An April Afternoon

by Philip Wylie

  -for a long time--she was recovering, and we thought that her mind would get better--"

  John looked steadily across the room at Bill. His voice was even and gentle. "I guess that's just about the worst tragedy that life can put on any body's shoulders. If you can carry that alone, then--maybe--you'll find others--some day--willing to share it with you."

  That was a father speaking. Telling Bill the best he could what to do about Virginia. Telling Bill that he had confidence in him. Answering the pained interrogation in Bill's eyes.

  It was difficult for Bill to speak at all then. He was still thinking about Joyce, living in the past--yet he was not unmindful of Virginia. So great a bond, expressed in such quiet words is unanswerable. Bill's gratitude for that understanding was like an aura in the room, but his face was still stern with responsibility. "I have a picture of her," he finally said. "If you'd like to see it? A miniature--"

  "We'd love to see it," Connie replied softly.

  He hadn't taken his suitcase upstairs. Not even left it in the hall. He'd brought it into the living room--the way people do when they're not thinking much about the props and objects surrounding them. Now he opened it--an untidily packed and somewhat shabby case. When he fumbled in it, a pair of socks rolled out on the floor, and he snatched at them and blushed.

  We looked at the miniature. It was exquisitely painted. When my turn came, I presumed that even the artist's skill had scarcely done justice to his subject. Bill's Joyce was one of those sculptured, dark-haired girls, with blue eyes. Eyes like sapphire ink, which could write pages with a glance, and books, no doubt, with one slow gaze of mystical affection.

  "She's lovely," Connie whispered.

  John said, "Tough."

  And Larry, "Golly."

  Virginia didn't say anything at all. She gave back the painting with a sort of reluctance, meeting his eyes, smiling. All of us knew that he had paid us a tribute, strange perhaps, but very great.

  I didn't want to stay in the room after that. Nobody did. We went away one by one and left them there. Virginia and Bill, and the portrait of a beautiful woman, face down against a soiled shirt.

  I think I went to sleep without much difficulty. I think my sleep was serene. It was as if that for which I had yearned had finally eluded me, and forces of nature beyond my control had taken charge. To hope was no longer possible; to fear was futile. Under those circumstances, sleep ultimately becomes a necessary blessing.

  I slept and do not know what woke me. But suddenly I was quite conscious, sitting up, looking through my window at the moon-powdered night. There was silence all around. But in that silence a sense of schism from normality as if images were walking or trees signalling to each other. Even the Sound was unmurmuring, and the fireflies stood still. It was a time for seeing ghosts. My flesh crept. I felt the presence of eerie vitality, beautiful and black, and I leaned and looked farther out of my window.

  Then I saw the authors of my awakening, facing each other in the garden, holding hands. Her arms were bare and so darkened by days in the sun they seemed like shadows against her white dress. He had his back toward me--a square, desiring statue of deeper shadow. They stood that way for a long time. Archetypes of love anticipated, love denied, old love, love in crinolines--armor plate, maybe--and they kissed, slowly, completely, her whiteness confusing itself with his darkness. The flowers exhaled their sacramental and ecstatic attars, a tree frog trilled at the moonbeams, waves returned softly to the shore, and the fireflies recommenced their ceremonial dance in three dimensions.

  I do not know how long they kissed. I sat there full of wonder.

  If they spoke, I could not hear what they said.

  But when they separated--white into white, darkness assuming shape again--she laughed. Her laughter was dulcet and mixed with night sounds.

  But that laughter stopped my heart as surely as if a blade had been driven through it. And now I understood what part of the magic had been sinister. For it was not Virginia who had laughed. It was Connie. And I perceived that silhouette of demanding masculinity was Colby.

  I lay back on my pillow, full of shock and immediate prescience. All of Connie's previous clandestine meetings had seemed experimental and tentative. One might have said about them that she had been playing with an old situation merely to show herself that it was not formidable. But the garden and the moonlight were too hallowed for any such interpretation, and the kiss had been a sacrilege.

