Experiment in Springtime

by Margaret Millar

  She readjusted the mirrors again. The pancake makeup helped, and besides this was her best angle, three-quarters face. She looked pretty enough to be a chorus girl. She toyed with the idea of becoming the first chorus girl/psychologist in history. It would be hard, but at least she would get on the cover of Life Magazine, and never again would she have to get down on her knees and beg Brown to let her borrow his wretched little car. People would give her cars, also mink coats. Chorus girls needed strong arches, so she walked around the room ten times on the outside edges of her shoes.

  Having thus rescued her life from the ashes and dusted it off, she proceeded out into the hall to look for Brown, a mean and stingy man, if there ever was one, and she wouldn’t be seen dead in his lousy car if she had one of her own.

  From the landing halfway down the stairs, she saw the doctor’s car winding up the driveway. He was coming to see Charles, of course. Charley had fainted and Martha had a bandage on her hand.

  She forgot all about finding Brown. She sat down on the windowseat, biting her thumbnail, realizing for the first time since she’d overheard the quarrel that it hadn’t been an ordinary quarrel. Charley was kicking them out—her and Martha and her mother. What terrifying, awful power men had. Charles had only to say “Get out,” and they were forced to leave.

  But it was not Martha who left, after all. It was Charles himself. Dr. MacNeil explained it to Martha downstairs, after he had talked with Charles. He was puzzled, he said, he was at a loss. As Mrs. Pearson knew, he was an allergist and the study of allergies was, more than any other branch of medicine, closely related to the study of psychiatry.

  Would Mrs. Pearson grant that Mr. Pearson showed some degree of neurosis?

  Mrs. Pearson would be delighted to grant it.

  Very well then, Mrs. Pearson would understand that this most unfortunate accident with the aspirin tablets would have a more devastating effect on the mind of a nervous and introspective man like Mr. Pearson than it would on an ordinary man.

  Ordinary men do not become ill from aspirin, Mrs. Pearson pointed out.

  How true. But suppose he did. Would not an ordinary man feel to a lesser degree exactly as Mr. Pearson felt, that his wife was responsible?

  Was the doctor implying . . . ?

  No, the doctor was not implying. Mrs. Pearson could not have known that Mr. Pearson had developed an allergy to aspirin. He, himself, Mr. Pearson’s own doctor, could not make an accurate list of the things to which Mr. Pearson was sensitive. The list was continually changing, as was usual in the case of a genuine anaphylactic person­ality. The amount of histamine manufactured in Mr. Pearson’s system during the years he had treated him was enough to kill off the entire household.

  Dear me.

  Quite. Had Mrs. Pearson ever heard of the Freudian concept of the death-wish?

  No, she hadn’t, she didn’t want to, and she wished he would go away and leave her alone. His eyes probed her like needles. He had a broad forehead and thick, black brows that moved with a life of their own. By contrast, his chin was round and fat and pink as a marshmallow, with a dimple in the middle as if a child had stuck a finger into it.

  She concentrated on the dimple and said, “I didn’t let myself realize until today what Charles was actually think­ing about me.”

  “It’s hard for you, I know,” MacNeil said with profes­sional sympathy. “But illness distorts the perspective of a man by narrowing his world, limiting it to one room and perhaps one person. In this case, you are the person. Whether it’s a matter of choice or necessity, I have always considered it unfortunate for members of a family to nurse each other during illness. Ordinarily family life produces enough friction under the best of circumstances, and when a man is ill his world, as I said, is narrower and more in­tense. His sensibility is exacerbated and leads him into extremes. He is both irritable and apologetic, both self-pitying and proud.”

  “In a roundabout way, you’re advising a separation, aren’t you?”

  “A temporary separation is vitally important.”

  “I suppose it’s useless to try and reason with him?”

  “You don’t reason with a delusion any more than you reason with a pneumonia virus. Your husband must be given time to heal. You, on your part, must realize more fully than you do now that he loves you very profoundly.”

