Promises

by Belva Plain

  “No one ever laughed at you.”

  “Where does she live? What does she do? Since she certainly knows all about me, I have a right to know all about her.”

  For a moment he hesitated, and mistaking his hesitation for refusal, Margaret cried, “You might as well tell me. I can easily find out.”

  Thinking, If she goes there, and I don’t believe she will, Randi can cope, he replied, “She sells real estate. She has a house not far from Randolph Crossing.”

  “And this has been going on how long?”

  “A couple of years,” he said.

  Squirming under the cross examination, he suddenly felt the same helpless anger that Jenks had made him feel. Yet Margaret had every right to ask. What else would any woman do? As if she had read his thoughts, she cried out again.

  “Do you know there are women who would throw you out of the house for this? Maybe throw a frying pan at your head too? Or file for divorce?”

  Divorce. Bite the bullet, Randi said. It was inevitable. Nevertheless, there was a sinking in his stomach, a cold fear that brought back the sensation that students have when they enter the examination hall and the blue books are given out.

  “Often,” he said in that same low voice and not looking at Margaret, but rather at the suddenly threatening face of her great-grandfather, “divorce is the best solution.”

  She stared at him. “What? What did you say?”

  “It isn’t the worst thing in the world.”

  “For us?” she cried.

  “It hasn’t been working out for us,” he said steadily. “Neither of us is happy anymore.”

  “What do you mean?” she gasped. “What are you saying?”

  “That we will both be better off if we face the truth.”

  “The truth! Am I going crazy here? Am I really hearing this? You would leave me, just walk away from everything”—and Margaret waved her hand, indicating the house and, as he well knew, the children upstairs—“in exchange for that woman?”

  “You make it too simple. Emotions are.…” He was faltering, yet there was no way to make plain a thing so complex, so contradictory, and yet so compelling.

  “Oh, my God, what has she got that is missing in me?” And Margaret clasped her hands in the age-old gesture of despair.

  He was pinned to the wall, and there was no escape. “It’s not that there is anything missing in you. It’s just that I love her. She is the love of my life.”

  “The love of your life! Then everything you ever said to me was a sham. All our years, almost nineteen of them, a sham.”

  “I didn’t think it was. I didn’t think they were. It’s just that things happen.”

  “Things happen? Am I losing my reason? You really said that?”

  He did not answer.

  “And the children? The life we’ve built for them here?”

  A look of disbelief came over her face such as you see on people who pass a hideous accident on the road and have to turn away. It seemed to him that he was actually witnessing the outflow of her strength and her vital fluids, as if she were about to die here in this room. He had cut her with a cruel knife, he had savaged her, and, knowing that he had done so, stood up to go to her.

  She gave a shrill cry. “No, don’t touch me! Don’t come near me with your phony sorrow.”

  “It isn’t phony. You can’t know what grief I feel, doing this to you. I don’t want to, but I can’t help it.”

  She fell onto the sofa. And he said gently, “Margaret … I’ll take care of you all. Don’t think I will ever abandon you and the children. I could never do that. I will be a caring father, the same father I have always been. And as for you, you don’t think so now, but you’re still young and you deserve—”

  “Get out,” she said. “You have nothing more to tell me. You’ve said it all. Get out.”

  So he left her lying there, went into the sterile little room where he now slept, and sat down. Well, he had done it; the scene he had so dreaded and so often postponed had been enacted. And yet his feelings were ambivalent. Relieved of secrecy and deception, he certainly did feel lighter and cleaner; he felt free; the way was finally open. Yet he had killed Margaret’s spirit. In spite of his mental reassurance about her future possibilities, about Fred Davis or some unknown Prince Charming, he had destroyed a part of her that would never be the same. And feeling that to be true, he was deeply sad. Tomorrow, too, they would have to inform the children.…

  For a long time he sat quite still, thinking and weighing many things. Probably it was a mistake to have been as blunt as he had been. He should probably not have used that phrase love of my life. He could hardly believe that he had really spoken it and had crossed the divide. Yet it was the truth.