  To do anything was impossible, and yet as I lay there I was forced to struggle against any impulse toward activity. I thought of a dozen little things--banging my window down, turning on lights, moaning and pretending to be sick, lighting a cigarette and tossing it onto the lawn. But while I lay in an intentional paralysis, the mood of the night was changed.

  A door opened and closed with a cautious creaking. I waited. There were footsteps on the stairs. A long time passed. Another door shut with a sound of much attention. Once more feet whispered. There were rustlings and the touch of toes on the porch. I heard the sound of gravel in the drive--then nothing--and at last the ululation of a motor starting at a distance from the house.

  I knew what had happened, but I would not say it to myself. It must have been an hour later when I got up and turned on the light and smoked a cigarette. My pajamas were soaked in perspiration, and there were deep crescents in my palms where I'd pushed my nails. I wanted to wake John.

  But I didn't. Instead, I went back to bed and waited for the infinitely laborious birth of daylight. Until the sky had become blue, I did not allow myself to rise.

  Then I went to Connie's room and knocked on the door. For a fraction of a second I believed that I might awaken her--but there was no answer, so I went in. And I found the note. It wasn't sealed, and on the envelope was written: "John, Virginia, Ivan, Larry, Frankie."

  I took out the folded page it contained.

  "Darlings, we're going away together--Barney and I. I don't know where. In some ways I don't know why, but I know that I have to go. I could have done it by telling you all first, and it wasn't fear or shame that kept me from that course. That just isn't the way the Sheffields do things. All or nothing. I love you. You know it. Try to keep on loving me.

  Goodbye now,

  Connie."

  I sat on the padded seat in front of her vanity--sick. A few hours before, there had been her brushes and combs, bright perfume bottles, her pretty jars of cosmetics. Now there was only a streak of talcum powder, pale dust, a symbol of hasty departure.

  When the sun came up, I went to John's room and woke him. He opened his eyes and smiled a little bit. "Hello, Frankie." Then he must have seen my face, because he threw back the covers and said, "What's the matter?"

  I'd intended to perform that impossible office called "breaking it gently." But as he threw the covers back I remembered what sort of man John was, and I realized its impossibility.

  I said, "Connie."

  He was puzzled for an instant, and then his color went away. It made his sleep-grown whiskers pathetically visible.

  "Gone?"

  "Yes."

  He moved his head. "Did she--leave a note?"

  I gave it to him. He read it.

  He didn't say anything. By and by he lay down and shut his eyes. An interval passed. He swallowed once. And at last, with his eyes still shut, he reached out his left hand toward me.

  I took it.

  CHAPTER X

  John and I were sitting in the dining room at eight o'clock. Virginia came down first. She said "Good morning" with that afterglow voice of hers. She smiled at us then and came to a stop before she reached her chair. I could see her grow frightened as she observed us, and her eyes showed that she was trying to guess what made us sit the way we did. She waited a second and had to clear her throat. "What is it?"

  "It's Connie," I said. "She went away last night with Barney Colby."

  Virginia didn't reply in words. She walked slowly to John, bent over his shoulder, and kissed h
im. Then she continued around the table to her place, touching my shoulders as she passed me.

  John was watching her and he spoke next, carefully making his voice clear. "I think it would be better if we didn't say anything about it, don't you?"

  Virginia shook her head. "I don't, John. We'll have to talk. It's better to."

  He thought awhile, avoiding her eyes. "Yes."

  From upstairs abruptly came the sound of Larry shouting lustily, "Four!--twenty-eight!--thirty-two!--six!--fifteen--let's go!" There was a smacking thud and the din of heavy, racing footsteps. I knew exactly what had happened. Larry had come out of his room just as Bill had emerged from his. There was an old upholstered chair opposite the stair-landing in the hall, and in front of it stood a small carpet-covered footstool. Larry had picked up the stool, called signals, and forward-passed it to Bill. The thud had occurred when Bill snared it.

  They were descending the stairs together, laughing. It was a wrong entrance-and now inevitable.

