An April Afternoon

by Philip Wylie

  Always,

  Connie."

  My first impulse was to rush with the letter to Virginia. But I didn't. Maybe that was wrong. However, Virginia had made an unspoken pact with the other Sheffields to avoid every vocal memory and reminder of Connie. I suppose I was afraid that Virginia wouldn't share the emotions which that pathetic note had given me. I was afraid that she would be unsympathetic toward me for allowing myself such emotions. So I burned the letter.

  For two or three days I tried to make up my mind whether or not to answer it. I didn't want to be disloyal to the Sheffields. If they learned that I was in communication with Connie, their reactions toward me might make life with them no longer possible, and I dreaded that idea.

  Most of all, I worried over the assumptions I made about Virginia--for her attitude toward her mother was not a mood. It had lasted all summer and into the Autumn without changing--unless, perhaps, it had strengthened. To think that she might turn upon me with unspoken invective, with negative silence, made those days of consideration sleepless and tormented. I could not be Virginia's lover. But I still treasured her friendship above everything else--in the world, I guess. On the other hand, if Connie had not reached out with her abundant affection toward that paralyzed four-year-old kid who had been myself, I would never have known those rich, ecstatic years.

  In the end, I wrote to Connie fully. I told her the truth--all of it--how everyone was and how they felt about her and what they were doing and how well they were, and my own dilemma.

  An answer came back by return mail. I suppose she would have sent it by air, but she had been afraid that she'd attract attention. The second letter had no formal salutation.

  She wrote it all in one paragraph:

  "Oh, Frankie, you darling, I have read your letter a hundred times, and you will never know what it has done for me and how much happier it has made me with Barney!

  I sacrificed the respect of John and Virginia and Ivan and Larry, and that was the price I was willing to pay. A price I paid gladly. But I did not anticipate how dreadful it would be no longer to know anything about them. There is a wonderful company that re-mails letters from various points, and I'll use them when I write again, so that nobody will suspect that I am corresponding with you. Thanks, thanks, thanks. Love, Connie."

  That letter I burned also. I did not hear from Connie again for some time, although I wrote to her twice to supplement my first information.

  Then a letter came, full of the subtle seeds of anxiety--anxiety for me. There was nothing definite--no complaint, no dismay, no abnormal nostalgia--just an over-attention to minutiae both in Connie's speculations about the family and in her reports of herself.

  She wanted to know if we'd had many colds and if Virginia had taken her annual

  "shots" for them--what John had done about the bad heating in his office and whether or not there were chains in the garage for all the cars. She told of a dinner party which she and Barney had given for a half-dozen people in one of the hotels at Palm Springs; she listed the food and forgot to name the guests. She wondered if the rose beds had been thoroughly mulched and wrote a paragraph about the year in which the Tailsmans had been winter-killed. They'd had a picnic in Palm Canyon, and again she told me about the salad and the sandwiches--and they'd seen a big-horned sheep against the skyline back in the mountains. She wrote too about the weeks that followed my adoption--a number of little things she'd never told me--things I'd said that had won their affection--and even included a vague hint that at first John had been dubious about adding me to the family.

  Detail was never Connie's forte, and such a melancholy medley of it was out of character. Some people are born to truckle with the trivia of their environment, but she lived above them. The letter meant that she had sunk spiritually--that she was trying, perhaps, to conceal from herself a great dissatisfaction by inventing ten thousand minor problems and responsibilities. The psychological effect was the same as that produced by a person counting repetitious patterns on the wallpaper. It made me nervous. And her guarded reminiscences about my early childhood were like an unconscious attempt to make me feel a duty debt to her.

  As if I didn't already consider my very life a glad forfeit.

  A forfeit I could not redeem in any part. I destroyed that letter and wrote some rhythmic claptrap for my syndicate--Iast-Ieaf-of-autumn stuf--

  "Gingerly, boys, testing the thin new ice--

  Shrill winter birds--a frost device

  Upon the pane . . ."

  The afternoon fell. Windows of a distant house turned red-gold, there were footsteps in the attic above my room--Virginia's footsteps--and I wondered what she was doing there. So I gave up trying to find a rhyme for "orange" and went to see.

