The Sound of Thunder

by Taylor Caldwell

  Margo went on. “Last week there was this guy from out West; buyer for girdles. I don’t do girdles, usually. Evening and cocktail dresses, usually. But this was a big account, biggest in the country. So there I was—” The story was outrageously indecent and full of humor. Gregory, released, roared with joy.

  “You’re not having another?” asked Margo, suddenly, her eyes still bright with laughter. She tapped Gregory’s hand with a big finger. Abruptly he was horribly sober, and the imperative to corrupt was on him again. He began to talk of Edward. When he reached this state, he invariably talked of his brother, with hatred.

  Margo, who had started to yawn with unaffected sleepiness, was suddenly interested. Why, those Green and White super markets! Why, Greg was not only a big writer, with millions; he was a brother to the owner of those big stores. And he was darling, too. All at once Margo loved him, quite sincerely. She had loved before, but the gentlemen sadly, and inevitably, were not rich, and she had parted from them with regret but with determination. Her mother had once told her, “It’s just as easy to love a rich man as a poor one; easier.”

  Margo had a mind, and now that she loved Gregory, she was all sympathy and attention. A picture of Edward Enger was forming before her, and she was filled with indignation. Though shrewd, and usually forming her own opinions, she was carried away on the wave of Gregory’s thinning voice as he described his brother. She never doubted his word for an instant, for she loved him. What a bastard that Ed must be! A real bastard. Keeping everybody on his or her knees in front of him; taking the guts out of them. Everybody, of course, except Gregory. Greg was one of those knights, or something, riding against a dragon. A real dragon. He was right in taking Ed’s money, all of it he could get. And saving it, too. Margo’s eyes gleamed with mingled greed and powerful affection. She nodded her golden head over and over, emphatically.

  “So you see, Margo, it’s his kind we’re fighting against,” said Gregory. “We’re going to take their wealth, their fat profits, away from them and share it. And why not?”

  “Why not?” echoed Margo, bursting with her indignation.

  The corruption was off to a fine start. Gregory could not help it. He must corrupt to blind the terrifying vision of himself.

  Four weeks later, on April 10, 1933, Gregory made one of the few independent decisions he had made since he was fifteen. He married Margo in New York. As part of his wedding offerings were several modern books on Marxism, written simply “for the masses.” Margo was enthusiastic. (After all, a girl had to keep up with her husband, didn’t she?) She never quite related what she was reading to the world of reality. The objective was Edward Enger, the oppressor, the grinder of the faces of the poor, the profiteer. He was, in particular, the grinder of the face of Gregory Enger, whom she loved.

  Gregory, with great fear, had had to notify Edward. He wrote, “I’d like you to meet my wife, Margo, who was a model, before anyone else in the family knows. You’ll like her. She’s strong and decent, though she hasn’t much education.”

  So Edward, gloomy and enraged at this new calamity—a model, for God’s sake!—had come to New York at once, and to Gregory’s apartment. He had sent a telegram and the newly married pair were waiting for him. But when he entered the apartment, he had looked at once, not at his brother but at Margo, and he thought to himself with pleased surprise, Why, she’s not bad at all! She’s got health and strength, and there’s something clean-looking about her. It could be—it just could be—that she’ll be good for him.

  Margo herself was surprised. She had expected, in a vague way, to be confronted by something monstrous in human form, something beetling and fierce and terrible. “Why,” she thought, “he looks just like Greg, except he’s bigger and stronger-looking and older.”

  They shook hands gravely. It was an uneventful meeting after all. Edward asked the girl blunt questions, which she answered as bluntly, while Gregory winced. It was all right! Edward told himself. A farm girl, a hearty girl, a girl who looked honestly greedy and not sly.

  Gregory had warned his wife. “Don’t tell him about—the movement. Keep it all very casual. You don’t know what he is!”

  So during the hours Edward spent with Gregory and Margo nothing was said that might annoy Edward or arouse his suspicions. He went away the next morning considerably satisfied.