  It must have been an hour or more before he walked with soundless steps into the kitchen, closed the door, and picked up the telephone.

  “Well, Randi. It’s done,” he said. “I’ve done it.”

  FIFTEEN

  When the sobs died away into exhaustion, Margaret began to feel the cold. The room was dark. Someone must have come in and turned off the light. She got up, lit a lamp, and, shivering, stood staring into the pink bulb. Turning her head slowly, she looked around the room. Nothing had changed. It seemed entirely possible that she had been hallucinating, that Adam had not been sitting in the green chair talking about a divorce. Yet there was the evening paper, and the tapestry pillow was on the floor where he always left it, although it belonged on the chair. The house was quiet in the stillness that comes after midnight. A few hours from now it would awaken, and its occupants would have to resume where they had left off.

  How had this thing happened? What was going to happen to them all?

  Upstairs, the bedroom doors were open. In the dim hall light she discerned Julie’s huge stuffed panda on the rocking chair beside the bed. What was this going to do to Julie, tender Julie, who took life so hard?

  Dear God, she murmured, clutching the banister. And Rufus, hearing the merest whisper of a voice, looked up from his bed. When she bent to stroke his head, he thumped his tail. And this small display of love from the dog—a dog!—was too much for her. If he had been able to understand language, she would have knelt beside him and asked him for comfort.

  Then she thought of Nina, wondering what she would say if and when the rupture should come to pass, the total rupture of the five lives beneath this roof. Given the direction Nina had taken, she would probably find an excuse for Adam, Margaret thought bitterly.

  She lay down again in the dark with her mind going over and over the unreality of this night, forming questions that had perhaps no answer. How is it possible after so many years that had been quite reasonably happy, that were contented, for an unknown woman to appear out of nowhere and destroy our peace? Our trust? While I was living my simple day, teaching, marketing, tending this home—or perhaps one night while I was sleeping in his bed with my head on his shoulder—she was already crossing the continent on her way here to rob and wreck.

  And we have such beautiful children. Is that nothing to him?

  There were more questions. At what point could she have stopped this if she had known, for surely such things did not happen at first glance, first contact? Or did they? That woman had come here looking for Adam. And he.… Chemistry, they called it. In the laboratory, chemistry followed the rules!

  The first light was touching the butterflies on the wallpaper when at last she fell asleep.

  When Margaret awoke, full sunshine covered the carpet and the feel of noon was in the room. There were voices and motion in the house. It took a few seconds for her to orient herself, to grasp the facts that this was Sunday, that she had a headache, and that Adam had asked for a divorce. She sprang out of bed and ran to the mirror, there to be appalled by the sight of her swollen, shining eyelids. Her impulse was to go back to bed and hide this ugly proof of her devastation, but when Megan knocked, she realized that hiding would be not only foolish, but impossible.
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br />   “I’ve been waiting outside your door for you to wake up,” Megan said.

  Margaret could think of nothing better to answer than “I look awful, don’t I?”

  “Yes. Cold water will help. And then you can wear sunglasses.”

  “I need to shower and get dressed.”

  “I shouldn’t have told,” Megan said.

  “Yes, you should have.”

  “Is it going to be serious?”

  “I hope not.”

  “I saw you on the sofa when I came back from Betsy’s. I didn’t want to disturb you, so I just turned the light off.”

  “I’m sorry you had to see me like that.”

  “Do you want to tell me about it?”

  “Not yet.”

  The two women studied each other, their visual contact accomplishing in moments what words would need minutes to do.

  “I hear Dad talking on the porch. Who’s with him?”

  “Uncle Fred, making his Sunday visit. Do you want breakfast or lunch?”

  “Neither, thanks. If I do, I’ll help myself.”

