Experiment in Springtime

by Margaret Millar

  “The car,” she said.

  “Forbes will bring it right around.”

  “And tell my mother Mr. Pearson would like to see her.”

  She walked away, her spine rigid. She always walked rather awkwardly because she held herself too straight, as if she had just finished reading an article on posture. Her feet, in low-heeled black suede oxfords, struck the floor heel and toe together, like a mechanical tin soldier’s.

  Before she left she paused to brush off some lint from her black suit and to adjust the brim of her black felt hat. As an afterthought she extracted from her purse a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. She had had the glasses for years and the lenses no longer fitted her eyes and invariably caused a headache. But she thought the glasses suited her; they made her look more intelligent, yet at the same time naïve, like a college girl who knew a great deal about books but had a lot to learn about the world.

  She ran her hand lightly over the knot of straw-colored hair at the nape of her neck. When she was Laura’s age her hair had been wavy and as bright and garish as brass. But with the years the color had become more and more indeterminate, and since she had let her hair grow long, the wave had disappeared. She was not displeased with this result. There were too many artificial blondes and artificial waves and curls; she preferred to appear natural and simple, and to give the impression that while she was a beautiful woman, she had none of the little airs and vani­ties of beautiful women. She had given up make-up and perfume, her clothes were unobtrusive, and, as a privilege of wealth, the faintest bit dowdy. Her skirts were always a bit longer than was fashionable and her hats were as sensible and durable as her shoes.

  She glanced into the hall mirror. She was looking very nice, she thought. Black suited her and, no matter what Charles said, she intended to go on wearing it, because, like the glasses, it was an integral part of her disguise. Only the most discerning people would stop on the street to look at her twice and notice the beautiful modeling of her mouth and forehead and the dark grey eyes.

  The only real fault she had to find with her appearance was her size. She was too big, both tall and, in spite of rigorous and agonizing dieting, a trifle overblown. She felt it wasn’t quite nice to have so obviously female a figure.

  A long time ago, when her breasts were just beginning to be noticeable, she was terrified of this new responsibility, but she was also secretly a little proud. It meant she was becoming a woman, and she resented her father’s jokes: “Gosh almighty, Martha’s getting a shape. Can you beat it, the kid’s getting a shape.”

  Well, her father was dead now, and she had her shape, and she was a woman—oh, God . . .

  She turned quickly from the mirror and went outside.

  Forbes was waiting for her, a dark-skinned, neat little wizard who sat behind the wheel of the car with careless ease as if he’d grown out of the upholstery like a polyp.

  She put on her gloves, making a quick inspection of the veranda. It was quite clean, but someone had killed a spider on one of the pillars. Its pulpy corpse clung to the white wood and oozed yellow.

  She drew back, shaken and disgusted. She hated dead things. She wondered if Charles would look like that. It was funny that she’d never before thought of Charles having any insides.

  Forbes leaped nimbly out of the car and opened the door for her. All the way downtown, while her soft grey eyes gazed blurrily out of the window, she thought of Charles’s insides.

  2

  Charles lay with his hands behind his head, staring toward the windows. When the sun reaches the left cur­tain, he thought, I will do something. I will make some decision.

  The curtains fluttered coyly like ladies’ skirts. They were dark yellow silk (like Martha’s hair, Charles thought; she probably chose them to match), and when the sun hit them they seemed to blaze up as if someone had touched a match to them.

  The sun was making the room uncomfortably hot. Charles would have liked the shades drawn but he felt too inert to do it himself and he didn’t want to ring for Brown and thus throw away practically his first oppor­tunity to be alone and think out the problem. It seemed that for weeks now he hadn’t been alone. Whenever he opened his eyes there was Martha. Sometimes she’d be sitting in a chair, reading, her knees together and her feet flat against the floor. She held the book too close to her eyes, and whenever she turned a page she sighed gently. It was a tragic little sound and it affected Charles because he couldn’t think of any reason why Martha, or anyone else for that matter, should sigh when turning a page.

  “Is it a sad story?” he asked.

  “Sad? Oh, no.”

  “Well, you sighed.”

  “I was just breathing.”

  Perhaps that was the explanation for a great many things—Martha was just breathing.

  Or sometimes when he woke up Martha would be giving him fresh water or straightening his blankets or putting the windows up or down, briskly and with a certain im­patience that suggested the windows should be putting themselves up or down.

  Usually, however, she just sat beside his bed with her hands folded on her lap. When she thought no one was watching her, her face had a dazed, slightly stupid expression. It was impossible to tell what she was thinking. Once he asked her, and her eyebrows flew up in surprise.

  “Why should I be thinking anything?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I thought you were sleeping,” she said coldly. Her tone added: You should have told me you were awake instead of lying there spying on me.

  “Next time I’ll ring a bell,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. I was joking.”

  Though she pretended otherwise, she was perfectly conscious of her beauty and she didn’t mind being watched. It was simply that she had to give the signal, like a child playing a game: “All right, I’m ready. You can look now.”