  It took Gregory almost two weeks to convince his wife that Edward was a menace and a destroyer. It took him several months to make her hate Edward again.

  CHAPTER IX

  The day after Gertrude Enger’s graduation from the Waterford School for Girls she sat alone in the hot June sunlight where her parents used to meet, and talk, and where they never met, or talked, any longer. She rubbed the toe of her slipper in the coarse warm grass and watched the glitter of the strong green trees, the intent coming and going of honey bees, the light and shadow which ran over the earth as the huge and brilliant white clouds passed and repassed across the face of the golden sun. She heard, without really hearing, the distant splash of the fountain in the molten quiet, the conversation and quarrels of birds, the monotonous clatter of lawn mowers. She thought, There’re so many gardeners around here now, more than we ever had. More than we need. The servants’ quarters are just jammed with people. That’s Daddy’s contribution to fighting the depression. And he won’t close a single store; he says that the men need the work, even though we’ll probably all end up in the poorhouse if this goes on. Poor Daddy. What did Miss Thompson, who’s so sly and mean, anyway, say last winter? “This depression is the end of the capitalist system in this democracy!” I always thought this country was a republic; when did it get to be a democracy? Did President Wilson do that? Or was it really what Daddy says it was, that the words were put into Mr. Wilson’s mouth? Daddy says Mr. Wilson was always so suspicious of idealists, though he was sort of an idealist himself.

  Gertrude sighed restlessly, feeling strangely oppressed and threatened. She was greatly worried about her father. She had no one to talk over her anxiety with except her mother, who was so apprehensive herself. Robert, her twin, was not one to worry overmuch, for his nature was sweet and amiable and full of trust in the goodness of man and the power of God. “Oh, Dad will be all right; he’s just worried about this depression,” he would say to Gertrude. It was odd that Robert, who had no conception of his father’s agonies and torments, and who preferred sports to studies, and who had an absolutely obtuse—according to Gertrude—attitude toward the ominous events occurring all over the world, should be the only effective consoler of his father. He had only to come into the room, smiling and serene, tall and masculine, and Edward would immediately brighten, turn from somber meditation and solitary misery, and greet his son with a lightening of his voice and a quick eagerness of expression. Was it because, the astute Gertrude asked herself, Robert brought to his father a sense of security, or reassurance, of unshakable health and hope in a world that was monstrously sick and in a state of savage and hopeless upheaval? Robert did not play particularly well on that fine violin his father had bought for him on his sixteenth birthday, but Edward would sit and listen to him with smiling pleasure, and would compliment him enthusiastically. And Daddy, thought Gertrude, with a rueful smile, really knows music, too!

  Gertrude thought of the discussion she had had with Robert only a few days ago, when he had been graduated from the Englebert School. Robert showed no anxiety, but only confidence. “I want to study at a business-administration school,” he had told his sister. “Oh, I’ll go in for a dash of the liberal arts, too, but business is my meat. Besides, Dad can use me a little later. What? My music? Who cares for that? I’ve outgrown it. I’ve just been going along with Dad, because he likes to hear me play. But I’ll have a talk with him and get everything settled.”

  Gertrude said, “But he’s settled it all that you’ll have four years of liberal arts, and intensive music training right along, and then a concert career after that!”

  Robert smiled indulgently
. “Don’t squint up your face as if I’m about to give the old man a body blow, Gertie. I’ll tell him what I really want, and that’s all there’ll be to it, with no fuss or screams, and he won’t mind a bit.”

  The strange and confusing thing about it, thought Gertrude, is that Robert was probably right, with regard to himself, anyway. Gertrude was another matter. She was already entered at Wellesley, to major in literature. She had talked with her mother about Robert, and Margaret was of the same opinion. “Robert is the least devious person in the whole world,” Margaret had said. “He doesn’t know what hypocrisy is, or double-dealing, or maneuvering. He is just himself. He has only to ask your father for something, whether your father approves or not, and he gets it. Perhaps it’s because he is just himself, and is simple and kind and expects others to be the same. You and I, darling, are a little more complex and we expect trouble. And we usually get it, too!”

