by Belva Plain
Primeval, burgeoning spring! Fragrance and moisture of new life, bursting, reaching, wanting. Wanting so! Until it—it hurt!
He became aware of his heartbeat. It happens now and then: you hear your own heartbeat and suddenly, for no reason that you can explain to yourself, you are reminded that someday it will stop. The sturdy, steady heart will flutter and gallop, will flutter and slow. There will come a final beat. And the amazing little pump, which has been serving without an instant’s rest for all your years, will halt.
And now the old, familiar melancholy seeped in Martin: the veil, the cloud over the sun, the shade drawn down on the day which had been so blithe and charming up till a moment ago. And he remembered that this melancholy had been lying upon him for many months past.
There had been such cheer when Claire was born! So much purpose and joy! What had happened to them? And when? But it was impossible to set a time, to say “There, that’s the moment we began to be unhappy.”
Back in Cyprus it had seemed remarkable that Jessie could be possessed of such practical good humor, so much realistic common sense, such strong optimism. “Wholesome” had been his word for her then, often a priggish word when misused, but actually a fine one, meaning “healthy” and “whole.” Now that wholeness had split How? Why?
There had been “scenes.” He hated them. It might be supposed that no one enjoyed them, although maybe some people did, dramatic types who flaunted emotion to gain attention. But Martin cringed at the thought. And Jessie was always miserable afterward. Yet they happened, again and again. They were very hard to live with.
A few weeks before they had gone to see Gisèle. A new ballerina had been dancing, an exquisite girl who was being talked of all over the Continent. A dream of a girl—unforgettable. Her dark red hair, caught in a tail, fell tossing to her shoulders. She rose en pointe, her white arms reaching in a perfect curve, her mauve skirt drifting—Splendor and grace to catch at one’s throat in awe and linger, smiling, on one’s lips!
And all the while Jessie had been watching, not the dance, but him.
Coming into the bedroom later that night, he had caught her standing naked in front of the mirrored door. She had turned on him furiously.
“Why don’t you knock? Do you have to come in here to stare at me?”
“I wasn’t staring at you! But for Heaven’s sake, I’ll look away if you want me to.”
“Yes, do! It’s a lot more pleasant for you to look at anyone else but me, I’m sure it is. Ballerinas, waitresses—almost anyone but me.”
Wanting to be patient, he had yet said the wrong thing. “Jessie, can’t you try not to think about yourself? Other people really don’t pay all that much attention to your—”
“To my what?”
“Your—disability.”
“You can’t say it, can you?”
“Say what?”
“Hump!” she cried. “I can say it well enough! H-U-M-P. Hump. Go on. Say it!”
He sat down wearily, covering his eyes with his hands.
“You didn’t think I heard,” Jessie said, “that time in Vienna in the shop where we bought the porcelain tea set and the saleswoman said to you, ‘You’ll be glad you bought it. You mother will love it.’ She thought I was your mother!”
“Oh, if you’re going to let a shopgirl’s stupid mistake haunt you like this, what can I say to help you? I want to help you, Jessie,” he said gently.
So he had tried and in the end, when she had exhausted anger, she had apologized, in shame.
“Oh, you are patient with me, Martin, I know you are! I ought to be grateful for what I’ve got, and I really am. It’s just that when we’re out together—you have no idea how I steel myself to go places with you! I feel the thoughts in the air, the messages passed from one to the other. And I know what they’ll say after we’re gone, how the women will talk on the telephone the next morning.”
For a week or two after that particular time they had gone nowhere, except on Sunday to a country inn where they had sat on a high-backed settee near a fire and watched the locals play Shove Ha’penny. No one had paid any attention to them. For those few hours it had been as it was when they rode around Cyprus on house calls, talking about the state of medicine and everything else under the sun. He understood now that these things had interested Jessie because she could hide behind them: they were not about her. But she couldn’t hide in anonymous places forever. She must know that.