  The sun passed behind a cloud. The curtains turned somber, and the cold wind that swept suddenly across the room was a warning that summer hadn’t arrived yet and you couldn’t trust the spring.

  That’s my signal, Charles thought. The time for de­cision. It is later than I think. I will now decide things, think out my problem.

  But in order to think out a problem it was necessary first to define it, clearly and without any emotional trimmings. If he could define it like that, the problem might solve itself. The important thing was to present the facts without bias as if he were in a courtroom.

  Your name?

  My name is Charles Henry Pearson. I am thirty-six. I am on the board of directors of the Matson Trust Company, which should prove to the court that I am not without some intelligence.

  Objection! Witness is prejudiced!

  Sorry, Your Honor. Anyway, five years ago I was married to Martha Katherine Shaw. My reasons for so doing were manifold and manifest. I will now pass photographs among the jury.

  Irrelevant, immaterial and irresistible!

  But, Your Honor, I haven’t even started.

  Case dismissed.

  The hell with it. I refuse to leave until I have defined my problem.

  Fifty dollars for contempt of court. Pay as you leave.

  You won’t listen . . .

  One hundred dollars.

  But I haven’t even reached the important part yet. At the beginning of this month I came home from the office with a headache and Martha gave me two aspirin tablets.

  One hundred and fifty!

  But I nearly died . . .

  It is the opinion of this court that the witness is guilty of prejudice and should be hanged by the neck until dead.

  You can’t hang me!

  But they could, of course. The rope grew taut around his neck and gradually choked off his breath.

  When he woke up he found himself tangled in the sheets, and someone was knocking at the door.


  “Charley?”

  “Come in.”

  The door opened and Martha’s mother came in.

  “Brown told me you wanted to talk to me.”

  Mrs. Shaw did not resemble either of her daughters, though there was a hint of Martha in her broad, strong forehead and her fair hair. She was an overweight, placid woman about fifty. When Charles had first met her, her husband was still alive. Their marriage was a happy one. They talked and acted like good companions, and no matter who was in the room, they were always ex­changing smiling glances like lovers enjoying secret jokes. Charles watched them with envy and with a hope that some day he and Martha would catch each other’s eye in just the same way. Two weeks before he married Martha, Harry Shaw died suddenly from pneumonia. His wife took it calmly. She didn’t make a fuss. She merely withdrew from life, as a gambler who has lost steps out of the game. Whatever actions she took now were inspired by Martha. She herself didn’t care one way or another, whether

  she lived in this house or any other house, or whether she did her own washing and cooking or somebody else did it for her. Nothing seemed to bother her, and this was an admirable and totally incomprehensible trait to Charles, who was bothered by nearly everything.

  He was, on the whole, rather fond of his mother-in-law, partly because she appeared to be fond of him, and partly because she came of an older generation of women who had been brought up to believe that men, simply because they were men, were something special. It was a welcome change from Martha, who managed, without moving a muscle, to convey the impression that men were a con­temptible and ineffectual lot, a group of dilly-dalliers who had survived merely because no one had yet invented a way of continuing the race without them.

  “I’m sorry I woke you up, Charley,” Mrs. Shaw said. “I’ll go away.”

  “No, don’t. Sit down. I wasn’t sleeping. At least I don’t think I was. I was merely trying to figure things out.”

  “You’re always trying to figure something out,” she said, smiling. She sat down without looking where she was sitting. Either she took it on trust that the chair was there waiting to receive her, or else she didn’t care whether it was there or not.

  “What if the chair wasn’t there?” he asked.

  She understood immediately. “But it always is. I re­membered.”

  “So it is,” Charles said, obscurely disappointed.

  “You know, Charley, I think you’re looking better.”

  “Am I?” He sat up in bed so he could see himself in the bureau mirror. “I think I look like hell.”

  “Well, I never did consider you a beauty,” she said pleasantly. “So maybe you expect more of your own face than I do.”

  “I’m not bald, anyway.”

  “No, you’re not. Harry was as bald as an egg by the time he was thirty-six. It didn’t worry him any, though. I don’t remember that he ever bought a bottle of hair tonic in his life. He wasn’t a vain man.” She paused, allowing Harry time to come into the room, bald as an egg but with no hair tonic. “He had some little vanities but they weren’t connected with his appearance. He liked to be­lieve, for instance, that he had complete control over the two girls, and that they obeyed everything he said.”

  “And did they?”

  “Well, no, they didn’t pay much attention to him, to me either, when I come to think of it. But they pretended quite nicely. Girls do that better than boys, and my girls have always been, not secretive, exactly, but self-contained.”

  Secretive, Charles amended silently.

  “I often wonder if it’s wise for people to have children when they’re as happily married as Harry and I were. We were complete in ourselves. We didn’t require children, I mean, the way some couples do. And I think the girls knew this and it made them feel out of things.” She added anxiously, “You see what I mean, Charley?”

  “Yes.”

