Simpson said, “All right. Can he come up to see me tomorrow at noon?” Laskell could hear in his voice the division between the desire to do good and the fear of being taken advantage of.
“Can you go up to Westport tomorrow?” Laskell asked Maxim.
Maxim nodded.
“About noon?”
Maxim nodded again.
“He’ll be there, Kermit.”
And somehow all of Maxim’s loss of moral glory was in that sentence that made him a disposable object—“he,” the poor sad patient whom the well-dressed doctors were trying to help.
Paine came in with the ice cream and Maxim went to the kitchenette to help her serve it out. He made no comment on the arrangement, offered no gratitude. He seemed quite to accept the role of patient. But when they were all three eating the ice cream, he said, “Where do the Crooms live?”
“In Connecticut, a little place called Crannock. I go to Hartford and take the local train from there.”
“Tomorrow? On what train?”
“The ten-twelve.”
“I’ll call for you and we can take the train together.” It was not a suggestion but a statement.
“No!”
The idea of the trip alone had been frightening to Laskell—it was astonishing how he had lost his nerve about so ordinary a thing. It was impossible to contemplate taking the trip with this man in whom one could almost hear the dim, slow sound of disintegration.
“No!” he said again.
“Why, what an excellent idea!”
It was the sure voice of Paine, the voice of nannies and nurseries, of coal fires and bad drains, of bread-and-butter and cambric tea, and an egg to tea, of rooks in the elms and the Christmas pantomime, of not whimpering and of keeping your chin up, of all the comfortable certainties of his childhood reading in English books.
“You’re very rude,” said Paine. “An excellent idea. And Mr. Maxim can help you with the luggage. You have to be careful lifting things, you know, after such a long fever. The muscles are weakened, particularly of the feet, and many people get fallen arches as a result of insufficient caution. But Mr. Maxim looks strong enough for two.”
Betrayed and trapped, Laskell sat there with nothing to say and nothing to do except to fight down as best he could a rising fluttering in his stomach.
He woke weary the next morning, drained and dry behind the eyes. He had remembered in the night the claim that Maxim had upon him—Maxim’s quiet company evening after evening in the days after Elizabeth had died. Now Maxim, in his loss, had come to Laskell. Beyond his use of the photograph, Maxim had not uttered the claim, and Laskell, now, was glad that he had not, that Maxim had got what help he had without any bargaining. He was also glad that, since the claim did exist, he had given Maxim what help he could. He found it strange that not until he was alone and sleepless that night had he remembered there was any claim at all. And when he did remember it, he remembered the stern and hollow feeling of those days. And he more than remembered it, he suffered it again, experienced the negation and hopelessness just as if three years had not passed.
It did not make the coming trip a happier adventure for Laskell that Maxim presented himself at eight o’clock, dirty, dark-eyed, unshaven, and asking for breakfast and a bath.
“Well, you’ve been on the tiles, my good man,” said Paine happily and went to draw the bath.
“She speaks truer than she knows,” Maxim said. “Except that your roof is tin.”
He had spent the night on the roof. Laskell had to put the fact from his mind, it was too awful even to contemplate.
He had saved until the moment before the farewell the gift he had ordered for Paine. There had been no trouble in choosing it. He had had merely to order what he had decided would make just the right gift; he had found it easily enough one morning when Paine was out marketing, by making a single telephone call to the likeliest store. It was a handbag of heavy pigskin, as plain as if designed to army specifications and stitched to endure forever and to descend to Paine’s grandnieces. Paine received it with the air of protest and surprise that is learned by people who receive presents in the way of business.
Paine said, “Oh, Mr. Laskell, too good of you, really. What a lovely handbag,” very genteel and not looking at him. She held out to him a dry hand. Dressed now in her street clothes, she looked shabbier than ever. “You’ve been a nice patient,” she said. She meant it, but there was a kind of forgiveness in her voice, as though she knew she had been imposed on all along and had decided not to mind. “Now I want you to be a good boy and take care of yourself.”
