and vanished in the water as the craft went over. I paused once and turned. I yelled, "Connie! Help!" as loudly as I could. Then I was on the beach. I yanked off my shoes without untying them.

  The surf was fairly high for the Sound. It was a sunny day, but the wind was off-shore and brisk. In the water, I'm pretty competent. Swimming is one of the things they make you learn for my trouble. I gave it everything I had. That was a mistake--but I'd seen her fall, as she tried to walk from the stern seat up to the bow so she could paddle without blowing around so much--and I wanted to get out there as fast as a human being could. She'd tripped on a thwart. If she had knocked herself out--then--

  There were those fragments in my mind. I got a mouthful once that stopped me.

  The salt water kept me pretty blind. And then I couldn't find the canoe. I think that the whole rest of my life seems shorter than the few minutes I was swimming there. Finally I had a glimpse of the keel and canvas turning aside a swell. I headed for it and grabbed it.

  But Virginia wasn't there.

  I yelled and looked. I put my face below the water but it was green and opaque.

  Then I dove under the canoe and searched its length. The effort nearly burst my heart.

  But she wasn't there. So I let go of the canoe and swam away and around it, looking.

  There wasn't anybody else in that part of the bay. If there had been a boat on the beach, I'd have taken it, of course. But Larry's sloop hadn't been put in the water, the motor boat engine was all over the boathouse floor, and the rowboat hadn't been on the sand. Berry probably was using it to get killies from the clam man for week-end pickerel bait. So I'd had to swim.

  Treading water and heaving up my shoulders to increase my view made visible only more empty breakers. So I kept on swimming aimlessly and in so doing I ran into her. Her dress struck my face, in fact. She was waterlogged, but sufficiently conscious to keep her mouth above the surface--or to get it there often enough for a breath. When I grabbed her, she turned toward me and there was a look of abject terror in her eyes. I realised with stupid clarity that she'd thought it was a shark.

  She saw me, vaguely. And she winked.

  I winked back.

  Then I started with her toward the shore. She was bleeding; it made magenta filaments among the silver, floating strands of her hair, and for a moment I thought she was bleeding to death, but that was because her dress was cerise. I tried to hurry shoreward because I knew she ought not to stay in the water that way--but the shore didn't get any nearer and after fifty or a hundred strokes I realized that the tide was coming out toward us with more speed than I could muster against it.

  If she could help a little, I thought, we might make it, but when I turned over and looked at her, I saw she couldn't. She had lost consciousness and her face was peaceful--

  as if my appearance had settled everything.

  That was when I really felt there wasn't any God.

  Because what I was failing to do--Ivan or Larry or John could have accomplished without a thought of failure. Towing an inert person through the water is no trick if you have strong legs. Without them, no one should try. Because arms are next to worthless.

  One arm is needed to hold the person--I couldn't use my teeth because the water was too rough--and the other cannot do work ordinarily performed by four coordinated limbs.

  I gave up and just held her still, with her face out--except when a bucketful of foam churned over it. I cursed the sea and the sky and the day I was born. I cursed things that I didn't dream I had ever resented---or could. And pretty soon I was cursing merely against panic, because pain was beginning to creep up that inadequate leg of mine, and pain meant cramp and cramp meant that we'd both go down. It came on slowly, like a careful torture designed to combine the utmost physical agony with the maximum of spiritual frustration. I heard the beginning of a great roaring which I thought was the approach of my own unconsciousness and the pain went around like a stop-watch ticking for an execution, and then very suddenly there was a huge, mahogany-coloured bow almost in my face.

  States of semi-consciousness always have peculiar effects on the mind: important things happen and cannot be recalled; trifles are retained with instrumental precision. I recall, for instance, that there was a triangular paint-chip missing on the NC letters which marked the underside of the wing of the hydroplane that had dropped down on us. I don't remember being thrown a rope, though I'm told that I caught it and hung on till they pulled us in. Anyway, they got us out.

  Out and ashore and safe.

  Half an hour later I woke. Doctor Kellog was in my room with Connie.

  "Be quiet!" she said--dictatorially because of her anxiety.

  "How's Virginia?"

  Connie looked at the doctor. He told me. "She got pretty full of water--"

  I tried to sit up--and changed my mind about that. "Bad?"

  "Not bad. She'll have to stay in bed a couple of days. Needs good care--"

  "That cut--"

  "That wasn't anything. Look here, Frankie. Lie still and if you get cold, holler for more hot water bottles. You'll be all right." He doubled up his fist and gave me one of those take-it-easy taps on the jaw. He was a nice guy and
he'd seen the Sheffields in and out of all their troubles.

