by Belva Plain
“What are you doing with yourself lately?” But some sort of answer was expected.
“He said I was ‘enthralling.’ ”
“Did he?” For an instant Jessie looked pleased. Then she pulled in her smile and looked somber again. “And so, what did you think of him?”
Another question you couldn’t answer! But Claire thought of something. “I thought he would be older.”
“He looks—he looks well then?”
“I guess so.”
“What did you talk about?”
“A lot of things. He has a little boy. I saw his picture.”
“I see.”
“His name is Enoch. That was my other grandfather’s name. Did you know?”
“Yes, certainly I knew. And now you’ll be going back to visit, I suppose.”
Something forlorn had come into her mother’s voice, something hollow and sad, like an echo. Claire looked up quickly, but Jessie was just sitting there as usual, with the pearls glimmering in her ears and the crocheted scarf about her shoulders that she wore every night because she said the house was chilly. Melancholy seeped like shadows in the room.
“Don’t you want me to?” she asked.
“You can imagine I’m not happy about it But you’ll do what you want, anyway.”
“I wish you wouldn’t mind too much, though.”
Jessie didn’t answer that Instead she asked, “You’ve been thinking about your father for a long time, haven’t you?”
“How did you know?”
“I didn’t until now. But obviously I should have known.”
“I’m sorry I scared you,” Claire said. “We got talking and forgot to look at the clock.”
“Well, next time let me know where you are, that’s all.”
Her mother stood up. “It’s time for your bath, and you haven’t done any homework,” she said.
At the door, Claire turned around. “Mother?”
“Yes, Claire?”
“Don’t worry. I’ll still love you.”
“I won’t worry.”
“Things will be the same. This won’t make any difference.”
“Of course, dear. I know it won’t.”
But of course, she didn’t know it. And Claire, trudging up the long stairs to her room, didn’t know it either. For it could never be exactly the same again. It wasn’t just the two of them, anymore.
Chapter 19
Martin moved his chair back from the table. “Well, this was a great dinner. Had enough?” he asked Claire.
The devastated Sunday roast stood in its cooling gravy on the sideboard with the peas, the sweet potatoes, the homemade rye rolls and the apple pudding. He ate too much, as his father had before him. He resolved to watch it.
“I’m stuffed,” Claire said. “You’re a better cook than our maid, Aunt Hazel. You can cook better than any maid we ever had.”
Hazel smiled. “If you still want to take Enoch to the park, Claire, you’d better start. It gets dark and cold early.”
“I want to go to the park,” Enoch said at once.
“I’m ready. I’ll just get my pea jacket.”
“All the buttons are off it,” Martin observed.
“Not all, only three. How come you noticed? Mother’s always noticing, but I didn’t think you would.”
“You think I’m blind in one eye and can’t see out of the other?”
“Give them to me. I’ll sew them on,” Hazel offered.
The three stood watching while she sewed the buttons. Her soft hair kept falling over her forehead. Whenever she pushed it back, she looked up at them and smiled.
“You’re really so nice,” Claire told her. “You know, my friend Alice’s parents got divorced, and her father’s new wife is nasty and Alice hates her, but I certainly don’t hate you.”
“That’s too bad,” Hazel said. “About Alice, I mean. I’m glad you don’t hate me, though.”
“I was supposed to wear my good coat today. It’s rose-colored, sort of, and has a gray fur collar. Mother made me buy it, but I don’t like it.”
“Your mother has beautiful taste,” Martin said. “You can learn something from her.”
“I know, but I’m not interested in things like that—clothes and keeping my room neat and stuff. I’m just not interested.”
“There. That’s done,” Hazel said. She bit the thread off between her teeth. “Now you look better. I’ll get Enoch’s snowsuit on. Be sure to hold his hand very tightly; he can slip loose before you know it.”
“You can trust me,” Claire assured her.
“She likes coming here,” Hazel observed when they had gone. “I guess it’s fun for her to be with Enoch. Her own house must be very quiet, I suppose.”
“I suppose,” Martin answered.
“She really is an odd character, Martin. In a wonderful way, I mean. So—different.”
“That’s true.”
“Do you ever think you would like to see her mother?”
“Not particularly.”
Hazel wanted to talk about Jessie, to probe in dark places. But the truth was that, yes, he would have liked to have seen Jessie, to talk about Claire, to find for himself whether the sore had healed at all. However, Jessie did not want to see him.
“Well, I guess I’d better clean up the kitchen. You going to work?”
“Just for an hour before the Philharmonic comes on. I’ve a few patient-reports to check.”
He had fixed up a room for himself and his personal treasures: his desk, his books, records and the little radio on which he listened to the Sunday broadcast of the Philharmonic. The rest of the house was Hazel’s, the woman’s province in which he did not interfere. She had done with it as she liked, and the result Martin would have characterized, if asked, as cozy: somewhat tasteless, but inoffensively so. There was a clutter of pillows and fringe and draperies in cloudy colors which tended to cloud his mood. Old rose, reminding him of rotting flowers, and tans like stale tea stains. In Martin’s little study the walls were white. The dark floor was bare around the edges of an old Persian rug patterned in gold and cream like sun on sand. There were no curtains, only shelves of plants, so that from his desk he could see the sky, and this gave him freedom and lightness of heart.
