Random Winds

by Belva Plain

  Mary was asleep on the sofa when he let himself in. Dismayed, he remembered that he had left Hazel’s pages scattered. She had picked them up and placed them neatly on the table next to the lamp.

  She opened her eyes. “I didn’t read it,” she said.

  “I didn’t think you did.”

  “It’s from home, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  And kneeling down, he put his head on her lap. Then, ashamed of his wet eyes, he couldn’t raise his head. The price a man paid for manhood! Valor and steel, the ramrod back, the stiff upper lip!

  “You’re going home to stay?”

  “Yes,” he murmured.

  She got up and, going to the window, pressed her cheek against the cold glass. At last she said, “A commitment. I understand.”

  He couldn’t answer. What words could he have found? He thought perhaps dying would be easier, going down into oblivion and rest.

  “We deserve something better …”

  “Who knows what anyone deserves?”

  “Our timing is always wrong.”

  “God knows that’s true.”

  “Bitterness is ugly, Martin. And I am so damn bitter.”

  They lay in bed, talking.

  “There was a couple who lived near Alex and me. He was twenty-eight, and he died one Saturday morning after playing tennis. Before the war, people of twenty-eight weren’t dying. It was a grief so terrible that you turned away from looking at her. And still I couldn’t have understood it … Tonight I do.”

  He took her in his arms. The last time, the last time. He thought he had cried the words aloud; perhaps he had only heard them in his head. A swelling tide of blood crackled and surged as he lost himself in her; never draw apart, he thought; never, never … and then he did fall away and lie apart at last, seeing shadows, hearing the sound of rain.

  It must have started while they lay in love. Trucks were passing at the corner, a rumbling convoy of army vehicles, each one guided by a being as filled with his own essentiality as Mary and he. The little room trembled with their thunder. The clock struck three. A few hours more, and it would be over.

  When she came out of the bedroom in the morning, he had already collected his things.

  “Just your clothes, Martin? Not the Churchill mug or the Rowlandson prints I gave you or anything?”

  “Only your Three Red Birds. I don’t want anything else.”

  They stood in the little hall.

  “Do you think we’ll ever be in the same place at the same time again?” Mary asked.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “If we ever are, I’ll walk quickly away, and you do the same. Will you promise me, Martin?”

  “I promise.”

  “It’s eight, and you’d better hurry,” she said.

  But neither of them moved.

  “I’ll go down the stairs, Martin. I won’t look back. Wait two or three minutes until I’ve driven away.”

  “No. I’ll see you into your car.”

  “Please. I can’t just drive off with you standing there. Please. Help me.”

  “I want to go down together,” he insisted.

  In the instant before he put the light out and shut the door, she began to look like a stranger. She was wearing a skirt he had never seen before. It had grown chilly, and she had put a sweater over her shoulders, a complicated knit of the kind people receive as gifts. Yet, under the skirt and sweater was the flesh he knew so well, more dearly than any he had ever known, or ever would.

  And was he absolutely mad to be doing what he was doing, or was it the only way to keep from going mad?

  They went downstairs and out to where her car was parked. It seemed to him that they ought to be saying something. He wanted to say: Understand, we are the kind of people who cannot step on other people’s faces. He wanted to say: You see, the trouble with you and me is that neither of us has courage enough to preserve ourselves. For, isn’t that the first law of nature? Yes, but nature isn’t civilized, and we are, you and I. He wanted to say all those things, but he said none of them.

  He might have done so—or again, might not have—but just then a man came out of a house and went to his car, which was blocked by Mary’s.

  “Oh,” the man said, “you’re going? Looks like a fair day! I suppose you will soon be leaving, Colonel, now that the Jerries have given up?”

  “I suppose so, yes.”

  “It’s been a long war. It’ll seem strange here when all the Americans have left.”

  “I guess it will.” Would he ever go, the fool? Couldn’t he see he was in the way? But no, of course, he was waiting for Mary to move the car.

  “Well, if I could just back out,” the man said, politely enough.

  “Of course.”

  The man got into his car and started the motor. Mary got into hers. She placed her hands on the wheel, then looked up at Martin.

  “Are you all right?” he asked. “Can you drive all right?”

  She nodded. He wanted to say—God knows, what he wanted to say. Oh, my dear, my love, forgive me, take care of yourself. And he said nothing.

  She put out her hand and touched his quickly. Her little car began to move. Then Martin turned, and rapidly, blindly, walked into the stunning glare of the risen light.

  Book Four

  VISIONS

  Chapter 22

  Over the northern shore of Japan’s lovely inland sea, in early morning the Enola Gay came winging toward Hiroshima. And in one fiery moment of warm summer, the war ended.

  In movie theaters across America, people sat with upturned faces, watching the mushroom cloud and the settling ashes of what had been Hiroshima, watching Tojo hand over his sword on the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay.

  When the show ended, they got up and went out into Times Square’s electric night, or else into Main Street’s shadowed night to walk home under rustling maples. For the moment, there was only rejoicing. Some years later would come recriminations and defense. Some years later, tourists would visit the museum in Hiroshima and stand in shocked and grieving silence before the pictures of the maimed. But for now, there was the business of living to be resumed.