  I said, "Virginia's in danger."

  The doctor nodded Connie out. Then he sat down beside me. "Virginia's in a slight amount of danger. She was about half drowned out there. But she has a dandy constitution and there's no reason to expect she won't be all right. We'll have to think a bit for a day or so about pneumonia, of course. Now. You wanted to know--there's the answer."

  I could feel myself getting into one of those infantile slumps. I hated myself for it-

  -but that didn't stop the slump.

  He sat down on my bed. "I get it," he said slowly. "I'll be damned."

  He did get it and I knew he had it.

  "You're thinking that if you'd had normal pins--she wouldn't have gotten full of water."

  "Which is true."

  He shrugged slightly. "On the other hand--the fact that you had bum ones meant you swam a lot for therapy--and could swim. Maybe if you'd had a perfect pair--you wouldn't have been able to do anything but run up and down on the sand and yell."

  "Larry. Ivan. John. They swim." That sick slump is a bad feeling and I guess as difficult for others to bear as for the one who has it. On the other hand, I presume old Doc Kellog had seen it come over millionaires who were known in Wall Street as wolves--so he wasn't particularly amazed to discover it in me.

  "Yeah," he said slowly, "Larry and Ivan and John can swim better than you and they would have saved Virginia from enduring as much submersion. But they weren't there and the fact remains that you saved her. Isn't that hero enough to satisfy you?"

  "No," I said. And then I didn't want to look at him. So I looked away. I asked how the airplane had spotted us.

  He answered--but as if he were thinking about something else. "Why--who they spotted was Connie--running around in the front lawn so she'd attract them. They dipped down to see what made a woman run that way--and she pointed. When they didn't understand that--she dropped down on her knees and folded her hands to them--and then pointed--and finally ran toward the beach. Then they saw you two in the water and came down."

  "Who was it?"

  "The Millers--and a couple of house-guests."

  "Thank God they were out flying--anyhow!"

  "Yeah. Easy to see things on the water from the air." He touched me. "Frankie. I think I caught sight of something just now and I'm wondering if you know what I mean?"

  "What?"

  "You may be too weak to talk--"

  "So long as I don't sit up---I'm fine."

  "You're in love with Virginia, aren't you?"

  I said the only thing I could, under the circumstances. "Look, Doc. Maybe I am.

  Maybe not. But if you ever say anything about that notion to any living person--I'll walk all the red-hot road from hell to kill you."

  That had no effect whatever on him. He went on thinking. "Let me make a suggestion, Frankie. When Virginia comes around, why don't you go calling on her in her room and tell her in a few simple words that--oh, well--you're a poet. You're supposed to know how to say it. Kiss her--then tell her you love her."

  Maybe I was weak and more or less sick. But what he was saying did seem unutterably hard to endure. He offered me a cigarette. I took it. "She thinks I'm her brother. She thinks I think of her as a sister. Any other idea would--why--!"

  He shrugged again. "The fact remains that you aren't--and you both know it. The fact remains that some thousands of the best marriages have come from just such--lucky accidents of association. You don't believe me?"

  "Virginia just came to me a few days ago," I said finally, "to tell me that she's in love with another man. The advice she wanted was brotherly."

  He began to put things back in his bag. His eyes held smiles--but whether they were sad or sardonic, I couldn't tell. He whistled softly as he packed. "Well, John Alden,"

  he said, when he had finished.

  Doctors make lousy jokes. That was his worst. It wasn't funny and it hurt. He went back to take another look at Virginia, and I continued, as I'd been for weeks, salting the sore of my own helplessness, thinking I should go away, feeling sure that Virginia and Connie also would need me in the months ahead, studying a thousand hypothetical calamities. It is not fun and it creates that kind of fatigue which poisons its own rest.

  A game leg. That is the central symbol in my life. From it come my fears and humiliations and, I suppose, such courage and self-possession as I have achieved by struggling against those opposite effects. Often I think that all men have a similar deficiency but that in most it is not so obvious and hence goes unrecognized. Some are greedy and it makes them opulent but arrogant and stupid--vast fools puffing over their lobster bisque. Some are cowards and it makes them clever, but they are cruel for it and at night a street lamp and a blowing branch can undo them.