  A nude bulb swinging from the ceiling made the shadows of trunks and hatboxes swell and shrink and swell again. In the middle of the floor was a great pile of clothing, and Virginia was folding it away in the trunks. I walked across the bare floor, and of course Virginia recognized me without turning.

  "Hello, Frankie. I'm glad you came up. I was getting tired. I need help. Putting away Connie's things."

  "Yes, I see."

  "Time somebody did it." She sounded conscientiously matter-of-fact. "Guess it is."

  "I brought everything from all the closets downstairs." I picked up a light, faun-colored coat--one that was just the color of Connie's hair, and as I turned it inside out, shoulder to shoulder; and doubled it in the middle, I was stunned physically by remembrance of her.

  Virginia knew what had happened--though I didn't at that instant. "It's the perfume she uses. On everything. I guess that's why nobody did this job before. You can't go into her room without--" Virginia touched a pile of shoes with her toe. "I know that we really should give these things away. People could use them. Plenty of people. But I can't bear to do it."

  "No," I said, "we can't give them away." I was still submerged in the scent--in the memory of Connie. It was like having her walk into the room. And now my eyes began to pick out garments one by one. Mules, a dressing gown, an apron, a negligée, an old coat, and a beige summer suit, a pair of driving gloves--and some of them went back to long, long ago. There was one apron, in fact, that I had wet with my own tears over a tragedy I couldn't remember now, but I could see the very place in the embroidery where I had put my head.

  Virginia kept watching me, and finally she said, "Cut that out! I don't enjoy this any more than you do, but somebody's got to be tough--tough enough to get through this life one way or another, at any rate. Got a cigarette?"

  We sat down on a trunk and looked at the many-hued heap in front of us, holding our lighted cigarettes and not smoking. "Hell of a thing," I said after a while. "And I know what you mean by tough."

  Virginia's shoulders moved in a slight shrug. "Clothes. I wonder what they do with people's clothes when they die? That must be awful too. Just think. Everybody dies and leaves behind clothes, and somebody has to do something about them, and usually the somebody knows every garment and its history and remembers pleasant things about it--happy things--funny things--and silly things, like when they spilled the lentil soup on that evening dress and a piece of sausage got lost down the front--it's more real to look at somebody's clothes sometimes than it is to look at the person. The person is immediate and full of what's going on, but the clothes are permanent and loaded down with just the same kind of ideas you maintain about an individual. I'd have asked Anne to do this, but I knew she'd break down and cry--"

  "Sure."

  "I almost did myself. Maybe I will yet. But I'm going to have Connie's room redecorated next week. New everything, from the paint on the woodwork to the spreads on the beds. Maybe that'll help. What do you say we fold?"

  So we folded until the heap disappeared, and we put down the trunk lids and snapped the locks. Then we switched out the light. The trunks, the hatboxes, the suitcases--all the discarded impedimenta that uselessly exist in garrets--disappeared in the dark, and we went out of
the room hurriedly--glad to shut the door and turn the key.

  That night when I was undressing I changed "orange" in my verse to "yellow"--

  which gave me mellow and fellow and bellow and even Jello, if I wanted it, and I was thinking such gibberish as, "He hurled the yellow Jello, and the fellow gave a bellow,"

  when I reached into my pocket for a cigarette. It was a patch pocket on a tweed coat, and besides the cigarette I found a rhinestone ornament from the dress Connie had worn on the night Barney Colby had first called. It had apparently caught on the pocket that afternoon and dropped in, but since a good part of our lives impinges upon such accidents, maybe they are not accidents at all. For it meant that when Virginia and I had shut the attic door, we had Dot successfully banished the aromatic garments behind it. I put the glittering little object on my desk and stared at it until its artificial fires became hypnotic and like a crystal ball it produced pageants of things remote.