It was only nurses’ talk—there was no longer any connection between them, nor did she have any remembrance of a connection. She had bathed him and shaved him, she had been with him when his life was in question and she had first heard his voice in the obscurities of delirium. So long as her function lasted she had thrown her protection around him, and to him it had appeared in the form of love. Now her function was at an end. Laskell thought of the gift he was to have given her every year at Christmas, the dull quiet evenings he had planned to spend taking his old nurse to dinner and theater. Now he knew he would probably never see her again and this first gift of his was the last. The gray and peaceful illusion was over.
Maxim, mad or not, corrupted or not, could help with the chores of closing the apartment, could pick up all the bags, Paine’s as well as Laskell’s, leaving Laskell only the rod and creel, could carry them down the stairs, turning his head to say to Laskell, “Take it easy now,” and could go to the corner to find a taxi.
“I took the creel, Paine,” Laskell said as they stood on the sidewalk with nothing to say, and he pointed to it in proof.
“Oh—sound idea. Good boy.” He had asked for her approval and she gave it. But she was not much interested.
Paine got into the taxi with Maxim and Laskell. She was to be let off at Fifth Avenue and Twenty-eighth Street. Why just at that place she did not say. At Twenty-sixth Street she again held out her hand in farewell. “Be a good boy,” she said. She nodded briskly and cordially to Maxim. “Good-by, Mr. Maxim. See to it that he behaves.”
With that her tie to him ended and there she was, standing on the sidewalk, alone and indistinguishable, looking for a way to cross the avenue, rather inept, her competence hidden. It was the last he would ever see of her.
Alone with Maxim, Laskell wanted to say something about Paine that would refer to his own large feelings and yet suit those still larger social considerations which he had often discussed with Maxim, the nature of modern society, the individual and his relation to the social whole, the breaking of the communal bonds. But any remark that would reflect his own isolation would be lacking in tact to this man who was really so much more alone. The remark itself would not actually “hurt” Maxim, but the deficiency in tact would be offensive to him, for Maxim always insisted on the code of delicacy and politeness, bourgeois though it was.
What Laskell said was, “By the way, do you have any money?”
“Enough for a while.”
Laskell took out his wallet and drew three ten-dollar bills from it. “Will thirty be enough?” he said, and then he felt himself flush at the number he had chosen. Had something in his mind wished to offer the traitor Maxim thirty pieces of silver?
But Maxim had not noticed the number, or gave no sign of noticing. “Thanks, John. Can you spare it?”
“Yes, I can get more if I need it.” And Laskell thought that there was this notable difference between them, that Maxim meant money while he had meant cash.
In the station, under the great blue dome with its faint gold constellations, Laskell felt how weak and inadequate his legs were.
“Don’t hurry,” Maxim said. “Plenty of time. You’re still a little shaky, aren’t you?”
It was so. Even Maxim was a comfort here among all the people so brutally intent upon making trains or appointments. And Maxim chose a double seat on what, when they emerged into the light, would be the shady
side of the car, and heaved the bags up on the rack—it was a great relief. Laskell could forget the disgust with which he had regarded Maxim’s moral defection, if it was that, or the pity with which he had regarded Maxim’s madness, if it was that.
But he did not miss observing that Maxim had chosen the last car of the train. He could at first suppose that this was to save a long walk down the platform. But when Maxim chose a seat at the very rear of this last car, Laskell was sure there was strategy in it. Their position had been chosen to lessen the chances of anybody approaching from the rear. And Maxim then substantiated Laskell’s conclusion by saying, “I guess this is the best place for me.”
It was terribly sad, this absurd precaution, but it was the only sign of delusion that Maxim gave. For the rest he was an almost pleasant companion. He asked about all kinds of people they had known together in the days before Maxim had given the whole of his life to the Party and had cut himself off from so many things. He was as social as anyone traveling in the direction of Westport.