Could he ever think of her as other than a poor bird with a broken wing? Her strength had been deceptive: the bird could flutter bravely in the cage but the wide world frightened it. Then his mind closed, unwilling to confront yet another analysis.
He looked for Claire. She was safely pedaling down the walk, her short legs working like pistons. He looked at his watch, which was a handsome one, last year’s Christmas gift from Jessie. She was always buying things for him, caring about his clothes—he himself cared almost nothing about clothes—seeing to it that there were books on his night table, making plans for the office he would have. Next year at Christmas they would be in New York and he would be earning. He would have to find some splendid present for her, something, even, that he couldn’t afford. A ring? She had slender fingers. A sapphire?
Now memory made one of its implausible and senseless associations. Mary wore rings. Mary still wore that curiously fashioned topaz ring. Only a few weeks ago, coming home earlier than usual, he found that she had dropped in for tea, something she hadn’t done in half a year or more. She had risen as soon after Martin’s entrance as decent manners would allow. He had been aware of that. Every nerve in him had been aware of her. And he had observed that she wore the topaz ring. White lilacs circled the brim of her straw hat. Her shoes were delicate. He had seen that her eyes avoided him, looking toward the wall, or resting on her hand, the one with the ring, which lay on the arm of the chair.
He concluded that she was embarrassed before him. People often were after they had revealed their intimate miseries. He had only seen her perhaps six times since that day, more than a year ago, when she had sat before him and told, with more dignity than most women would have been able to muster, the story of wreckage. He had, for a bad few moments, been harsh with her that day; for some reason he had wanted to hurt her; and at once he had been terribly ashamed and tried to make amends. He hoped he had made them adequately.
There had been no way to find out, or to find out how she was faring at all. From the outside, seen at a Thanksgiving dinner or a Christmas party, everything looked handsome enough, with a patina of wealth and charm and family unity.
“Fern would never get a divorce,” Jessie had remarked once, a long time ago. “It would shatter her image of perfection.”
But that wasn’t true. She would have got one if she could have.
And he wondered about many things: whether Alex had any idea how much he, Martin, knew of the Lambs’ affairs; whether Mary had someone else by now; whether she lay alone at night and how troubled she might be because of it—
Surprising, though, how one could get used to being “alone.” He had thought of himself, and indeed had been, a man with strong and frequent sexual needs. Yet now a very little went a long way. Lying down at night next to Jessie’s immaculate, light body, he could fall instantly asleep. When a man has worked under pressure all day he is too tense to want anything but sleep, he told himself—and at the same time knew this for the rationalization it was.
Oh, it ought to be otherwise! It ought to be the core of a man’s life, its force and heat!
If only he could get rid of the images that lay on his brain as though they had been printed there! Mary, in Braidburn’s office, struggling against tears. Mary, proudly pregnant, standing at the door of Lamb House. Mary, in Cyprus, painting three scarlet birds on a wire fence. Fantasies! Soon, if he didn’t curb them, he would become obsessed by them again as once he had been. Foreboding and alarm began to flutter in him now. It was humiliating not to be able to direct
his mind at will …
Claire climbed up on the bench between him and a proper British nurse who was tending a baby in a perambulator.
“Read to me,” she commanded.
He opened the little book which he had thrust into his pocket before leaving home and she explained earnestly, “It’s about dinosaurs. This is Allosaurus. He eats vegetables.”
“And very good for him, too.”
“I hate vegetables.”
“I know. That’s why I said what I did.”
She laughed. Only three, and she could already share a joke with him!
“Shall I read about him, or about this one?” he asked.
“This one. He’s Tyrannosaurus Rex. He eats people. Look at his teeth, Daddy.”
“Oh, he’s fierce all right,” Martin agreed. “We’ll read about him, then.”
When he had finished, she went back to the tricycle.
“That’s a bright little girl, sir,” the nurse remarked.
“Thank you.”