  Over my gentle dreaming hung the incubus that had fallen on the house of Sheffield, blurring thoughts and blotting feelings: nobody was himself or herself any longer, and even Virginia was talking about the necessity of being tough. I felt emerging from within me some sensible factor that had been struggling for existence through the past many weeks. Connie had abandoned us and we had abandoned her--officially now, with the immolation of her clothes. We, her sons, her daughter, and her husband--I, who owed her the difference between all the love and all the opportunity of my life and, probably, a newsstand on a cold street corner.

  Something was horribly wrong.

  I knew what by-and-by. The rhinestones told me, winking in the lamplight. Or maybe it was the particular perfume she had had made ever since I could recall, seeping down from the attic, invisible and everlasting, romantic as gardenia, elusive as sound in a fog.

  Somebody had to see Connie.

  She had lived for us. She would still live through us. Her kind of existence was dependent upon vital actualities, upon the sun and body temperatures and smiles observed. Photographs were not for Connie-not even my words, sterilized by three thousand miles of flight.

  And somebody, of course, meant me. It might have meant Virginia if Virginia had not been trying by cold observation of Connie's fates to determine her own. But in any case there would have been none but the two of us.

  I felt frightened--and ecstatic. I put the rhinestone in the plush-lined box with my studs, to be the amulet for my future destiny, and I began to plan. Presently, also, I began to whistle--aimlessly but with determination.

  It wasn't going to be easy. In the first place, I would have to alibi the journey so strongly that none of the Sheffields would suspect what I was doing, and in the second, upon my return, I would have to hide whatever I had discovered about Connie. I began to realize as I pondered that it would require extraordinary skill to deceive them. And yet in their present dejected state it might not be impossible. I would have to have some one invite me away and embark apparently for that person's abode. I would have to write letters to be mailed from that place during my absence. It would be best, perhaps, actually to spend some part of the time I was absent with whatever friend I chose to be my proxy host.

  At first I thought that I would wait until after Christmas, and then it occurred to me that going away for Christmas would be more effective. I would say to John and Virginia that so-and-so had invited me here-or-there for a couple of weeks over the holidays--and the very abnormality of my acceptance (I'd never missed a Christmas at Fort Sheffield) would fit in with the unnaturalness of our present lives. They would understand my wish to be away during the season of so many former hilarities, and, while they could imagine that might some day be audacious enough to visit Connie, they would never conceive my audacity to be great enough to take me at that time to the source of all our wretchedness. Thus, by the very boldness of going to see Connie at Christmas, I might in a large part eliminate the suspicion of it.

  That scheme relieved me a good deal, and I began to think of friends. Somebody en route. I'd fly of course. Flying is beautiful and exalting--and when the girl you love is going to marry another man, when you have already undergone some slight but sempiternal part of bodily destruction, you do not fidget with apprehension over the remote possibility of scattered duraluminum and blood on a snowy mountain. Somebody in Chicago or St. Louis or Kansas City.

  I ruffled through a mental roster of classmates from the Middle West and settled finally on Jimmy and Isabella Weyburn. They had a ranch outside Cheyenne. They had a villa in Nice, too, and an apartment in New York, but they were lovers of the outdoors.

  Not the mystic sort who find poetry in uncurling ferns and melodrama in the setting of the sun, but participators, who hunted out nature in her rawest parts and attacked there with glee, gusto, and myriad stirrup cups. They spent their lives on unmanageable moving things: skis, snowshoes, dog sleds, skates, aquaplanes, toboggans, decks of fishing boats, diving boards, the backs of horses, canoe seats--and possibly pogo sticks for quiet evenings at home. Cheerful people-and if they were never still, they were seldom out of equilibrium. For the Weyburns to be so generally meant a plaster cast or crutches at the least.

  My selection of the Weyburns was a further inspiration. They always spent Christmas at the ranch. They'd often asked me to visit them there. They knew the other Sheffields only slightly.

  So I decided. And that night I slept the first sweet sleep I'd had since Connie had walked in the garden with her lover.

  In the morning I took the train to New York. Whether the Weyburns were in their apartment or abroad or in Wyoming I did not know, but I was sure that wherever they were I could reach them by telephone, and I was so eager to have my purpose kept a secret that I would not risk a call abroad or even to Wyoming from anywhere in Reedy Cove. The operator might talk.