  “It’s almost as warm as summer out. I thought I’d play tennis with Betsy. Unless you need me?”

  “No, darling. Go. I want you to have good times.”

  Standing under the shower, Margaret let tears mingle with the spray. How can he, how can he do this to a girl like Megan? Seventeen years old and already sickened with fear on such a bright spring day.

  When she opened the window, which was directly above the porch, the two voices were distinctly audible, and Fred’s voice made eavesdropping irresistible. “Try not to hurt her more than you already have.”

  And Adam: “I’m not deliberately hurting her. It’s not what I want to do, for God’s sake! It’s something that simply happened. Neither of us has been happy for a long time. Why? It’s hard to say.”

  Fred’s voice rumbled: “Nothing hard about it. Actually, it’s very simple on your part. You fell in love, didn’t you? Head over heels in love!”

  “I don’t relish your sarcastic tone, Fred. Love exists, you know.”

  “That depends on what you mean by the word. Some people, if you’ll pardon me, have been known to mistake an itch in the groin for love,” replied Fred, who did not usually speak like that, at least not in Margaret’s hearing.

  “Look here, Fred. If you came here to make trouble, you’d better leave right now.”

  “If I wanted to make trouble, I could have made it long ago. Have you any idea how many times I’ve caught sight of you and that piece of yours going in and out of her street?”

  There was a silence, during which, weak and shaking, Margaret waited for more.

  “What the hell brought you over here this early?” Adam demanded. “Did Margaret phone you?”

  “No, Megan did.”

  “Megan doesn’t know anything about this.”

  “She knows more than you think, and what she doesn’t know, she suspects.”

  “You may not believe you’re making trouble, Fred, but you are. You’re interfering, and I’m asking you to get out. You’re standing on my porch without an invitation.”

  At this a sudden fury rose within Margaret, and she leaned out of the window, calling, “Don’t you dare go, Fred! It’s my porch too. I’m coming right down.”

  Throwing on an old sweater and skirt, she appeared on the porch below, in bedroom slippers with hair uncombed and without sunglasses.

  “Perhaps we should go inside,” Fred said when he saw her.

  “Yes. I know I look like death warmed over. That’s how I feel.”

  The disarranged pillows on the sofa were as she had left them last night. Still there on the floor was the newspaper that Adam had dropped when he pronounced the word divorce.

  “Has he told you? He wants a divorce,” she said.

  Fred frowned. “He’s told me, but I haven’t been able to take it in.”

  Automatically, the two turned toward Adam, who, forced then to make some response, spoke to the air above the others’ heads. “I admit it’s shocking. It seems horrible to you, and I can see why it does. But you’re not in my skin, you see.”

  “Skin or not,” Fred said, “you can’t do this.”

  “Margaret and I haven’t been ha—”

  “You told me. It’s not only a question of you two being ‘happy.’ There are three others who didn’t ask to be born, and certainly not into a broken family.”

  “ ‘Broken’! You make it sound as if nobody will ever see or talk to anybody else. I’ll still be their father. I told Margaret that this will make no difference to them. I’m their father!”

  “Yes, their father who has left their house and gone to live with his new woman,” Fred said, putting his total contempt into the last two words.

  Adam leapt from his chair and strode to the door. Fred was quicker and blocked the only exit.

  “No, Adam, you can’t get out of this so easily.”

  “Can’t? Who gave you the authority to tell me what I can’t do?”

  “Margaret has no one to speak for her. I’ve known you both too long not to be part of this tragedy. Now let’s sit down and talk. Nothing you say will ever leave this room. I don’t think I need tell you that.”

  Fred Davis had simply assumed command. Margaret had never seen him taking the stance of authority, certainly not with regard to Adam, who would never have accepted it from him. Now, though, Adam, in spite of his bravado, was ashamed; suddenly she recognized the sullen, flushed expression that he wore after a disappointing session with Jenks or Ramsey.

