by Belva Plain
“Martin, let’s do without diplomacy, shall we? This is a time for plain talk. You’re thinking, and I don’t blame you, that Jessie Meig isn’t precisely what you had in mind when you thought of choosing a wife. I’d be a fool if I didn’t know that! But I also know, and you do too, that burning love affairs usually go up in smoke anyway. Now, Jessie is an unusual human being. You’ve said so yourself. She’s intelligent, she’s good company and she thinks the world of you. Anybody can see she does. She’d be a trusted companion all your life.” He paused. “And she’d have reason to be grateful to you.”
Martin winced and Meig saw it.
“Yes, I did say ‘grateful’! What’s wrong? But you’d be grateful to her, too, wouldn’t you? Because without her you’d spend the rest of your life here, going to waste.”
Martin stood up to get his coat.
“Will you at least think about it?”
“I understand what you’ve said, Mr. Meig, but—”
Meig waved him aside. “Your impulse is to say ‘no, absolutely not.’ You think if you accept, you’ll be selling yourself. Dishonoring yourself. Isn’t that so?”
“I feel—” Martin began and was interrupted again.
Behind the strict, rimless glasses the eyes were shrewd, “Sentimentality, Martin, sentimentality!”
Martin had one foot out of the door.
“Of course she doesn’t have the remotest idea of what I’ve been saying and must never find out, whatever you decide.”
Martin was horrified. “No need to worry about that!”
“Very well, then. Just give it some thought, that’s all I ask.”
It was such a cold night that, unless you knew better, you could lose an earlobe. In spite of the arctic air, Martin sweated. The shame of it! He looked back at the house, wondering which of the second-story lights came from Jessie’s room. And with flashing insight, he thought he could feel how it would be for her, proud as she was, if she could know what had just passed between her father and himself.
The proposition was, of course, unthinkable. Yet it had been well-intentioned, born of desperation. That this arrogant, private man should have revealed himself like that to a stranger! What must he have seen in that stranger? Ambition, obviously, but much more also: loyalty and kindness and honor. No question about that. He trusts me, Martin thought. Then his thoughts veered.
He dares to think I can be bribed!
Don’t be a pompous ass, Martin; he didn’t mean it that way!
It’s a bribe, all the same!
He’s terrified and wants to see his house in order. A human being has revealed his sorrow before you, Martin!
But the thing’s impossible. And now a fine friendship has been spoiled for good. How can I feel free in that house anymore?
It was the most weird encounter, weird and sad! The wind rushed and the night was inexpressibly lonely. The planet was small and shriveled with the cold. And he went to bed thinking of loneliness.
For two weeks he stayed away. Then it occurred to him that such an abrupt disappearance would be a cruel hurt to Jessie. And indeed, it had been.
“I thought maybe my father had made you angry the last time you were here,” she said, looking anxious.
“No. Why should you think that?”
“Because he can be so superior and cold. He antagonizes people.”
“Well, he wasn’t. Anyway, I don’t antagonize so easily.”
“That’s not true. The truth is exactly the opposite.”
“You’re right, as usual,” he admitted, and she laughed.
Seated as usual in the great wing chair, with her cheeks gone pink from the fire’s heat, and the pinpoint sparks of gold in her ears, she could have been so lovely! If only—And he wondered whether anyone would ever marry her. Would anyone ever love her? Respect, admiration, companionship—these would come easily in all the virtuous ways through which human beings relate to one another. And surely even tenderness could come. But love?
She said softly, “You’re very quiet, Martin.”
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to be.” He brought himself back into the moment. “By the way, I finished Main Street. I meant to return it tonight, but I forgot to bring it.”
“Did you like it?”
“Yes. It has the ring of truth. Depressing truth.”
“I’ve something else for you, quite different.” She ran across the room to the shelves. She always ran. Did she think it made her less visible to run?
“Here. It’s Rolland’s Jean-Christophe, a beautiful story of a musician in Paris. Especially good for you.”
