by Nigel Dennis
“Rosa, do you know if he went out? He’s not usually out of the house at this hour.”
“I’ll ask around, ma’am.”
“I’m afraid I get too nervous,” said Mrs. Morgan, looking hopefully at the secretary.
The secretary refused to sympathize; her dignity was still offended.
“He seems to be out, ma’am,” said the maid. “He was down early….”
“Oh, he was down; you’re quite sure?”
“Oh, sure, ma’am; he was down and went to the kitchen and squeezed some oranges, and Marian says he had coffee and toast and a bite of cereal.”
“Oh, thank you, Rosa; that’s just what I wanted to know. But he didn’t say anything about where he was going…? Well, that’s not so important as the other. All right, Peggy, let us return to our muttons.”
The screen-door opened and Mrs. Morgan’s father came in, his fingers clasped ahead of him as though he were trying to crack a hard nut. He had reached an age when he no longer appeared to be built to scale; he always looked slovenly, even though he wore a stiff white collar and jazzy tie on the hottest day. “The thermometer fell below 65 degrees all through the night,” he said. He had an old man’s proud, paternal appreciation of nature.
“Father, what do you intend doing today?”
“Doing? Today?”
“I mean, are you going to want the car, and, if so, when?”
The old man rubbed one cheek slowly, and said: “I had thought of seeing Waters.”
“Well, that means driving to Pigot. What time do you plan to go, and how long will you stay with him?”
“… But I recall this isn’t his day.”
“You mean you’re not going, then?”
“I don’t think so. Not if I won’t find him. No point to that.”
“Then you’ll be here for lunch?”
“Surely; I’m always here for lunch.” He smiled at his daughter, who was beginning to twitch, with benign amusement.
“And this afternoon?”
“I might take a turn.”
“You mean, not with the car?”
“No, not with the car.”
“Then you won’t want the car all day?”
“That’s right. I’ll always say if I want it.”
“But that’s the trouble, you scarcely ever do say. Then when you ask for it it’s not there.”
“I’ll settle myself in the arbour, I think.”
“The arbour. Not the summerhouse, because Peggy and I will work there, I think; it’s such a beautiful day.”
“Then, maybe, I’ll stay on my porch.”
“Father, I said the arbour would be all right. You don’t have to stay inside on a day like this.”
“It’s not going to stay this way for ever,” said her father, blinking up at the sky as at a child he knew well.
The secretary followed Mrs. Morgan to the summerhouse and set up the portable typewriter on the cracked, uneven table. There were spider-webs in the open eaves, and tiny ants were building a moated grange in one of the corners. The secretary began to sweat prettily at the arm-pits as she worked the typewriter; Mrs. Morgan dictated from a long rattan chair, fingering a twig. Toward the middle of the morning she became restless and went out on to the lawn, calling, “Rosa, Rosa!” in a high voice.
“Yes, ma’am; I’m coming.”
“He’s not back by any chance?”
“No; I’ve kept an eye for him, Mrs. Morgan.”
“You’ll tell me?”
“Right away if I see him.”
“I wish I could stop being such a worrier,” said Mrs. Morgan, returning to the summerhouse and smiling ruefully. “I keep thinking of that mountain. It’s really no place for him to be. If anything happened you could search for hours.”
“Yes, I guess you could,” said the secretary.
At noon the secretary went inside. As she crossed the lawn she gave a secret signal with her hand. The tutor, who had been hiding behind an elm, then joined Mrs. Morgan in the summerhouse. “You look well, Mr. Petty,” she said. “Yes, thank you; now that the warm weather …” he said.
After a pause he began to speak again. “It struck me again last night, Mrs. Morgan, that, well …”
“What do you say struck you, Mr. Petty?”
“It struck me, how shall I say, the thought, struck me again, what a shame that young Jimmy shouldn’t be able to get more out of his instruction….”
“We always let a few days go by after he’s had an attack, Mr. Petty. It’s impossible for him to work.”