6
TELLING the story of Maxim’s visit to the Crooms was even more difficult than Laskell had anticipated. How difficult he expected it to be he understood when, walking to the Crooms’ house that evening, he had to acknowledge that his heart was quickening its beat. The sensation was not entirely unpleasant. It had something of the normal anxiousness he might have felt if he were just about to make a public speech on a difficult matter, though with every reason to suppose that he would in the end do credit to himself. But it was odd that he should have felt even this much excitement at the prospect of telling the story. After all, it was nothing more than a piece of news to be imparted to Arthur and Nancy. Yet he had eaten his supper that evening with an enforced calm and had even been at pains to make himself neat for the occasion, going to his room to change his shirt, though it was quite fresh, and to brush his hair. While he was in his room he recalled that he had not made the test of his urine that day—lately he was beginning to forget to do this—and he heated the test tube over the lamp he had lit on his dresser and dropped in the acetic acid when it boiled, noting with satisfaction that the liquid did not turn cloudy.
It was a warm night, though damp, and there was a mild, drifting mist. The days were noticeably drawing in and Laskell needed a flashlight for the road. The segment of mist that was lit by the conic beam of the flashlight was turbulent, but he had only to look outside the cone of light to see that its main movement was large, slow, and drifting. The air was filled with the perpetual sound of crickets, the sound of summer that speaks of summer’s end. It spoke of this now to Laskell, as it always had, ever since boyhood, with its pleasant melancholy of things ending, a conscious and noble melancholy leading to hope and the promise of things to come, of things beginning, all the liveliness of autumn, of new starts, the renewed expectation that, this year, one’s personal character would learn the perfect simplicity one wished it to have.
The Crooms had finished dinner and were sitting in that unfinished but already charming living-room of theirs when Laskell arrived. He naturally did not knock when he entered, the sound of his steps on the path being enough, and they greeted him as casually as if he had not arrived at all but had merely come back after having stepped out for a look at the weather.
Arthur said, “Hi, feller!” and went on whittling the block of wood that was to be a boat for Micky. There was newspaper spread out at his feet to catch the shavings. Nancy was wearing a long house-coat of light blue and her sunny hair was turned up and bound with a ribbon. She sat under a lamp and her only greeting to Laskell was to say aloud what she had been murmuring to herself, “Forty-seven, forty-eight, forty-nine, fifty, fifty-one,” warning him that he must not speak to her nor she to him until she had finished the count of her knitting stitches.
Seventy-four was the number of stitches she was counting and when she reached it she said, “Hello, John.” But while the counting continued, John Laskell had a perception. The sound of the crickets filled the Crooms’ room and to Laskell it suddenly seemed that the sound no longer spoke with the sweet melancholy of the end of summer. It seemed to him that it was the sound made by the passing of time, a very different thing. It was not like an elegy heard with pleasure in its sadness, but like the inexorable ticking away of life itself. The Crooms in their house together had shut themselves off from it as snugly as they would have shut themselves off against a storm. They had made everything tight, seen to all the windows, looked in on their child to see that he was undisturbed, and now were the happier for what was going on outside. But Laskell could not share the shelter which they had together. He felt suddenly exposed to the whole force of the movement that was indicated by that ceaseless noise of time rushing away. He had a desire, not for shelter—he could not hope for that much—but for something he could hang on to as standing against the movement of time he now heard around him. Summer spoke of its end but did not go on to speak of new beginnings. It spoke only of the end of all other summers. Laskell, standing there while Nancy counted, had the sense—and he wondered if it came eventually to every man and if it always came so early in life—that there was really no future.