“Why for me?”
“Because it’s a story of a struggle. Always, even when he was a child, he knew he was going to be a composer, a great one. He faced everything—loneliness, poverty, rivalry; but he never gave up.”
“And did he win in the end?”
“Read it.” She forced his eyes to meet her own. “You’re a tenacious man, you know? You’ll get what you want. I feel it in you.”
A sudden brightness came into the little face, a fervor so glowing that it seemed he was seeing past the frail barrier of her forehead, seeing deep into her with shocking clarity.
She loved him.
Good God! He hadn’t intended that! Hadn’t intended to weaken or mislead this vulnerable small girl! What had he done? How had this come to be? Clumsily he flipped the pages of the book she had put into his hands.
“Seems like something I’ll hate to put down,” he said.
“Yes.”
Did he deserve to feel such guilt and shame? Truly he hadn’t been aware that this was happening. Nor perhaps had she. Well, it would have to be stopped, that was all. Brought abruptly to a halt before any more damage was done.
He simply wouldn’t come here again.
And swiftly, with such grace as he could summon, he escaped from the house.
There are days on which troubles accumulate and peak. One oversleeps and there is not time for breakfast. One is late for the first appointment and for all the others after that. It rains on the wet snow; then the rain turns to sleet and the roads turn to ice. It is March and one is sick of winter, but there are weeks and weeks of it still ahead.
The office was crowded all the morning with coughs, sore throats and a rampant case of measles that should have stayed home instead of polluting the waiting room.
The last case in the afternoon would have broken Martin’s heart if he had allowed it to. Elsie Briggs was thirty-four, unmarried and the youngest of a large family. Hers was the old story of the daughter who stayed home to take care of her parents, wearing herself out for the senile and incontinent, locking herself away from life behind four dismal walls. And Elsie Briggs was finally breaking down. They would be taking her to the state hospital on Friday because there was nothing else to do with her. There was no outpatient care; there was no place other than the bleak state institution. Martin shuddered. In this mood he closed the office for the day and went to the car.
Ordinarily, he would not have answered a summons fifteen miles north in the mountains, especially in weather like this. But these were old patients who had bought a remote farm and moved away. Their parents had been his father’s patients. Pa would have gone, he told himself grimly.
Sliding and struggling up the hills, each one more steep than the last, the flimsy car shook through fierce cross-winds. The windshield wipers clacked. All was gray: dim fields, gray air, steady snow. After two miserable hours, he pulled into a yard to find what he had expected: unpainted boards, a ramshackle porch, no light poles. If anybody needed cutting or stitching he would turn the car to let the headlights shine into the room. Rural poverty like this in the twentieth century!
In the bare kitchen stood a huddle of five runny-nosed babies and a thin mother, terrified because her husband was sick. Who was to tend to the man’s work?
The man had pneumonia. Martin left medicines and a sheet of instructions.
“Keep taking his te
mperature regularly,” he told the woman. “Can you get out to a phone to call me tomorrow?”
She was concerned about his bill. “I can’t give you anything now, Doctor, but I’ll be at my sister’s right near your place in a couple of weeks. Ill bring it then.”
“Dont worry about it,” he said gently, knowing quite well that he would never be paid, knowing also that he wouldn’t want to be paid. For who could touch dollars that would deprive these children of something they needed? And heaven knew, they must need everything from oranges to shoes!
So he left to slide and slip, downhill this time, the fifteen miles homeward. In the city or under some better system—though God knows what system in places as remote as these—this patient would be taken care of in a hospital. At least, somebody would see him tomorrow. In this weather he surely couldn’t get back soon enough. And this frustration, along with so many others, nagged him as he drove.
I don’t know anything. I’m not an expert obstetrician, cardiologist or orthopedic surgeon. I’m not an expert anything. That arm of Wagnall’s that I set last week wasn’t done right. I know it wasn’t.