  Luckily they were still in their apartment--their western hegira imminent but not yet undertaken--and I found them chafing gaily at the stuffy unendurability of metropolitan existence, drink bourbon while the parlor maid put slip covers over the furniture, and tearing open huge packages from Spalding and Abercrombie and Fitch.

  When I told them I was coming to visit them on their ranch, Isabella clapped me on the back so hard she broke a collar button and Jimmy promised that in a fortnight I would be chewing nails and spitting rust, parting my hair with a blow torch, picking my teeth with dynamite, or some such thing. I had to tear them from a catalog that showed a snowplow attachment for a tractor in order to explain my true intentions, but once they realized that there was trouble in the house of Sheffield and that I did not wish to play polo in the Northern Lights, they were filled with sympathy and suggestions.

  Afterward I embarked upon the mission I had used as an explanation of my trip to town-Christmas shopping--and I thought amusedly, as I rode inch-meal by taxi from store to store, how one lie leads to another and a dozen others. The prospect of seeing Connie pleased me so deeply that everything pertaining to it became an adventure, and I imagined myself as a sort of Jimmy Valentine committing a technical crime for a philanthropic purpose and adroitly concealing each separate step of the deed.

  It is difficult to shop for people like the Sheffields. I learned that long ago. They are provided with all the necessities; most of the luxuries are commonplace to them; the things which they would appreciate are sometimes trifling. On account of that, I have made it a practice through the years to note some little item that Virginia had desired and denied herself or some larger acquisition that Larry has not had the courage to request.

  For him I went to my tailor and established a credit. I judged that Larry was as tall as he would ever be and that he would not gain much weight in the next ten years, so the credit covered full evening dress and all its accessories, a topper and white gloves, shirts made to measure, a chesterfield and even a cane with a gold head. In my day a dinner jacket and a gray felt hat excessively battered, together with a giant envelope of coonskin, was de rigeur. Now, however, I note our yo
uth immaculate in "white tie"--even when indulging in that conniption called the "Big Apple" to the maniacal fanfare of Benny Goodman.

  For Ivan, at an optical shop, a new fangled microscope, the name of which I had heard him mention wistfully. Its price was a shock to me, but I daresay that Ivan's scrutiny through it may someday repay his fellowman a million fold.

  John and I had one paramount taste in common: fishing--and it was not limited to the taking of trout in his private brook. I had watched--him during the past summer as he read accounts of the international tuna-fishing tournament off Nova Scotia, and he had also kept track of the weights of individual fish caught off the Jersey Coast in late August and early September. John is a powerful man, and I could imagine nothing more satisfactory to his soul in the years ahead than the violent endurance necessary to lick a big bluefin tuna. I bought him a Stevens reel, a big beauty with two cranks, a winch.

  really, and a thousand yards of line that would not snap wet with a strain of two hundred pounds.

  That left Virginia. As usual. I could seldom decide what to buy for Virginia. It was easier when she had been a child. The whole family had solemnly added to her collection of china elephants. That in itself was an idea. Nobody had given her one for a long time. So I hunted around and discovered two that I liked--a Venetian glass beast with purple eyes and a modern one whose trunk was consolidated with his forelegs. Still, that was only a gesture. I had brought along a snapshot of Bill, filched from her vanity, and I arranged to have that enlarged and framed. Then I looked at bracelets, hostess gowns, a sable neckpiece, and cocker spaniels. I liked the dogs best, but I thought that if she ever ran away with Bill, John and I might inherit the cocker and there was already welzschmerz enough among us. That led me to wondering if she would ever go away with Bill, and I doubted it, but I realized another thing: she lived on a relatively small allowance--her bank account was generally down to zero at the end of every month--

  perhaps that circumstance unconsciously prejudiced her freedom of action--and the whole estate of her grandmother had come to me. I knew she would never ask John for money if she decided to leave Fort Sheffield as Connie had left, and I presumed that a good part of Bill's income was required to maintain Joyce in comfort, so I wrote two checks--one for the family to see at Christmas time and one which I hoped she would accept privately.