Someone last spring had sent them an azalea in a wooden tub. The flame-colored petals had fallen, but the shining leaves thrived, and it would surely flame again in season. Hazel had nurtured it She had a green thumb.
The afternoon was murky and still. He looked down to where, three floors below, bare gingko trees stood in a row along the curb, each one enclosed in its low fence of wire scrollwork. Claire, holding Enoch by the hand, had just crossed Seventy-third Street and headed toward the park. He watched them, the tall, curly-headed girl and the little waddling boy, until they turned the corner. Tenderness filled his chest. That they might know grace and mercy all their lives! Their flesh was so soft He yearned for them: more for the girl than for the little boy? No, no! How could he? And after all, one couldn’t measure. They were different, his feelings, neither more nor less, just different.
He suspected—he was almost certain—that Jessie could not be at ease with this new development He hoped her resentment was not too acute. He suspected she would not have let Claire know if it were. At any rate, Claire never said anything about it.
She had invited herself to dinner this Sunday and Martin had asked, “Doesn’t your mother want you to have dinner with her on Sundays?”
“She has a cold and has to stay in bed, so I’d have to eat alone anyway.”
He tried to fathom their relationship, and concluded that Jessie, pragmatic as always, had adjusted to living with a good, but strong-willed, very adult child. In short, Jessie would know when she was beaten! It took rather a good deal to beat Jessie, too, Martin reflected now, with a touch of amusement and more than a touch of admiration. The world had not confounded her yet. Professionally, she was doing very well. Hazel reported that at one of the
hospital auxiliary meetings, some of the women had mentioned Jessie’s name as though they were impressed. An extraordinary twist of fortune!
Extraordinary, too, that after all his own despairing, fruitless efforts, his daughter, without any act or effort of his, should have been returned to him. His entrancing daughter!
His mother had come to visit again for her birthday. Meeting Claire for the first time, she had wept.
“She’s different from the others, from Alice’s girls,” she had told Martin. And he had asked her in what way.
“It’s hard to say, exactly. More curious, for one thing. And very strong. Yes,” she had repeated after a moment, “yes, very strong.”
As Jessie had done, Claire would say whatever came into her head. She had been like that when she was three, he remembered. (Enoch, at three, was still a baby.) He was thankful that what came into her head caused no disruption in the life of his household. She had with frank simplicity liked Hazel at once, and Hazel, loving soul, had liked her. Hazel would be especially charitable, he knew, because Claire was a “victim of divorce” and because her mother was crippled. Hazel tended to think in clichés. But they were kind clichés.
He was thankful that, for whatever reason—most probably her own pride—Jessie had said nothing to Claire about the truth of their divorce. Someday, inevitably, he supposed she would have to know and he dreaded the prospect of being diminished in his daughter’s sight …
Ah well! Sufficient unto the day, et cetera. He pulled out his writing pad and a pile of reports. A reminder had been propped against the bookend: “The Mosers have invited us for next Friday dinner. Are you free? Shall I accept?”
As it happened he was free, yet he knew that if he had not been he would have made an effort to become so. The Mosers were amiable and decent people. They were all gratitude. Vicky was in fine health: Martin was given detailed proof of her fine health at every meeting. Moser wanted to believe in Martin’s special genius, a belief that was as ill-founded as his first refusal to believe in Martin at all. But it was difficult, even impossible, to change a layman’s opinion of a doctor, once he had formed it. And generally he formed it on the strength of something read in a popular magazine, or on the experience, probably misunderstood at that, of a relative or friend.
“An acquaintance of mine has a son,” Moser had been saying recently, “out in Dayton, Ohio. Same situation as Vicky’s was, after an accident And the surgeon botched it He’s a useless lump of flesh, poor boy. An outrage.”
“Well,” Martin had said, feeling an obligation toward the unknown surgeon who had probably not botched it at all, “it might have been a different thing entirely, you know.”
“No, no, it was the same thing. It only made me realize more and more what we owe you, Martin. Yes, it was the hand of God that led us to you. And nothing you or anyone can say will change our minds.”
He hoped the dinner would be nearby at a hotel. It would be a long drive out to the Mosers’ Long Island place on a winter night, after having worked all day. Still, Haze! liked to go there. It was no average experience, of course. You turned in at the great iron gates, traveled half a mile up a driveway between immense walls of shrubbery and were greeted by a servant at the top of a flight of steps. Double doors opened onto an octagonal hall. You walked on pastel carpets through lofty rooms filled with mirrors and brocade furniture, past a polished mahogany library whose shelves were filled with uncut leather-bound sets and silver golf trophies. Through the casements you looked out on terraces descending to the Sound at the base of a shallow bluff.
“It’s an English manor house,” Mrs. Moser liked to explain. “Elizabethan. We had an architect who was famous for English design.”
Mrs. Moser had come from Iowa and married Mr. Moser long before he became president of his tool and die company. She wore many diamonds, but she was a simple person, somewhat intimidated by her husband and his status. Hazel felt comfortable with her.