“Yes, I meant, though, when he actually is working. To be honest, Mrs. Morgan, I really am fond of the boy. I think he’s most intelligent; he shows great originality; underneath, there’s even a good deal of eagerness, a real vitality. If that spring is not being tapped, so to speak, there’s no doubt it’s my responsibility; it’s up to me to find specific ways and means by which the dormant faculty can be, ah, made not dormant. The boy is clever; his heart is good; his penetration is often alarming….”
“Mr. Petty,” said Mrs. Morgan in a vague, uninterested way, “if what’s worrying you is whether you will be able to keep the cabin if Jimmy goes to Colorado, I can assure you it will be all right. And your salary remains unchanged, of course, by any absences caused by his being sick.”
The maid came out on the lawn ringing a bell. “Would you like lunch with us, Mr. Petty?” “Thank you, no, very much,” he said, looking ashamed. “I’ve got a soup-cube boiling up right now.”
Mrs. Morgan, her father, and her secretary sat down to the table. “Where is my wayward son?” asked Mrs. Morgan. The old man polished off his special soup, and only then looked up as though he had known all along that something was missing, and said: “Where’s the boy?” “He went for a good long walk, it seems,” said the secretary—the silence was getting on her nerves. Mrs. Morgan held her head low over the soup bowl; a long, grey ringlet dangled over her face; when she had finished the soup she sat back and fled into one of her trances, a picture of gaunt unhappiness. “He’s just a high-strung boy,” the old man was explaining to the secretary; “nothing wrong with him; he’s well built, sound constitution; just pawky; jumpy, edgy, the way we all were at his age. I tell my daughter not to fuss so much with him; he’ll grow out: I’ve no doubt he’s just an artistic disposition: when they’re built that way it’s best to leave them alone and quit worrying; means they’re thinking, just finding inspiration, mostly; no cause for worry in that; a positive good, when they do something with it; as he will, no doubt, I have no fear.”
The maid put her face in at the door and smiled warmly at Mrs. Morgan. “He’s coming, ma’am,” she said.
Morgan came in, his hair untidy, his hands approximately washed. “Sorry I’m late,” he said, and began to eat his soup. His mother started to say something, changed her mind, changed it again, began a sentence, stopped. The maid brought in a large fish.
“Have a good walk, boy?” said the old man.
“Yes, thank you, Granf,” he replied, bowing politely.
“Fish, Jimmy?” said his mother, raising the fish-slice with an uneasy smile.
“Thank you, no; no fish,” he answered, looking out of the window.
“Are you not going to have any lunch?”
“I don’t happen to feel especially hungry, thank you.”
His mother brought down the slicer with a clang. Everybody jumped. “Jimmy! Will you kindly look at me one minute?”
He turned towards her a face in which, in a flash, the artificial coldness had been replaced by his more usual, sullen, semi-drugged expression, underlip pouting resentfully, eyes half-closed and suspicious. “What’s wrong now?” he asked.
“You know very well what I’m talking about,” snapped his mother.
“How can I know when you haven’t even said anything?”
“What do you expect me to say?”
“Why should I expect you to say anything? Do I have to eat fish too, whether I
want to or not?”
“You know very well that fish isn’t what I mean.”
“Why do I know?”
“Do you know or don’t you know, Jimmy; answer me, please, and kindly don’t stare the other way.”
“I know you’re mad over something.”
“And I hope you also know that if you hope to get your way like this you’re making a big mistake, a very big mistake.”
He gave a bored sigh. “I just don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
“Just so long as you bear it in mind, I don’t care a pin whether you know it or not.”
“Sounds like crazy reasoning to me,” said her son, sneering, but apparently a little frightened. “May I leave the table now, please?”
“You’ve only just this minute sat down.”
“O.K. Have it your way.” He shrugged, and in a bored way began to arrange his cutlery in patterns.