My father’s kind hands lay folded over his black vest in the coffin. He gave the best care he could. He tried. My God. he did! And that’s better than nothing, better than no care at all! A man has to be satisfied with it My father was satisfied.
Quite without warning, not fifty feet ahead of the car, a tremendous limb, almost a quarter of a giant elm. split from the weight of ice and crashed on the road. In pounding panic, Martin swerved. If he’d been a few feet farther along, all his problems would be over! And he laughed at his own macabre humor. Indifferent nature! Savage world!
The wind whipped the trees as he carefully skirted his near-disaster. March was the most dismal month of all. Yet his father had loved it, had liked to talk of the stately cycle of the year, its rhythm and its grandeur. The road curved around the lip of a plateau from which, through beating snow, he could see a spread of white fields and hills folding back to the mountains out of which he had just come. Grand, yes! Eternal. Majestic. All the orotund words. A man might well stand in awe of it. He understood that deeply. But everybody wasn’t meant for it, and he hated it, hated the loneliness, the monotony, the awful cold. He had never said it aloud before, but he said it now.
“I hate it.”
And he could have wept.
Six miles from home in sleet as slippery as grease, the car slid off the road. He swore, then rocked the car, trying to get traction. He revved the engine over and over, to no avait. At last he got out It was so cold, thirty below he’d guess, that his lungs burned with the small pain of each indrawn breath. The hairs prickled in his nostrils. Taking the shovel from the back seat, he tried to dig. The snow was so hard that the tip of the shovel bent backward. He sighed.
“Goddamned junky old car! Goddamned winter!” Suddenly recalling Pa’s advice, he got the burlap from under the front seat and placed it beneath the rear wheels. Then he started the engine. It roared and whined. The wheels spun furiously. It’s rubbing the tires to a thread, Martin thought. But at last they caught hold and the car lurched back onto the road.
When he crept into the yard an hour later, the house was dark and he remembered that his mother had gone to an afternoon at the church, followed by a supper. She had left his meal on the coal stove in a covered dish. It was stone cold. Then he saw that the kitchen fire was out The house smelled dank and musty. He ran down to the cellar where the furnace stood like a hungry monster beside a hill of glossy coal and flung the door open.
There was no fire here, either. The monster hadn’t been fed and ashes were thick in the grate.
Blasted boy! His mother had arranged with Artie Grant to tend the fires today while she was gone, but obviously he hadn’t come. He went back upstairs to the rear porch for kindling wood. Each ice-incrusted piece had to be dislodged by sheer force. Now, back to the cellar with newspapers and matches. But first the ashes must be cleaned out. Martin’s head pounded as dust from the ashes set off a fit of coughing. He sweated and shivered, shoveling the ashes out, then shoveling the coal in. Last he shook down the grates, making a lonely rattle in the empty house. From the head of the stairs the collies stood observing him, while he watched the fire take hold.
Finished in the cellar, he went back up to the kitchen. His mother had just come home. For an instant she was framed in the doorway, her pretty eyes anxious. She wore her old, black “good” coat; the black feather on her hat was turning green. Humble. That’s how she looks, he thought. Mean word. Humble.
“Goodness, look at you! You’re all over ashes!” she cried.
“Yes. Where in blazes was Artie Grant?”
“He’s usually so dependable! I guess the weather was just too bad for him to get here.”
“It was, was it!” Martin was furious. “Wasn’t too bad for me, though! I only traveled thirty miles round trip to Danielsville and back!”
“Martin,” his mother said mildly. “Martin, you’re tired and hungry.”
“Of course I am. Why not?” After a day like this one, was it too much to ask for a house that was warm so that you could at least rest when you came in?