  “You’ve lived your life as an honorable man,” Fred began.

  Standing above them, he was the teacher addressing his class or the doctor directing his patient. And Margaret, as she raised her eyes to his eyes, now so uncharacteristically severe and keen, began to feel a gradual relaxation, thinking: I trust you to set Adam right. You will know how.

  From the collection of photographs on the table Fred took the triple-framed heads of Megan, Julie, and Dan.

  “Look at these,” he said. “No matter how many hours a week you will spend with them after you leave their mother, how will you be able to look into their faces and explain why you left their mother? Because you ‘fell in love’? Sounds pretty lame, doesn’t it?”

  Adam left Fred’s unanswered question to float in a profound quiet. As to pictures speaking louder than words, Margaret was thinking, there are yet more to be listened to in this room. And at that exact moment Fred held up another.

  “If I remember correctly, this is your mother, isn’t it? She was very close to Margaret, that I remember well. What do you think she would have to say about this divorce business of yours?”

  At that Adam raised his head, giving a short, ironic laugh. “My mother? She would kill me.”

  Fred said dryly, “I’ll bet she would.” For a moment he studied Isabella, the grave eyes, Adam’s eyes, and the serene forehead under the slope of waving hair, before replacing her on the table.

  “Maybe people were just different then,” he said softly, as if to himself. After a moment he turned back to the others and was brisk again. “All right, let’s talk. Let’s begin at the beginning.”

  It was a long afternoon. Fred knew where he wanted to go, and he went straight toward his destination, driving Adam, however unwillingly, ahead of him. Years afterward Margaret would still remember the steady progress, the demolition, inch by inch, of every repetitious argument that Adam, growing weaker, was able to raise.

  It was after five o’clock before Fred at last concluded. “When all is said and done,” he said, “it comes down to the fact that you need counseling most desperately.”

  To this Adam objected. “I don’t think we do. I’m a private person. I don’t take kindly to the idea of exposing myself to a stranger. This has been very painful to me today. It’s only the sight of Margaret’s grief that has kept me sitting here.”

  “It would be easier for you to talk to a stranger th
an it has been to brook my interference,” Fred argued, “and I’m well aware that it has been interference.”

  “No counseling,” Adam repeated.

  And quickly, Margaret, fearing an impasse, interjected, “I think if we try, we can manage without any outside help. This—this unhappiness—that Adam has felt began when that woman came here. I can place the time exactly. If she were removed, Adam, if you would promise never to see her again, we could go back to what we were before. I know we could.” And thinking, I am not too proud to plead, for this is my life, our lives, she got up and stood before him, saying with all her heart, “I beg you to try again. I beg you not to leave me. I love you, Adam. No matter what you’ve done, I love you.”

  “Well,” said Fred.

  There were tears in Adam’s eyes. “I’ll stay. I’ll stay. And I will not see her again. Take my word.”

  Make believe, Margaret said to herself, that you are a war wife as Mom was, and your husband has been overseas. You would surely know that he had not gone for three years without having a woman. You will accept the fact and, for your own peace, put it forever out of your mind.

  Unfortunately, though, Randi was neither in Europe nor in Asia, but right here, just fifteen miles away.…

  “I only had a glimpse,” said Louise, “but I had the impression that she was dreadfully common. Madeup, overdressed. You know what I mean.”

  Pressed by the need to talk to someone and also because Louise was already involved, Margaret had made some very incomplete admissions to her.

  “They used to know each other before we were married,” she had explained. “The woman’s a widow and desperate for another husband. Apparently, she thinks Adam has some connections for her, and she’s made a pest of herself.”

  Whether Louise believed this tale was doubtful, but she was too primly polite and also much too kind to question it.

  “Well, he needs to get rid of her,” she said succinctly. “He needs to tell her flat out not to bother him. I wonder whether he can do it. Under that sometimes lofty way he has, I have always felt there’s a lot of insecurity in Adam.”