By now the secretary, because she too was feeling queasy at so much sharp talk, was a little ashamed of her behaviour in the last twenty-four hours; but she could not suppress, far down inside, a thrill of excitement, and a hope that the fight would break out again. It did, almost immediately. Without warning, Morgan glared at his mother and shouted: “D’you know I’m nearly eighteen? You don’t seem to know! Eighteen!”
“I know it very well, Jimmy,” replied his mother calmly. “I also know that there are special circumstances, though I don’t at all like to remind you of them.”
He continued to glare, breathing loudly. “You treat Granf the same way at eighty,” he shouted.
The old man was taken aback by this and waved trembling fingers in the air. “Now, James …” he pleaded in a quavering voice, looking nervously at his daughter.
“Well, doesn’t she?” demanded his grandson.
“When I was eighteen, now let me see …” began the old man.
“Father, there is entirely no need for you to say anything at all,” said Mrs. Morgan sharply.
“See!” cried her son. “You shut him up too.”
“Jimmy, Jimmy!” cried Mrs. Morgan. “What a terrible way to talk!”
“What a terrible way to live is what I mean!” he retorted.
Mrs. Morgan set her lips, and gave the secretary a quick look, ashamed that an outsider should be witnessing such a scene. But the secretary’s eyes were cast down modestly; her face was expressionless—and, changing her tactics suddenly, Mrs. Morgan looked pleadingly at her son. He looked back with contempt. “Her?” he said savagely, and then, suddenly coldly polite once more: “May I leave the table now? Please?”
“Indeed you may,” said his mother.
When lunch was over, Mrs. Morgan said to the secretary: “I think an afternoon off wouldn’t hurt either of us. First, though, will you read me the week’s engagements?”
The secretary read: “30 Million Koreans’ Luncheon, Biltmore twelve-thirty Tuesday; Wednesday, Editorial Lunch, and five o’clock meet Mr. Horace Sweeney of Texas Land Holdings; Friday, noon, meeting of War Against Wars Council, evening at eight-thirty Shostakovich Concert—or should it be concerto?—by the Orchestra of the United Automobile Workers. That’s all in New York.”
“I want you to cancel them all.”
“Every one?”
“Yes. Write a very nice, polite note, if you please, Peggy, and of course enclose cheques for the seats just the same.”
At dinner, mother and son did not exchange a word. Morgan spent most of this hour looking at the opposite wall. Sometimes his eyes would film over in the usual helpless, apathetic way; but mostly they were hot and angry, and the bones of his face were as prominent as if they were being forced out of the skin. Mrs. Morgan, on the other hand, wore the look of a person who scarcely dares to bend or look a fraction to one side or another for fear of being fatally distracted and overrun. She was incapable even of sneaking a glance at her son’s face—which she was desperately tempted to do.
“Fireworks coming soon, I guess,” said the secretary afterwards to the tutor. “She must know the brat’s going to do something awful or she wouldn’t have cancelled her precious engagements.”
“How long has her husband been dead?” asked the tutor.
“I think fifteen years. Why?”
“I just wondered.” Rather nervously, the tutor went on to say that without a husband or a son going through certain stated paces, and appearing, in his trousers, at stated hours, remaining visible to the corner of her eye even when out of sight, Mrs. Morgan might feel that even the simplest gesture was beyond her power and interest. There were women like that, he said, very active women who didn’t want a man but had to have one.
“You would think that, of course,” said the secretary.
“It was only an idea that crossed my mind.”
“It has the real stink of masculine superiority, even so.”
The tutor looked sheepishly at the prim, pretty face of his loved one, now filled with sullen dislike; and when he saw, as usual, how admirably made she was, with such long and perfect legs, and curves that had the finished look of cloverleaf intersections on a concrete highway, it seemed as plain as day to him that no woman really needed to take any serious interest in so clumsy and timid a thing as a man. He wondered why women had never invented some romantic machine that would do as well as a man—say, an adjustable cigar-store Indian.