  As they came in, Larry was saying: "After I threw it, I was afraid you might rush me. I had visions of being straight-armed through the wall and over the garage."

  Bill, of course, looked at Virginia first and kept his eyes on her as his smile faded.

  But Larry was so carried away by the proximity of a football titan, even if he was historic--that he behaved less like a Sheffield and more like seventeen years old. "You guys all look mopier than a bunch of wet owls."

  John understood it. He had even grinned slightly at Larry's exuberance. "Sit down, son. We've got trouble in the family." He needn't have added that. When John called one of us "son" instead of addressing us by our first names, it always meant that something was wrong. "You see, well--I don't know exactly how to tell you."

  Virginia took charge. "It's going to be right on your chin, Larry," she said softly.

  "And after it hits you, you've got to stand on your feet. Last night, while we were all asleep, Mother went away with Barney Colby."

  Larry didn't move. His face paled and the veins came out his temples. After a moment, he ran his fingers through his gleaming hair two or three times. He turned toward John. "I was afraid she might."

  John didn't answer.

  "You knew she's been seeing him?" Virginia whispered it.

  Larry began to break. He pushed his chair back from the table three or four inches. His face turned chalky; his eyes dilated and became very green. Suddenly he swung his fist in an arc and banged it on the table so that the silver danced. Our coffees splashed. "But I didn't think she really would!" His voice was loud and it broke.

  John said, "Cut that!" He spoke quickly and quietly, with the voice of a man meeting a complicated emergency.

  Larry gazed at him keenly for a moment, and then his eyes filled. He hitched his chair back in place without a word, and reached for the coffee pot. It chattered against the brim of his cup.

  John turned to Bill, "You'll have to excuse--all of us."

  Bill just said, "Yes." It was enough.

  Nobody spoke for quite a while, and in the rising tension of that silence, I decided a conversation of some sort was necessary. "She may change her mind and come back."

  Virginia shook her head at me. "She won't, Frankie. You know that."

  "Yeah. I guess I do. All right, guys. She's gone. Let's face it. For one thing, people are going to find out that she isn't here. We've got to decide what we're going to do about that."

  "We've got to lie!" Larry said sharply. "She's gone on a cruise! She's in Europe, or in a sanitarium, or sick or something." He looked at his father, hoping that John would be able to invent a story adequate for the situation.

  But John nodded "No." He drank some coffee. "We can't do that."

  Larry persisted. "Then what can we do? Connie's friends will miss her inside of twenty-four hours! Am I supposed to go around telling my pals that my mother ran away with another man? Just right and left to everybody: 'Mother eloped. Quite gay, isn't it?'"

  His voice was rising again.

  That stung John.

  I said, "If you're going to be a heel, leave the table."

  Larry flung down his napkin and ran from the room. He went up the steps, three at a time. We heard his door slam. That made me feel wretched and I started to go up to talk to him. I knew he'd be flat on his face on his bed, crying. He hadn't done such a thing since his childhood--but Larry's regard for his mother had always been fierce, as well as tender--and seventeen is a poignant age for disillusionment.

  Virginia made me sit down. "Don't do it. He wants to be alone. He'll come down after a while and apologize. "That's what I want to stop. It'll just make him feel worse."

  She regarded me patiently. "Sure. But it'll start him thinking about himself."

  I understood what she meant by that. When the first torrent of his feelings had spent itself, Larry would remember that he had behaved badly. That would put him on his guard, and being on his guard would give him courage. Whenever I thought that I understood the Sheffields to the very marrow of their bones, Virginia would do or say something like that--a thing of subtler insight, of swifter recognition.

  We had paid no attention to Bill's abashment--but now, as he reached for a piece of toast, John took friendly cognizance of it. "Don't eat that, old man. It's cold. I'll ring for some fresh."

  He picked up the little modernistic glass bell from Connie's place.

  Anne came in.

  "Some fresh toast," John said.

  The telephone rang.

  We all looked at it--for the extension was beside another of Connie's places--the porch glider where she used to sit and swing and read novels and look at her flowers.