  She smiled dryly. “Charles can be very convincing some­times.”

  “Oh, he didn’t tell me that. It’s so obvious that he didn’t have to.”

  “It’s not obvious to me.”

  “You don’t want it to be.”

  “He’s jealous and possessive. I don’t call that love.”

  “He’s that way because he’s uncertain of you.”

  “He has no reason to be. I don’t know what Charles wants of me. I always have the impression that he wants me to do something, say something, be something that I’m not.”

  Warmth, the doctor thought, he wants some signs of warmth in your nature. Oh, well.

  He rose, suppressing a yawn. He was tired of talking and the woman depressed him. She seemed immovable and cold as marble, and if any of his words had ever struck her, they had bounced off again without leaving a dent. At the same time he felt somewhat sorry for her. She could not help her frigidity. Perhaps with another man she could have had a happy, or at least, normal marriage. He won­dered whether at some level of her mind she was harboring a guilt complex, or whether the explanation was simply that Pearson was not impotent but sterile.

  He picked up his instrument bag from the floor.

  “How does your hand feel now?”

  “It’s all right.”

  “Good. Take care of it. Human bites are often more dangerous than animal bites.”

  He departed with the feeling that he had just said some­thing profound.

  After he’d gone she discovered that all his talking and pretending to consult her had been mere camouflage, that the arrangements for Charles to leave had already been made. It was Laura who came down and told her.

  “I heard them talking,” Laura said.

  “You shouldn’t eavesdrop.”

  “I didn’t eavesdrop. Charley’s door just happened to be open and I just happened to be sitting on the landing. He’s going away tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “To a cottage on the lake. It belongs to a friend of the doctor’s. Forbes is going with him because Forbes can cook. They’re going to take the Chevvy coupe. Charley said to leave the big car for you.”

  “That was nice of him,” Martha said. She was oddly affected by Charles’s concern for her. Though he was ill, though he despised her and suspected her of the worst possible crime, he wanted her to be comfortable while he was away. At least that’s how it sounded at first. After she’d considered it a minute, she began to wonder uneasily if Charles’s irony was getting so subtle she couldn’t recognize it. Talking to him was so difficult these days. It was like walking through a room strung with invisible wires; you could be aware that the wires were there, but you couldn’t prevent yourself from stumbling over them if you moved at all.

  The following morning MacNeil came again. He re-bandaged her hand and told her that Charles was going to leave in the afternoon. He spoke of the cottage vaguely as being on the lake but not too far from the city.

  “Why aren’t you sending him to a proper nursing home if he needs attention? Forbes can’t look after him the way I did.”

  “The hospitals and nursing homes are badly over­crowded,” MacNeil replied. “And Mr. Pearson perhaps doesn’t need as much attention as you thought he did. His main need is to get away from this house and from you, to put it bluntly.”

  She saw Charles only once before he left. She was waiting at the front door to say goodbye to him when he came down the stairs with Forbes. From a distance he looked perfectly well, though he walked sl
owly and held onto the banister for support. At the bottom of the staircase he put his hand lightly on Forbes’s shoulder and they crossed the hall toward her, walking in step.

  The interval before they reached her seemed intermi­nable. She thought of saying something light to bridge the gap of time and mood, but when she finally spoke it was the wrong thing to say, and the wrong tone to say it in.

  “Well, Charles,” she said heartily. “You’re all dressed up!”

  He had on grey flannels and a tweed coat with a brown turtleneck sweater underneath. She couldn’t remember seeing him in such informal clothes before. They made him look younger and the bulky sweater helped to con­ceal his thinness.

  “Am I?” he said.

  Forbes, with a little nod to Martha, opened the door and went out.

  “How are you feeling, Charles?”

  “Fine.”

  “I hope—get a good rest, won’t you?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Did you leave your address with Brown?”

  He said flatly, “What do you want my address for?”

  “Well, in case anything turns up.”