  Perhaps it is impossible to be born without an Achilles' Heel. Mine has a thousand sharp, minute reminders, which show to what small things the senses will lend themselves. When people say, "He legged it for home!" I recollect my state. Or leg of mutton, two feet tall, limpets, limber, even limburger, and legs of chairs and tables, even, once, a man shouting, "leggo." There is no end to this vocabulary of punning self-consciousness. It is as if my inner being desired to call derision upon the outer by taking not only legitimate but also fantastic opportunities.

  It's absurd to have to live by such stuff, yet we do. And part of my long meditation after the doctor had gone was nothing more than wishing against the jargon in my head.

  There were pills to take that night, and I slept like the drunken until noon. Then, when I rang for the maid and she brought coffee to my room, I learned that Virginia was better and wanted to see me, that the doctor had come and gone leaving permission for it, and that Connie was in New York, making emergency purchases of a nature not specified.

  That startled me, under the circumstances. But Virginia's improvement held my surprise in abeyance. I put on a dressing gown that I once saw in a store in Paris. It was of blue, heavily ribbed silk, with a rolled collar, but embroidered down the back in magnificent yellow characters was a Chinese poem the translation of which I had torn up as I read it. People were under the impression that I did not know what my gown said--

  but I hoped the Sheffields would import no Chinese servants. There would be looks, to say the least.

  Anyway, I put it on because it is elegant, because I felt better, and because Virginia did. Especially that. She was sitting with a tray on her lap and when I came in, her eyes were instantly tender.

  "Frankie," she said--the way you'd want a girl to say it if you had one hour to live.

  "Don't delude yourself," I answered. "A better man would have done a better job."

  "Frankie. Come here."

  "Nix. Leave sentiment to mobs, who have so much and such appalling sorts."

  She shook her head. "No use. I remember when you swam up. They said we were out there for three quarters of an hour. And your poor--" She pulled me toward her and kissed me then and it was the way you would like to be kissed, if you had one hour to live. The doctor's advice ran into my mind. He'd said to do exactly this. And then, in a few well-chosen words--poetic, he had suggested--I would tell her about my feelings. But no intention could have been farther from me, in spite of the memory. I would not have changed her expression-- for my life.

  "You're a darling," she said.

  "And you--are exercising an embarrasing prerogative."

  "Am I?"

  "You are."

  "The dialogue is getting silly."

  "And you have made me feel silly."

  She bowed, then, very formally. "Have some of my coffee?"

  "I'll get some of my own." I yelled for Anne.

  "Sit? At least be a polite hero."

  "I'm no hero. I nearly bungled you."

  She changed the subject, after that. My surprise over Connie had been shared by her--only--I knew the reason behind it. She suspected. Like everyone else in the family, she got to her point di
rect. "Frankie, do you think Mother sees Barney Colby in New York?"

  "Good Lord, no!"

  "No? Well, I do. And I think you do."

  "Why--to both ideas?"

  She leaned back and closed her eyes. "For one thing, you didn't deny my first question hard enough. Then--John has been too thoughtful around here for a mere strike at the plant. And Mother borrowed a pair of my shoes, a hat of mine, and my white suede handbag--not a shopping costume. Yesterday morning's society notes said Mr. Colby had leased his Bar Harbor house and was staying in New York indefinitely. Well?"

  I mocked her attitude of concentration--leaning back in my chair and closing my eyes. I adopted her tone. "Well--I didn't bounce to your suggestion because I thought any violent reaction might make you fear you were losing your mind. A strike might not make a woman thoughtful, but it would a man. Especially a man like John. He gives his workers a square deal and he hates to see dopes trying to make them believe they're discontented. As for the borrowed clothes, she's done it before; in fact she loves to borrow your things because she wears them so beautifully--has what I believe you call youthful chic. About Mr. Colby's staying in New York--maybe he got a sudden Bar Harbor phobia--couldn't stand to hear the word Maine mentioned. Maybe he is doing business in New York. Maybe he wants to spend the summer lolling around on roof gardens. Maybe--"

  She stopped me. "That's terrible poor kidding."

  So I was silent.

  "You see--she came in this morning early--and apologized for having to leave me today. I couldn't understand it and suddenly she said--'Is it possible for happily married people to fall in love?'" Virginia's eyes came up and hung on mine, steadily, like flame in a still place. "I know, Frankie, that's possible for an unhappily married person. Bill--isn't really married at all. But Connie said that--and I lay here in bed--dying inside myself. I guess she saw the look on my face--because she didn't say any more--just--went. So I thought. And I thought of Barney Colby right away."

  "We're grown up," I said after a while. "We ought to be able to face the world the way it sometimes gets--"

  Her head shook. "Not Connie and John--breaking up, or anything like it."