He did not mean that he had no future. He meant that the future and the present were one—that the present could no longer contrive and manufacture the future by throwing forward, in the form of expectation and hope, the desires of the present moment. It was not that he had “lost hope,” but only that he did not make a distinction between what he now had and was and what he expected to have and be. The well-loved child of the middle class is taught about the future by means of the promises made to him—the birthday gifts will come and the Christmas gifts will come, and the performance at the Hippodrome, and camp and college and the trip to Europe. And all the promises and their fulfillment are symbolic of the great promise, made to him by everyone, that he will grow and change. This great promise he takes into himself in the form of a pledge—made to himself and to everyone—that he will grow and change for the better. He takes it into himself too in the particular form of his vision of time, in which the future is always brighter and more spacious than the present. How the mind of the fortunate young man of the middle class is presided over by the future! It is his mark, his Muse—for it is feminine in its seductiveness—and sets him apart from the young men of the truly lower class and from the young men of the truly upper class.
What happened to Laskell, all at once, was that he realized that you couldn’t live the life of promises without yourself remaining a child. The promise of the future might have its uses as a way of seducing the child to maturity, but maturity itself meant that the future and the present were brought together, that you lived your life now instead of preparing and committing yourself to some better day to come.
His new perception of the nature of time struck him with very great force. Yet it was not especially startling. The only thing that was startling about it was that it came so suddenly, in this moment of differentiation between the Crooms and himself. It was not painful—or no more painful than the change that had taken place when, at a certain age, the special and mysterious expectation of Christmas and birthdays was no longer appropriate and his parents began to give him his gifts quite as a matter of course, most affectionately still, but without their eyes shining in the excitement of seeing their son’s wonder and impatience being now satisfied and even exceeded by reality; or just as going to the theater was no longer a matter of waiting for that blessed Saturday on which would be revealed Annette Kellerman in the tank or Charlotte on the ice but became a simple transaction, a call to the ticket-agency, with no interval, if one didn’t want an interval, between the decision to go to the theater and the going.
It was not a gay feeling, this change in the character of the relation between present and future, but it was certainly not an unhappy one. The well-loved child of the middle class had always done everything with an exemption granted, for the future was made not only of promises but also of opportuniti
es for forgiveness, and redemptions, and second or third chances. As Laskell looked back on this evening with the Crooms, he found that his odd idea about the future and the present being one brought its own heroism. It had a kind of firm excitement or excited firmness that was connected with his feeling that at this very moment he had the full measure of existence—now, at this very moment, now or never, not at some other and better time that lay ahead. If at this moment he did not have the simplicity of character he wanted, he would never have it; if he was not now answerable for himself, he would never answer.
“Sixty-nine, seventy, seventy-one, seventy-two, seventy-three, seventy-four.” Nancy finished counting and said, “Hello, John.”
Arthur, released from the necessity of silence, said, “Nancy tells me that you have news from Gifford Maxim.” He was still whittling at the boat.
“Why no,” Laskell began. Nancy made a surprised and questioning sound and Laskell said, “Not news from him but news about him.” And although he had planned to lead up to it, for the sake of verisimilitude, he now thought it best to let them have it all at once. “Maxim has broken,” he said.
They looked at him both in amazement and in lack of understanding. But if they were amazed, they must understand, and if they did not understand, how could they be amazed?
“Broken?” said Arthur. “What do you mean, broken?”
But Arthur of course knew what it meant and Laskell found himself not answering. He looked at Arthur, waiting until Arthur should consent to understand. Then it occurred to him that this was a trick of Maxim’s and he said, “Broken with the Communist Party, of course.”
“No!” said Arthur. Then he said, “For Pete’s sake!” Then he said, “Giff Maxim?” And not until he had expressed his amazement in three separate utterances did he feel that he was beginning to come into possession of the astonishing fact.
Nancy’s incredulity was more coherent. “I don’t believe it,” she announced. But there was nothing else for her to do except believe it. “I can’t believe it,” she said, meaning that although her mind gave a formal assent to the truth of the statement, she had no emotions with which to accommodate it, and no real desire for such emotions.
The Middle of the Journey Page 19