  “Nothing will turn up.”

  “It wouldn’t look right for me not even to know where you are.”

  He regarded her quizzically. “No?”

  “Why won’t you tell me where you’re going?”

  “Because I don’t want to see you again for a long, long time. If you knew where I was, you might be tempted to run out and see me. Not for humanitarian reasons—merely to check up. You’re a great one for checking up on things.”

  Forbes returned. “Everything’s ready if you are, Mr. Pearson.”

  “I’m ready. Well, goodbye, Martha.”

  “Goodbye.”

  She raised her face perfunctorily for his kiss. He stared at her for a moment. Then he said coldly, “Aren’t you forgetting I bite, my dear?”

  The door slammed.

  She hurried into the living room and watched him from the windows. She saw Forbes help him into the coupe and lay a blanket over his knees, then Forbes got in beside him and started the engine. Before they drove off, they both began to laugh.

  That was the picture of him she kept seeing over and over again—Charles looking quite healthy and young again in the turtleneck sweater, driving off to a place she didn’t know, laughing at a joke she couldn’t share.

  6

  Time passed slowly for Steve. Each day dragged by on its club feet and fell exhausted into the grave of its brothers.

  There were a hundred things he had planned on seeing and doing as soon as he returned; he had even made a list of them in a diary to while away the time in the English hospital. But now, when he took out the list and read it over, the things he’d written seemed pretty silly to him, futile excursions into the past. The past had been distorted or erased.

  The city had never been bombed but it gave that effect. Time itself had been the bomb, annihilating the land­marks that he knew, destroying his friends and their houses and scattering their families. Some rebuilding had been done; his favorite bar was a supermarket, and the Star Building, where he’d worked as a cub reporter, had been torn down and risen from its ashes, a steel and concrete phoenix.

  He paid a visit to the city editor one day. The city editor was the same man, but he had changed his style to match the new building. He wore a neat pin-striped suit, a tie and an efficient smile. The air-conditioned offices were dustless and sterile, and there wasn’t a single cigarette butt on the floor. Steve departed with a strong feeling of unreality.

  Meanwhile he stayed on at the Neal Hotel. Once the symbol of elegance, the Neal catered now mostly to traveling salesmen and people like himself who wanted to avoid the five-day limit imposed by the better hotels. It was a depressing place, but it would do until he found an apartment. He had no desire to stay with his only relatives, a cousin and aunt who lived in the west end.

  He had visited them out of politeness. It was the night after he met Martha on the street and he was feeling bitter. The long ride out on the streetcar depressed him even more.

  They must have been watching for him, for as soon as he came in sight of the house Aunt Vi thrust the door open and shouted, “Steve!”

  His cousin Beatrice stood behind her on the porch. She didn’t say anything, but she was smiling at him in a fixed, idiotic way.

  He kissed them both, noticing and feeling ashamed of noticing, that Aunt Vi was a great deal fatter. Her plump prettiness had turned flabby and her soft chin had grown into jowls that sprouted coarse white hairs.

  “Steve! My goodness, let me look at you!” She put her hands on his shoulders and turned him around, half-weeping. “My goodness. Here he is, Bea. Just look at him.”

  “He looks the same to me,” Beatrice said. She seemed unable to stop smiling, and she was still blushing from his kiss. It was practically the only thing he remembered about Beatrice, that she blushed easily.

  “I was hoping someone would say that,” Steve said.

  “Oh, but you are the same.”

  They were both looking at him, very intensely.

  “Well,” he said in confusion.

  His aunt was a widow, and she and Beatrice, who was nearly thirty now, had lived alone together for so many years that it was impossible to think of them individually or even as females. Vi-and-Bea might have been broken down into Vi and Bea, but no one had ever tried very hard. Beatrice was a nice girl, she dressed well and had a good job, but she wasn’t the type who got married without some parental maneuvering.

  “You’re both looking swell,” he said cheerfully.