For the next few days a long silence fell over the household—a silence so deep that during meals the least scrape of knives and forks sounded overloud, and it was embarrassing to hear the babbling and laughing that came from the cook and the maids in the kitchen. It never occurred to the secretary that she was witnessing one of the most critical occasions in her employer’s life; she thought it inexplicable that in a few days Mrs. Morgan had changed from an incessantly active, decisive woman into a strained, uninteresting creature who let her secretary compose her letters as she pleased and made more or less the same spiritless reply when her editor telephoned questions from New York: “If you think that is best, by all means. I leave it entirely to you.”
“But I’ll bet she doesn’t give up,” said the secretary to the tutor. “I bet he doesn’t go.”
As the silence tightened around the house, so did the movements of the people in it become not more escapeful but more circumscribed. Once a day the secretary drove the station-waggon into the village and did a few commissions; otherwise the cars remained in the garages, so that the estate paths and driveways appeared to come to an abrupt end when they arrived at the park fences. Mrs. Morgan sat in the library a large part of the day, or in the summerhouse; occasionally she dragged herself to the kitchen-garden and exchanged a few words with the head-gardener.
Her son no longer climbed the mountain, or even went outside the grounds; all at once his behaviour became so peculiar that the household was amazed. He appeared at all meals exactly on time, ate well of each course, and left, with irreproachable correctness, only when his mother rose. Between meals he dragged a long canvas chair across the lawn, set it up under one of the maples and read books. At the end of the day he was careful to drag the chair back to the house, in case it got rained on, something he had never bothered to do before. If his mother addressed him, offering him a chop or more string beans, he bowed almost from the waist, and passed his plate in a most courteous way. Only when she asked him if he was being sure to take his medicine twice a day—a question she had asked him twice a week for many years—did he appear simply not to have heard such a silly question. He went to bed, as the doctor had always advised but without much result, as soon as the living-room clock chimed eleven. He observed the precaution of taking his bath in only three inches of lukewarm water (exactly three; it might have been done with a measuring stick), instead of wilfully filling it to the brim and wallowing in a thick and boiling steam; after the bath he scrubbed away the brown scum at dirt-level instead of leaving it to cake for the maid. He spent a full day straightening up his room, and even tidied up the drawers t
hat he never let anyone touch, and which were full of old notebooks, sneakers and phonograph records. He no longer sank into chairs and threw his legs over the arms; he sat upright, and ceased, while reading, to pick his nose and ears. His passage through the rooms and corridors was stately: he walked with his shoulders back and his head tilted somewhat higher than usual, in the manner of a promising student in a theological seminary. He did small, but thoughtful, things to help the maids, the cook, the chauffeur, and even the secretary; above all, he showed a new interest in his grandfather, and could be seen with a hand cupped under the old gentleman’s elbow, helping him over a rough spot, or gently arranging the hood of his deck chair to prevent too much sunlight from falling on the weak old eyes. Without prompting from his mother, he went to the tutor, apologized for his former behaviour, and resumed his daily lessons, noting down the tutor’s words carefully in a book and writing calm and thoughtful compositions. He had always looked rather sick and miserable, but now his air was so grave and decent, so much a model of an honest, socially-minded person, that one might have thought him the victim of some terrible abnormality.
“Are you sure you feel all right?” his mother asked him nervously. His answer was a courteous smile, which seemed to overlie a rich inner feeling of tolerance. The same afternoon, he brought the secretary a bunch of spring wildflowers. In the evening he spoke with good sense about an aspect of Russo-German relations.
“I think you and I have behaved pretty shabbily about Jimmy,” the secretary told the tutor very coldly that night. “I know plenty of people who are supposed to be normal and haven’t an ounce of Jimmy’s natural decency. When you think of the handicaps the kid’s had to overcome, it’s a wonder that he can come out of it like this.”
“I always said I thought he was intelligent.”
“Yes, but it was the way you said it … It annoyed me even at the time, but I was a coward, and I was afraid you’d sneer if I defended him.”
“Honey, I’d never sneer at you.”