  “I suppose Daddy will blow up when I tell him I want to enter the University of Syracuse’s School of Nursing,” Gertrude had said, anxiously. “He won’t understand that I’m not really a writer and don’t want to be a writer, and that the very idea frightens and bores me to death. Just because of all those silly poems I used to write, and the stories to amuse myself, when I was a kid! He really took Aunt Sylvia seriously, didn’t he?”

  “That’s because he wanted to take her seriously,” Margaret had said with some anger.

  “I never took myself seriously,” said Gertrude. “But Dad did.” Her olive face and gray eyes, her broad cheekbones and thick dark hair, her straight tall body and resolute movements, made her a young and feminine replica of her father. But Gertrude, unlike Edward, had few illusions about herself or others, and preferred, unlike Edward, to let others pursue their own way. She was by nature solitary and reticent and proud, while her brother was gregarious, open in personality, and had a high sense of humor which prohibited too much pride. He was deeply concerned with others, and generous-hearted.

  “I never,” Gertrude had said to her mother, “deceived myself that I was a writer, but it pleased Daddy to think I was. I thought it would all pass later on. But he’s fixed on it. I don’t care! I’m going to be a nurse. I want to get into Dad’s Clinic.”

  “You’re not exactly the tender and solicitous kind, dear,” Margaret had said, with one of the smiles which were becoming rarer and rarer with her. “So why the nursing fever?”

  “Oh, I don’t expect to spend my life bending lovingly over beds and emptying bedpans,” Gertrude replied. “I’m interested in the scientific side. I want to do research. And nothing, and nobody, not even Daddy, is going to stop me. I want to be a laboratory technician, later.” She looked at her mother. “I want to get off Dad’s neck. I’m not a parasite.” Her face shone with sudden strong indignation. “Why doesn’t Dad throw them all out, all the uncles and aunts? Why, they’re eating him alive, and in these days, too!”

  Margaret did not reply, and Gertrude had continued, “I love Daddy, I love him dearly. But he’s not going to manage my life.”

  Margaret said, “You and Robert are good children. You are the only good things in this house. You are the only good things that ever happened to your father. He’ll realize that, one of these days. He doesn’t know yet that to give anybody everything that person thinks he wants is to do him the worst injury in the world.”

  Gertrude burst out, “I hate my aunts and uncles, yes, I hate them! For what they are doing to Daddy.”

  “And I do, too,” said Margaret, quietly. “Yes, and I do too.”

  “I love Daddy too much to give him power over me,” Gertrude said.

  Margaret was stunned and outraged. “What do you mean by power? Your father never wanted power over anybody! What a terrible thing to say, Gertrude! He has never wanted to do anything but help—”

  “They’re the same thing, mostly,” said Gertrude. “But it’s very hard to explain. You help people when they should be helping themselves, and so you acquire power over them because they are weaker, and so they hate you, for their own weakness in putting themselves under your domination. And in turn, you despise them for their weakness, and you’re uncomfortable, if you’re a decent person like Daddy, because you have that power over them. I think all help, all charity, should be absolutely anonymous. Then the weak could develop pride, and the strong wouldn’t be humiliated by having to exert power they don’t want—if they’re decent people.”

  “I simply don’t know what you’re talking about, Gertrude! All this talk of power!”

  You can’t see, Mother, because you can’t take an objective view of Daddy and all the aunts and uncles, thought Gertrude, hopelessly.