  “I’m miles too fat,” his aunt said. “Can’t be helped. Did you bring it, like I asked on the phone?”

  “Bring what?”

  “The medal—your D.F.C.”

  “Sure.”

  “Bea, run over and fetch Mrs. Henderson, will you? Steve won’t mind.”

  He glanced at her suspiciously. “Mind what?”

  “I want Mrs. Henderson to see your medal. She’s been so miserable about the whole thing, always kidding Bea­trice because she wrote to you so often, and you never answered.”

  Without a word Beatrice turned and went down the porch steps. She had on a light green wool dress that clung to her hips, and in the late afternoon sunlight her brown hair had glints of red. She looked a lot better from behind, Steve thought.

  He frowned, angry at the unknown Mrs. Henderson, and at Beatrice for minding, and at himself for not answer­ing her letters. All the time he was away, she wrote to him once a week and every month she and Vi sent him a box of food and cigarettes. He knew it must have been Beatrice who packed the box, his aunt wouldn’t have taken the trouble to select and wrap the articles so carefully. Instead of paper and twine, the box was sewed up in heavy white cloth, and inside there was always a box of his favorite chocolates, homemade cookies and two cartons of Luckies.

  “I told Mrs. Henderson,” his aunt said, “I told her, Steve hasn’t got a mother and father like a lot of boys have. He’s just got us, and it’s the least we can do to write him letters. It’s a small enough sacrifice, I told her.”

  He waited in some trepidation for the arrival of the formidable Mrs. Henderson. She turned out to be a small, weary woman whose shoulders had a permanent sag. She brought her children with her, two half-grown boys who had been obviously cleaned and shined for the occasion, and were consequently ill-at-ease and silent.

  The medal was passed from hand to hand, while Beatrice dispensed tea and chocolate cake. She avoided his eyes, and when the medal was passed to her, she barely glanced at it.

  He didn’t know at what point, or why, his nerves began to crack, whether it was the change in Beatrice, or his aunt’s incessant talking, or the two boys surreptitiously filling their pockets with cake, or Mrs. Henderson’s
melan­choly voice asking him to tell them all about his ex­periences.

  “I haven’t had any experiences,” he told Mrs. Henderson irritably.

  “Well, my goodness, Steve,” his aunt cried. “You must of. They don’t give medals away like that every day, I can tell you.” She turned dramatically and faced Mrs. Hender­son. “He nearly died. He was wounded here.” She pressed her hand against her breasts, while Mrs. Henderson re­minded her none too gently that she knew where Steve was wounded, having heard about it at least a dozen times. Undaunted his aunt went on, “It’s the very worst place, so near the heart. He’s filled with bullets even yet, aren’t you, Steve?”

  “Flak,” he said. He felt himself shaking, and the tea balanced on his knees began to rattle against the saucer. “Listen, Aunt Vi. I don’t want to . . .”

  “Real bullets?” one of the boys asked, and his brother answered, “What do you think, you dumb cluck.”

  Mrs. Henderson slapped them both absently, and told them to shut up and let the hero talk. In passing through her mouth, the word had absorbed acid.

  “There’s nothing heroic about stopping a few pieces of flak . . .”

  “Now, Steve,” his aunt interrupted. “There’s such a thing as carrying modesty too far, if you ask me.”

  “Modesty is a wonderful thing,” Mrs. Henderson said with a significant glance at Aunt Vi. “There’s too little of it in this world, not mentioning any names.”

  Beatrice rose suddenly and stood at the door. Everyone appeared to recognize this signal and to be accustomed to obeying Beatrice. They all departed abruptly, though the older Henderson boy hung back and whispered to Steve, “Gosh, I’d love a real bullet.”

  Beatrice said, “Hurry up, Bobby. Your mother’s wait­ing.”

  The boy left, and Beatrice began to gather up the empty tea cups. She had narrow white hands and delicate wrists that moved bonelessly as snakes.