“A child with spirit. She knows what she knows.”
Martin dutifully praised the baby in the perambulator.
“I often see your little girl here with her mother. This is my favorite place in the whole park.”
“It’s a beautiful spot.”
So this woman had seen Jessie, too. The nurses must have gossiped: “The child’s mother—poor thing … No, not the father …Very odd, really.” He could hear them. Then he felt ashamed. Good God, he was as bad as Jessie! People did have other things to talk about, after all.
“You’ll be going back to America soon, I hear.”
“Yes. In the fall.” He corrected himself. “The autumn.”
“I expect you’ll be happy to go home.”
“Yes, home is always best, isn’t it?” Martin answered tritely.
The sky was what one called “mackerel,” spotted and clouding over toward a sudden English shower. He stood up and called to Claire. Holding the child’s hand, he guided the tricycle across the street.
“Home is best,” he had said. Yet here he had had perhaps the best years of his life. Here he had grown farthest and swiftest toward what he wanted to be. “Why don’t you stay in London?” people often asked. For it was a civilized place. Always he would remember its moist, foggy air and its mild light lying on greenery and gray stone.
New York, on the other hand, was aggressive. The searing summers drained your strength. The tearing February wind, blowing off the rivers, was fierce enough to spin you around in your tracks. And all the time, one was battered by noise of traffic and hammering rivets. If they were not tearing something down, they were putting something up. A restless, unsetting place!
Yet he had felt its lure and power from the very first There was no place like it, so challenging, so—alive! It called to him; it dared him to do his best. Yes, time to go back. Time, too, for Claire to know she’s an American. She speaks now with a pretty birdlike chirp, the accent and inflection of the English upper classes. So that’s another reason to return. But the true reason, the real one? The answer struck Martin like a slap across the cheek. Because it will put an ocean between her and me.
“It’s Otello tonight, isn’t it?” he called from the shaving mirror in the bathroom.
Jessie didn’t answer. When he came back into the bed room, she was sitting at the window, looking out into the street.
“Why, you’re not dressing! We haven’t got all that much time!”
“I’m not going to the opera,” she said.
“Not going! What’s wrong?”
“I’ve nothing to wear.”
“What can you be talking about?”
“About having nothing to wear. I refuse to go out anymore in makeshift clothes.”
“You always look fine,” Martin said, too heartily. “That white lace cape-thing you bought—”
“Capes! Scarves! Creeping in, crouched under a cape!”
Swallowing impatience, he said reasonably, “I don’t know anything about fashions, but perhaps a good dressmaker—”
“I’m tired,” she interrupted, “of having you ashamed of me.”
He almost shouted: “I have never been ashamed of you, Jessie!”
“If I looked like Fern, you wouldn’t have to be.”
“I am not ashamed, I tell you!” He was so weary of having to cope with this again! Maybe in the morning when he felt fresher he would do better, but not now at the end of the day. He sighed and recited, “Actually, you do look very much like Mary. You’ve said so yourself.”
“Why will you keep on calling her Mary?”
“She likes the name.”
Jessie’s mouth twisted. “You know, Martin, you don’t fool me. You never have.”
“What in blazes are you talking about? Who’s trying to fool you?”
“You never say, ‘I love you.’ Do you even realize that?”
“I’m not much for words. Maybe that’s a fault Yes, I guess it is. But actions are something else, aren’t they? How do I treat you? You should ask yourself that.”
“You’ve been—exemplary. You made a bargain and you’ve stuck with it to the letter. Honorably. You couldn’t get my sister, so you took me.”
As it is said, the best defense is a good offense. “I am not, positively not, going to stand here—” and catching a glimpse of himself in the mirror, with one half of his face covered in shaving lather, Martin felt ridiculous and irritated with himself. “You’re making trouble where there is none, Jessie.”
“Don’t fence with me. Father warned me before we were married. People don’t know how shrewd Father is, because he’s closemouthed when he wants to be. But he knew it was Fern you wanted and he warned me not to marry you. He was right.”