  “It made them self-sufficient. They never confided in me, and maybe the reason is that subconsciously I didn’t want their confidences and they knew it even if I didn’t.” She turned away with a nervous little toss of her head. “I feel very guilty about it, as if I’d just found out that years and years ago I committed a crime.”

  “Your conscience must be a sleepy little thing.”

  She smiled. “Oh, dear, I don’t know what’s gotten into me this week. I’m getting as bad as you are, always figuring and figuring and never really accomplishing anything.”

  “That’s what I do, eh?” Charles said blandly.

  “Well, isn’t it?”

  “I like to know why people do things, why everyone in this world does every single thing he does.”

  “I wouldn’t like to know. It would frighten me.”

  “It frightens me, too.”

  They sat for a while in silence, contented in their fright, while a bumble bee flung himself in rhythmic frenzy against the screen.

  Charles saw himself with a notebook in one hand and a crystal ball in the other, going out among the people of the world. When he returned, or when he died without returning, the answers would be all there in the note­book, and there would be no more war, no more famine, no more crime, no more poverty. The earth would be given back to the meek. By whom? By himself, Charles!

  It was a childish and dangerous dream, and he recog­nized it as such. But he couldn’t destroy it. He kept it locked in his heart and took it out only when he was alone, like a miser counting his gold. No one would ever know . . .

  “I don’t know what’s got into me today,” Mrs. Shaw repeated. “Maybe it’s the weather, do you think?”

  “Possibly.”

  “I feel . . .” She closed her eyes as if she could feel better when she couldn’t see. “I feel I should be doing something, I should be active about something, but I don’t really know what.”

  He couldn’t recall her ever being so talkative before. Perhaps it was the weather, and she’d felt a sudden chal­lenge in the spring that had brought to life her old energy and interest.

  She rose suddenly. “I hope I haven’t tired you, Charley.”

  “Not at all.”

  “Martha should be home soon.”

  “I don’t mind being alone. She doesn’t have to stay home on my account. I wish, in fact, that she’d go out more than she does. I wish you’d tell her that.”

  “I will.” But she departed hurriedly as if this was a subject she was anxious to avoid.

  Charles lay down again. He did want Martha to go out, that part was true. But he also wanted her to miss him all the time she was out, to be in a great hurry to get home again, and to tell him when she returned everything she had said and done. She wouldn’t volunteer any informa­tion, but if he questioned her thoroughly he would eventually find out what stores she had shopped at, what clerks had waited on her, what people she had met. His desire for such information was motivated not by jealousy or by a need to live vicariously through her experiences but by the delusion that the more he knew about Martha the more completely he would possess her.

  He remembered vaguely one of Grimm’s fairy tales about a girl who owned a tree that grew golden apples and silver leaves. No one else could pluck the apples, but when the girl herself reached out, they fell into her hands. Some day he would look up a copy of Grimm and find out the rights of the story. Meanwhile, it continued to worry him. He felt that his life with Martha had been spent standing under a tree of golden apples he could not pluck, and that some day someone else might come along and the fruit would fall into his hands. The true and rightful owner—was she waiting for him?—was she hoarding the apples deliberately?

  No, it was impossible. There was no tree. There was no warmth or love in Martha. It was her body that misled you. The curving hips and voluptuous breasts invited the touch, and you had to touch them repeatedly before you learned they were plaster props. Plaster breasts like a cast covering a
broken heart.

  Broken, he thought. I wonder why I said broken? Nobody could have broken Martha’s heart. I knew her first. There was no one else.

  All the same it worried him. To take his mind off the subject he began to count the number of leaves in each ridge of the wallpaper. Finally his eyes wandered back to

  the windows and he saw that the sun had reached and passed the left curtain, and that the time for decision was gone.

  He had a moment of panic. There was still time, still time to decide, to do something, anything.

  The only thing he could think of doing was sitting up in bed and swinging his feet over the edge. He was sweating, and his pajamas clung to his back and along his ribs, emphasizing his frailness. He saw himself in the mirror across the room. He certainly did not look like the true and rightful owner of any golden apples. A shave might help, and a grey pinstripe suit with a navy-blue tie. Very well, he would get dressed, and what’s more, he would shave himself.

  His feet fumbled for his slippers. He reached for the bathrobe that Martha had folded at the foot of his bed, and stood up. He was shaking so badly that he couldn’t get his arms into the sleeves of the robe. He struggled, the robe dragging on the floor, twitching as if it were alive and determined to resist him.

  After a minute he stood quiet, helpless, in the grip of a new and terrible fear. He was afraid to die. Up to this time he had been too ill to care much about it, living had seemed so much trouble. But now that he was on his feet again he must stay there, he must exercise that sick old man in the mirror. He must stop playing his little game of hints and ironies and come right out and ask Martha.

  No, not ask her. Tell her. Tell her he knew.

  He leaned over and picked up the bathrobe and put it on. Then he straightened his shoulders and looked once more, challengingly, into the mirror. He felt calmer. Everything’s going to be all right, he thought.