  As she sat under the trees now her sense of foreboding and distress increased. She knew the source of them clearly. Unlike her father, she had a stern sense of reality in personal and emotional matters and understood that though he derided mysticism he was thoroughly saturated with it. But Daddy is really an artist, with an artist’s temperament, she thought, in spite of his marvelous business instinct. I just see things levelly, and I don’t know whether or not that is so wonderful either. Grandma’s like me; that’s why we have so much in common. And all she’s gotten out of life is a philosophy of endurance, but for what purpose I don’t know. Life is surely something more than an endurance test; if it isn’t, then it’s a barren and fruitless thing. Yet Grandma doesn’t seem crushed, as Daddy does, Daddy who’s always looking for a meaning to things, even if he doesn’t know he’s looking.

  And yet, and yet, she thought, if you stop looking for a mystical or religious meaning to life, then you live in a world of blacks and grays and whites, without color. You live in a world of despair and violence; a cold hell without values or escape or significance. I think Daddy has one foot in the world of meaning and one foot in hell. I wish I could help him as Robert does, Robert who cheerfully believes everything is very simple and kind and exciting.

  “Aha,” said someone, and Gertrude started. “We sit and dream. About the graduation party Saturday night before we go off to get educated.”

  “Oh, it’s you,” said Gertrude, coldly, looking up to see her cousin André. “Go away, child. I’m busy.”

  André, with an indulgent and debonair wave of his hand, sat down beside her. She drew to the edge of the bench, then slipped forward, as if about to rise. André said, “You’re only a couple of months or so older than I am, and you’re terribly young—child. Chronologically a little older; mentally a lot my junior. You’re always worrying about people and trying to solve things about them in your own mind. I just accept them as amusing spectacles. They have a right to be idiotic if they want to, and it’s impudent of you to try to change them.”

  Gertrude’s smooth olive face flushed, and André smiled at her approvingly. “You’re really a very handsome girl, Gertrude. Not pretty. Handsome. You’ll always be handsome, when only pretty girls have become dumpy and frowsy.”

  Gertrude tried to retain her annoyance but she could not help smiling. She had no aversion for André, though she was sometimes afraid of his worldliness and what her father referred to as “spiritual depravity.” She disliked his detached objectivity; mankind was involved in itself and its own fate and its obscure reason for being. She did not believe that anyone was justified in standing apart, as at a theater, and watching the antics of others with pleasure and mercilessness and cynicism, as André and his mother did. Such an attitude implied inhumanity and heartlessness and a kind of outlook which was frightening. Yes, it was truly depraved.

  She studied André with cold sternness, which hid her fear, not of him but of his kind of soul and philosophy. He had, at almost eighteen, grown to quite an impressive stature, leaving his little mother far behind and taking on the height of his father. But his look of “foreignness” had increased. His black eyes still had that peculiar shine of his childhood, the lids stained with “gypsy” brown; his features were delicate yet strong, and full of mature mischief. His movements, to Ger
trude, were too quick, too alien in gesture and controlled vehemence. In spite of this, however, he was not emotional in the sense that Gertrude understood emotion. There was a knowingness about him, a disturbing sense of the absurd, and Gertrude found very few things absurd about the predicament of humanity. Her humor was the abstract kind; his was personal and without pity. Yet she enjoyed his company much of the time. He could frighten her, but he could sometimes give her inner vision clarity, and he could frequently inspire her and make her laugh.

  She said, her hands still on the bench in the attitude of rising, “Why can’t you dress for the country the way everybody else does? Blazer or something? You always look as if you’re going to a funeral or about to attend a formal soirée.” But she thought, with charity, that he had something of Uncle David’s slim elegance about him, something of David’s impeccable air of poise and patrician surety. André was also ingratiating and had considerable charm. It’s the French in him, Gertrude thought. They’re calculating in even the smallest things. But then he’s been away in European schools ever since he was twelve, and it’s hard to think of him as an American with American ways. She tried to dislike him, very strongly, and never succeeded. Robert would sometimes say to her affectionately, “Oh, let him alone. He has as much a right to be what he is as you have, Sis. Besides, he isn’t complicated at all, though you think he is.” But then nothing was ever complicated for Robert.