  On laden ships, crowded in passageways, on bunks four tiers deep, the impatient men sailed homeward. Trains were jammed. And the stations which had, four years before, seen so many dreadful partings were witness to a million reunions of sons with parents, of husbands with girl-wives and children who had been babies when their fathers went away.

  Of course, there were some who were not being met at the station. These had already been informed, or had informed, that absence had changed things: that she had found another man in the factory or down on the street, or that he had found a girl overseas. For such as these, the end of the war was as much of a shock, or possibly more of a shock, than the start of it had been.

  But most came back home to the same wife and the same job at the gas station or the bank. And these, the wife and the job, might have been either balm to the heart or else a secret disappointment that the great adventure was over.

  Everyone joined the scramble for goods, for everyone needed everything and everything was in short supply. Ration books were torn up and thrown away. Gradually, the shops began to fill again with nylon stockings, sugar, lamb chops, shoes and chocolate bars. OPA was taken off and prices jumped, but since wages did too, no one objected.

  Pessimists like Tom Horvath, ever cautious, predicted a bust and a slide back down to the grim grind of the years before the war. It didn’t happen. There began instead a long procession of the most plentiful, lavish, dazzling years in all the history of America, indeed in the history of any land or empire on the planet, since histories have been written.

  Martin was propelled by events. He needed only to stand still and be swiftly moved as if on a conveyor belt, from that first moment of beholding Hazel’s radiance and hearing her glad shaking cry, then of catching the boy up in his arms, the cheerful little boy in whom Hazel’
s effort had kept alive the memory of Martin.

  He got down on the floor with Enoch. Three years before the child had played with blocks. Now he could read Dick and Jane and write the note tacked on the bedroom door: “Dear Dady. Well come home. Luv, Enoch.”

  Claire came, quieter now, less impetuous, wearing a feminine blue dress and a hairdo. He sat with her to talk about college. She was barely sixteen, but already the rush was on. Should it be Smith or Wellesley? Where were the better science programs? She wore glasses now. For some reason, they were becoming to her alert and mobile features, and he thought: She is going to be a rare woman.

  The telephone kept ringing welcome. Martin’s mother called, her old voice quavering with tears until Alice got on the line. Friends rang the doorbell. One evening the door was opened to Perry, still in Navy uniform, back from the Aleutians; a week later, Tom telephoned from California that he was on his way home.

  On the first Sunday they could borrow a car, Hazel and Martin went to visit the Horvaths. Tom had gone quite gray. The men hugged each other, hiding great gulps of emotion, then sat down to eat one of Flo’s enormous dinners and studiously didn’t talk at all about the war. That would come later.

  “You’ve still got your appetite,” Flo observed.

  And Martin answered that, yes, there hadn’t been much good eating in England these last years, and the English had never been first-rate cooks, anyway. So he filled himself, while Hazel watched, not able to take her eyes away, and he was grateful that she was still so sweetly pretty, with so much joy in her face, and hadn’t grown older and fat as Flo had.

  He was grateful, too, for Enoch, who demanded his attention and made, he admitted to himself, a kind of natural barrier or buffer between himself and Hazel’s intensity. If she noticed at all that the child was in the way, she did not appear to. So Enoch averted many moments which for Martin would have been sorely strained.

  He was in a hurry to be busy again. Work would be his salvation. And his head whirled with the speed of reentry to the former life.

  His old civilian clothes still fitted, but felt foreign, and the first day in the hospital was queer, too, walking in and wondering whether he’d attract too much attention, or perhaps none at all.

  On a bronze plaque in the lobby, he found his name on a long list of names, some of which bore stars. The stars gave him a thundering shock, recalling the faces that went with them, faces that would never be seen in this building again, while he could walk in, hale and straight, to be greeted like a hero.

  For, indeed, they remembered him. Nurses came crowding up; the old ones, those over sixty, kissed him. Doctors came to shake his hand. Even Eastman was cordial.

  “I read your article in the Archives. Extraordinary case! You must have seen more in your three years over there than we see here in ten.”

  “More than I ever want to see again. Not that kind, anyway,” Martin told him.

  The first thing you had to do was to open an office. Space was almost impossible to find. One consulted newspapers and agents; one canvased every possible doctor for news of space to sublet. In desperation at last, he agreed to share with an obstetrician of acquaintance, also back from the service, who hadn’t yet found a place. It would have been an unwieldy arrangement for both of them. At the last minute the other man found something, and to Martin’s great relief, he was left with an ample office all to himself on the fine East Side street.

  Painters had to be found, at a time when it seemed that everybody in the city must be calling for one. There were furnishings to buy. Hazel wanted to help, but Martin told her mildly that, while the house was hers, the office was his. Here he would spend the larger portion of his days, and he knew what he needed: simple Danish chairs and desks. And on the walls, a series of fine photographs, views of the city done in sepia: a liner coming through the Narrows, an old man feeding pigeons on the Mall, rain on Fifth Avenue in late afernoon with the lights coming on.