Now Martin started at the top of the pile of reports, read through one and wrote corrections in the margin. His mind wandered: too much dinner, or maybe just the Sunday letdown after a week of split-second activities and meals on the run. His mind went back to the Elizabethan manor. The Mosers would not have recognized a real one or liked it if they had. He thought of Lamb House.
Why was it that, on days when he was with Claire, he thought more of—of her? Were they at all alike? Not the eyes, for Claire’s were dark. Never in any other human being had he seen just that pure and lucid blue. But there was something, some joyous movement of the head, something in the child of eleven that reminded him they were of the same flesh, after all.
No, Martin, no.
In the kitchen, Hazel was singing. “I hear music when I touch your hand,” she sang, and the sound was sweetly, faintly mournful, like herself. She wanted so much to make everything between them perfect. By preference she read romances and women’s magazines, but the better to resemble Martin, she made herself read whatever he had just been reading, and asked him to discuss it afterward. He often did and found her comments apt She was not especially fond of music, either, but would go with him to the opera and had bought a book to learn about it. She was convinced that all the other doctors’ wives were educated, although he had told her that was not true, and in any case it didn’t matter, because he was satisfied with her as she was.
What Hazel really liked was domesticity and the company of women like herself. Flo had become a trusted friend, and that pleased him; it would have been hard for him and Tom if their wives had disliked one another. Also, she liked being with her family, especially her sister Tess, whom Martin bore only because she was Hazel’s sister. Tess was an incessant talker, and her voice was excruciating.
Hazel knocked on the door. She always knocked on the door when he was working, although he had told her she needn’t.
“I thought I’d remind you the concert will be coming on in three minutes. You get so busy, you might forget.”
“Thanks. But I wasn’t busy, I’ve been daydreaming.”
“About what?”
“About what a good year it’s been.”
“I’m glad. If you want me to listen to the concert with you, I’ll stay. I won’t talk, either.” Her eyes were innocent, holding more innocence than Claire’s, by far.
He said fondly, “Only if you want to. You needn’t pretend with me. I don’t mind that you don’t like music.”
“I want to try to like it, Martin, so we can share it together.”
Try to like it! Mozart and Bach, their celestial mathematics! The glory and the peace, like stroking fingers, like quiet hands.
“All right,” he said and turned the dial.
There was a buzz and scratch of static. A voice rumbled. Then it came clearly.
“At seven fifty-five this morning, a large force of Japanese planes attacked the United States naval facilities at Pearl Harbor, inflicting great damage on Ford Island, as well as at the Army Air Base, Hickham Field. Casualties are mounting—
“My God!” Martin cried.
“A large number of Army Air Corps planes was destroyed on the ground. Winging in over Oahu, Japanese torpedo and dive bombers destroyed hangars, docks and—”
Hazel’s hand went to her mouth. She always covered her mouth when she was frightened. “Does it mean—” she began. They stared at each other and her broken question hung unanswered in the air.
Ask anyone who was alive on that day and is old enough to remember what he was doing and where he was at the moment he heard the news, and he will answer you with a kind of awe in his voice.
“We were on our way to the beach.”
“I had just taken the roast out of the oven.”
“We were getting dressed for my brother’s wedding.”
So these two also would remember the day that shook the world, that changed the world for them, as for their countrymen, and indeed, in the end, for all men everywhere.
The last thing Martin s
aw before he turned the bedside lamp out was his uniform hanging in the closet with his sober civilian suits. The suits looked queer, like relics of some other man or life. He felt he would walk awkwardly in them if he had to wear them, and it had been only half a year since they had been his daily garb.
The room was strange, too, this room in which they had conceived their child and spread the Sunday papers on the bed and, warmly covered, had lain listening to the wind. Home on a three-day leave, he thought it might have been better not to come, not to be reminded of what he had already grown unused to and would not have again for no one knew how long. Or ever? The last medical contingent to go overseas had been torpedoed in the North Atlantic. Young Prescott had gone down with them, and for some reason—he had not known Prescott well at all—but for some reason he could recall his face most vividly, plump and soft, eager to please and worried. His wife had been pregnant with their fourth child.
From down the hall came a sharp little cry. Hazel sat up and waited for the cry to be repeated, but it was not “Enoch’s dreaming,” she said.
What did a three-year-old dream about, this gentle baby with his mother’s anxiety already written in his eyes?
“Martin,” she whispered into the darkness, “how long will you be at Fort Dix?”
“Dear, I haven’t the least idea.”
“But it’s a staging area, isn’t it?”
“Hazel, please.”
“I know you’re not supposed to tell anything, and I understand why, but—” She clung to him. He could feel her lips moving against his neck. “Martin?”
“Yes, dear?”
“I’m trying not to cry. I’m so ashamed of myself.”
“It’s all right to cry. I don’t want to leave you and Enoch, either.”
How old would Enoch be when he came home? And Claire, whose years with him had been so few? And in how many rooms, how many houses all over this land were men and women lying awake tonight, holding back the hour of departure?
“Martin? You won’t be angry if I ask you something?”
“Of course I won’t. Ask me.”