  Finally, Virginia walked over and answered it. She said, "Hello," and then, "Oh hello, Martha."

  That made me glance at John. His jaw muscles had tightened up. Martha Bigelow was president of the Garden Club, and executive secretary of the Woman's Club. Her family had lived in Reedy Cove for six generations. Martha was a spinster--long-legged, heavy-chinned, tennis-playing and curious. The Sheffields didn't hate anybody--but if they had been haters, Martha would have been high upon their list. I suppose it struck John and me at the same time, that the idea of people like Martha running Connie's name through what we used to call the "meat grinders" was intolerable.

  While we were thinking that, Virginia was saying, "Why, no, Martha. Connie's not here. When will she be back?" The question echoed flatly. "I really couldn't say." She was looking at us speculatively now, with the instrument pressed against her ear and covering her mouth, and her free hand drawing nervously on the back of the glider.

  She made some sort of decision. "As a matter of fact, Martha, I'm glad you called just now. A rather sad thing has happened, and I think you ought to know it first." John was shaking his head, but Virginia wouldn't look. "You're one of Connie's best friends, and you have a great deal of tact, so that you'll know how to deal with it." Then Virginia told her--simply and directly--who Colby was, and that we didn't know where they had gone.

  Back across the wire, audible to us, but unintelligible, came the excited whack and clatter of Martha's voice. Virginia murmured, "I don't know," a couple of times, then said, "Yes, do call back. Goodbye." She hung up.

  John had covered his face with his hands and was rubbing his cheeks with their palms. He spoke leadenly. "You shouldn't have done that. It'll be allover Reedy Cove--"

  "--in half an hour." Virginia smiled sorrowfully. "I know it, John. That's why I did it. The telephone operators are going to be pretty busy this morning. People are going to call New York, and Greenwich, and half the towns in Westchester. Everybody will know.

  I just thought that it would be better if we started it than if it seeped out. Suppose we tried to keep it quiet, and the first place we saw it was in somebody's column in a New York paper? By telling Martha the truth, I took three-quarters of the wind out of her sails. I don't like to have her broadcast it any more than you do, but we might as well go right straig
ht through with it, beginning now."

  John made a very slight motion of his head, as if he understood and agreed with her, but he didn't speak.

  We weren't ourselves that morning. John least of all. He seemed to have lost his leadership. He was like an animal that had been struck a paralyzing blow. He was conscious of what was going on, but his body and his mind were in a transfixed state.

  I think his helplessness increased our own abjection. We sat there for a long time without saying a thing. Then Larry came down the stairs. He walked back to his seat at the table. Everybody carefully avoided looking at him until he spoke. Virginia had been right. He was more restored than any of the rest of us. "Sorry I took it like such a baby, fellows. I've thought of something we've got to do right away."

  We were all looking at him by that time.

  "Get Ivan down here."

  That seemed to bring John out of his blind stupefaction. It gave all of us a slight feeling of comfort. Ivan had finished his exams, but he was staying on for a couple of weeks to complete some work. John walked over to the telephone and asked for the long distance operator.

  While he was waiting for the number, Bill spoke again. "There isn't anything I can say to any of you. I'll be leaving in a few minutes now."

  John looked up at him. 'There's no need for you to go, Bill." He turned his head a little more. "And maybe Virginia would rather you'd stay."

  I had one of those fugitive selfish wishes--that she would act in such a way as to make Bill depart. Instead, she looked at him for several seconds and answered. "I'd rather you would stay, Bill--if you don't mind too much."

  He just shook his head.

  Ivan arrived before one. He'd got the plane to New Haven and taken a taxi to Reedy Cove. Ivan looks much as John did in his youth. There were differences: his features had a regularity which John's didn't; he was even taller than John; and underlying his appearance of ruggedness, was something of Connie's glamour and dash. It was recklessness, perhaps--that very quality which had made us fear that he wouldn't study medicine. Now that he'd decided to do so, we knew that it would be transformed from a potential handicap to dynamic skillfulness.