“He warned you?” Martin was totally confused.
Jessie twisted a hankerchief. She began to cry. Two red blotches appeared on her cheeks. “Yes, yes, he only wanted this for me after I convinced him. Maybe he wanted to be convinced, I don’t know … You were, after all, a solution for me, weren’t you?”
He was stunned. For a moment there was no sound in the room.
“Why am I telling you this? I’ll be sorry tomorrow—”
Anger surged in Martin and quickly died. After all, what difference did it make now who had or had not conceived the marriage?
“I loved you, Martin. We were alike in a way; we were prisoners. Your prison was poverty and mine was my body. And I thought—I thought perhaps we could make each other happy. It would be a kind of trade-off.”
He stood in a fog. Thickly it settled, a heavy weight of hopeless fatigue, so that it seemed he could never make the effort to move through it.
“I thought—oh, I gave it hours of thought, believe me—I thought, although you didn’t love me, as you might have loved Fern if she hadn’t gone away, or loved some other woman, still you liked me tremendously. I knew you did. I believed we could manage with that It’s been done before.” And Jessie looked up half timidly, half in defiance.
Prison, she had said and it was true, except that he had already escaped from his and she never would.
“Jessie,” he said softly, “Jessie … you’re wrong. You think I don’t love you … but I do.” And that also, in its way, was true.
A small doubting smile fled from her face. “Don’t, Martin, I’m too smart for that.”
He made a helpless gesture. “Then I just don’t know. If you won’t believe me—”
She sighed. “It’s my own fault. I took advantage of your need. It was my fault.”
“Who’s talking about fault? We’re here, now, today. And we have so much—” Suddenly his energies revived and he began to speak eagerly. Holding his fingers spread, he counted, “We have a home. We have friends and will have more. We have a beautiful child. We can’t allow this sort of thing to go on, for her sake, if for no other reason.”
“That’s true.”
“Well then?”
She stood up and laid he
r head in the hollow of his shoulder. “I’m drifting. I’m floating with nothing to hold to.”
He put his arms around her and held her gently, as one holds a troubled child. “You have me to hold to.” He stroked her hair, the jaunty curls on the sad, bent head. “I wish I could make you feel the way you did when we used to ride around on house calls. Remember how we’d talk and talk? You had ideas about everything in the world.”
“I felt I was a part of things then. It’s different here. You’re gone all day, climbing up in the world, and I’m left out.”
“But this is what it was all for! It’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”
“I know. I planned the whole thing, and at the start I was happy; I was! But now it’s all got complicated … I don’t make any sense, do I?”
“Well, plenty of people don’t make any sense. But you’ll climb out of the slump. I’ll pull you out of it. Now let’s hurry, shall we? How fast can you dress?”
“I don’t want to go tonight, Martin. Truly. You can go without me. I won’t mind. And I’ll be all right. Really.”
She expected him to stay with her, he knew. And, pity or no, he felt suddenly perverse. He wasn’t angry, he wasn’t being stubborn; he was simply weary of yet another “scene.” Moreover, he had wanted to hear Otello.
“All right then. I’ll go,” he said. “Have a good sleep. You’ll feel different in the morning.”
The singers had taken their final bows, and the departing crowd moved slowly through the lobby. Alex Lamb touched Martin on the shoulder.
“Hello there! Where’s Jessie?”
“Didn’t feel up to par tonight. She went to bed early.”
“Come back to our place for a spot of supper. It’s my birthday and some friends are coming.”
“Well, I really ought—”
“Come on, you can spare an hour or two for your brother-in-law. Jessie must be asleep by now, anyway.”
The Lambs’ table was bright with iris and narcissi, flowery porcelain, laughter and wine. The women were so lovely! Even the older ones had a pearl glow, not from the candlelight, but from something within. And in Martin, too, a subtle warmth began to stir.