  He had been prepared to borrow from a bank the considerable money needed to get started again. But when Hazel, with simple pride, showed him the savings book in which his allotment checks were methodically recorded, and he saw that there was more than enough to pay the bills, he was much moved.

  “ ‘She looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness.’ ”

  Hazel’s admiring comment, “You do know the Bible backward and forward, don’t you?” embarrassed him. But she was right about it all the same. He was his father’s son.

  They needed a new apartment. The old one had been cramped to begin with, and now, in the rear, a building was being put up which would have so darkened Enoch’s room that he would have had to burn electric light even on the fairest day.

  “The new apartment must be sunny,” Martin insisted, which limited their choice even further in the limited market.

  Of course there had to be more rooms, for without doubt, they would soon be having another child. Not a day went by without mention of it from Hazel. Martin had no real objection, although surely no desire, either. He had Claire and Enoch; they were enough for him. But Hazel’s position was very different.

  As with their first home, she had free reign. He had little time anyway to spend in the rose-colored living room with its flowered, middle-European embellishments. She liked it, and he was pleased with her liking it. Only his study was to remain as it had always been, a refuge for books and music and plants. For a moment he considered the possibility of hanging Mary’s Three Red Birds above the bookshelves. But then he realized it would be an affliction to him every day, like a hairshirt, and wrapping it up again in brown paper, he laid it away at the top of a closet behind a row of old medical texts.

  He began to fit back into the routines of home: the sounds of a little boy roller-skating down the hall; Claire’s dropping in one or two afternoons a week after school; Hazel’s resumption of her comfortable life among women, with classes in needlework, P.T.A. and recording for the blind.

  “It’s almost as if you hadn’t been away, isn’t it?” she remarked once during the third or fourth month. “I used to be afraid we’d never make up for our lost time, but it’s not been like that at all.”

  It seemed to Martin that her thankfulness was an aureole about her head. She glowed with it And his thoughts would flee to that other woman—his thoughts, like some poor chained dog, that in a sudden rush of glad anticipation, forgetting the chain, jumps forward at full strength and is jerked fiercely back at the throat.

  In the fall Hazel knew she was pregnant. The following spring she gave birth to another boy, whom they named Peter after her grandfather. A good-tempered baby, resembling his brother, he gave promise of being, again like Enoch, a quiet little boy.

  Martin tried to remember what he had felt on the day Claire was born. He seemed to recall a first aching disappointment that she was a girl, and after that, a surge of absolute exaltation, totally unlike the tender, subdued pleasure he felt now. Again, the circumstances were not at all the same.

  They made plans to rent a house in Westchester for the summer, near the beach yet close enough to the city so that Martin could commute by train. On crowded days, he would stay alone in the apartment.

  So they were on their way, he in the hospital and the office, Hazel in the busy home, and both of them in a mild bustle of work and children and meals, of coming and going and living. Apparently, out of first confusion, order had quite rapidly been wrung.

  He treads the carpet softly, its rough pile prickling his bare soles. The old insomnia which has plagued him intermittently through life has come back. He steps into hazy, pink light: a lamp has been left burning in the hall, so that Enoch will not trip on his way to the bathroom during the night.

  He looks in at the boy who sleeps in a tumble of blankets and toy animals. Then he goes into the baby’s room. The infant has wedged himself crosswise in the crib, his head pressed up against the sides. Very carefully, the father readjusts his position, concerned for t
he pulsing fontanel in the tender skull, although he knows it is foolish of him. The baby is really not that fragile.

  Quietly he recrosses the hall to his study. He closes the door and turns on the record player. Perhaps music will help him tonight. It always has.

  The Cleveland Orchestra plays “Ein Heldenleben,” doing it better than either the Boston or the Philadelphia, he thinks. His listens carefully to the solo violin, and with pleasure, recognizes the recurrence of the theme from Don Quixote.

  When the music stops, he starts to reach for Don Quixote. It is consistent to stay with one composer, and consistency is part of his compulsive nature. How well he knows himself! But he pulls his hand back and turns the player off. It is no use. For the first time, music has failed him.

  He looks at the desk clock. It is past dawn in England. He starts to switch the lamp off, but again halts his arm in midair, remembering suddenly a strange thing that had happened in the drugstore that afternoon, where a woman was buying perfume.

  “La Fougeraie au Crépuscule,” she had said, mispronouncing the words, and had asked the clerk what it meant.

  “Don’t know,” the clerk had replied with a shrug.

  Martin had answered, not intending to; the words just issued from his mouth, “Fernery at twilight.”

  “Oh,” the woman had said, surprised that he should know.

  “It’s the only perfume I remember,” he had added awkwardly, most foolishly, as if the woman had asked or would care what he remembered.

  It is cold in the apartment now, and he goes back to bed. He hopes Hazel will not wake up. If she does, he will have to take her in his arms, for although she keeps saying everything is quite normal again, it is plain she still needs reassurance that they are as they always were.

  He draws the quilt up over his shaking shoulders. The baby cries out, but it is only a startle, and is not repeated. He is just five months old, and Hazel is pregnant again.