When his supper was ready Ma sat down in the rocker near the table. “That shutter keeps banging. Hear it? The hinge is loose. If I get a new hinge, will you put it on sometime?” And without waiting for him to answer, “Your father never cared about things like that. Never cared about things at all, you might say. The world of ideas, that’s what he lived in, all that he cared about,” she reflected, sighing a little. The light fell over her head, over a smooth streak of gray that lay like a ribbon on her still-dark hair. She was talkative tonight. “Yes, he was a student of the world. He read everything. I’m sorry I never had much time, and now it seems to be too late. I’m out of the habit of reading.” She rocked: creak, creak. “Anyway, I would never have been like him. I do like things so much. I like having things. You never knew that about me, did you?” she asked shyly, as if she were making some astounding confession.
“It’s no sin to like things, Ma.”
“Do you know where I always wanted most to go? I used to wish I could go to Washington, to see the Lincoln Memorial and the Capitol and all that. But we could never seem to get away.”
“You could go now. It’s outrageous that you should have to think twice about having such a small pleasure.”
“More than twice. We don’t have the money to spare. You’ll be needing a new car by summer. It’s a wonder this one has lasted as long as it has.”
Never in all the years Martin had known his mother had she expressed any desires. It hurt him to hear her. Yes, and made him strangely angry, too. He felt a whole jumble of restless feelings.
“Your father was so content. He’d sit here rocking by the stove when the front room was too cold to go over his records, and he never complained. Sometimes he’d read aloud about places far away. Places like Afghanistan or the Amazon. And I’d ask him, ‘Don’t you wish we could go there? “I am there in my mind,’ he’d answer.”
“I’m not like him,” Martin said.
“That’s true. I’ve never known anyone like him.”
In the hall the old clock struck with a tinny bong. Ashes tinkled in the stove. His mother coughed, a thick phlegmy cough that she hadn’t been able to get rid of all winter. It wasn’t her fault, surely, but it was exasperating. And he had a sudden projection of himself on long, dull, winter nights like this one, sitting in a shabby room like this one with a faceless woman: not his mother, of course, but a woman who would be his wife, since inevitably a man acquired a wife.
The future was a dull road going endlessly uphill, downhill, uphill, stretched through an unchanging landscape; at last, when one no longer hoped for any change, one would come to the final hill and just drop quietly off into the unknown. Life would have passed, never having counted for very much, or not what one wanted it to count for, at any rate. It would have gone by withou
t color, without sparkle or aim.
But all the time, in other places, some men would have been doing what they wanted to do! They learned, they lived, they moved ahead! And there came again that old sense of rushing time which had haunted and beset him since adolescence. He was already twenty-eight! Without meaning to, he smashed a fist into his palm and sprang up as if he had been shot. There was such tension in his solar plexus that he had to move, he had to—
His mother looked up. “Where’re you going?”
“I don’t know. Just out.”
“In this weather?” For it had begun to sleet again.
“I’ve been in it all day. I’m used to it.”
“Oh, I forgot to tell you. While you were down cellar, Jessie Meig telephoned. Odd for a girl to telephone a young man, don’t you think so?”
“No. Just natural and honest.”
“Her sister didn’t do it, did she?”
No, Martin thought, she never did.
“It’s not even very clever, if you ask me. She must be a strange girl, that Jessie Meig.”
“Why do you always say ‘that Jessie Meig’ as though you had something against her?”
“How could I have anything against her? I don’t even know her.”
“You know she’s crippled, and that’s what you’ve got against her.”
“Martin, I don’t understand you sometimes! You’re so blunt and bluff lately, so outspoken! You’ve no tact anymore.”
“I’m outspoken, I’ll admit.” It came to him that indeed he was more candid than he had used to be, that he had learned it for good or ill from Jessie. “Say what you mean and mean what you say. What’s wrong with that?”
“Very well, then. I can’t for the life of me understand what you can see in a poor, crippled girl. It’s pitiful, of course it is, but here you are, a tall strapping fellow, and you could get any girl you wanted if you set your mind to it.”
“I’ve told you, Ma. She’s a friend, one of the best I’ve ever had outside of Tom, and there are things she understands about me that even Tom doesn’t. How she’s managed to know so much about the world, living the way she has, I have no idea. And I like being with her. What more can I say?”
