Corporation Wife

by Catherine Gaskin

  He came forward and kissed her without hesitation, a warm kiss that gave her a badge of belonging to him before all these people. ‘My God, Harriet, you look wonderful ‒ you look shining, and young ‒ and beautiful. I’m going to have to take you away from all these guys who’d kick my teeth in for the chance of talking to you.’

  Later in New York they danced in a place where the bill was outrageous, and the champagne and food was poor. To Harriet it was better than she had ever tasted.

  ‘Harriet, I should be asking you if you’ll sleep with me ‒ and all I can think of saying is “Can you marry me in a week’s time? Or sooner?” The course is almost over, and we’ll be pulling out.’

  She would have gone to bed with him, but he seemed to have forgotten that he had asked her to, because he was talking too much about their getting married.

  They were married one week later at the Carpenter house ‒ with the big bare rooms hastily cleared of the Red Cross activities. Joe was torn between pleasure that Harriet was marrying exactly the kind of person he wanted her to marry, and disappointment that she was marrying at all ‒ and putting aside Vassar. Steve’s father, a gentle scholarly lawyer ‒ a widower ‒ came down from New England; he looked like Steve, and Harriet felt it would be easy to love him. The rooms were thronged with Army personnel from Kempton; Harriet found out, and was rather surprised by the knowledge, that in spite of his contempt for the Army, Steve was popular with his fellow trainees. He was a second lieutenant, and graduated near the bottom of his class. It was the first time Harriet learned that with Steve, what he did not like barely existed for him.

  They had a one-night honeymoon in New York, during which Harriet discovered that Steve was passionate and tender by turns, and that she had no need of her vague fears because she responded to him as if the act of love with him was something for which she had been waiting all her life. He had a way of making her feel young and yet mature; that her body was beautiful and desirable, and still a familiar, beloved thing. As she lay naked drinking her coffee in bed the next morning, with Steve smoking beside her, she felt confident and successful. She laughed suddenly, with happiness and pride.

  Steve was sent with his unit to Camp Roberts in California. Here he waited ‘doing nothing’, he wrote Harriet, for a month, and then was posted to the Signal Corps, and sent to work on an experimental project at U.C.L.A. ‘The work is strictly security,’ his letter ran, ‘but I can tell you that the campus of the University of California at Los Angeles is huge and sprawling, like all this city. You should see it.’

  Joe was aghast when Harriet began to plan to go to Los Angeles. ‘You don’t know what it’s like! There’s a housing shortage, no one can get an apartment in L.A. with all the factories on full shifts. You’ll be miserable out there, and probably stuck in some hole twenty miles from U.C.L.A. Can’t you wait here?’ he pleaded. ‘Will it do Steve any good to see you lonely and uncomfortable out there? …’

  ‘That’s just the point,’ she said. ‘I’m married to Steve, and I want to stay married to him. I want to go to bed with him, and I want to be on the spot so that he won’t go to bed with anyone else. This is my personal bit of the war … and it won’t surprise Steve a bit when I go out to him. I think he has a right to expect it. I have to let him know that I mean to hold on to him. The only way I can tell him that is to show that I don’t mind living in a hole twenty miles away from U.C.LA.’

  And so she had gone, and she had known from Steve immediately that she had been right to go. His face wore that tight look ‒ the look of boredom and frustration that had been on it the first time she had seen him.

  He had managed to get her a reservation in a run-down hotel, and he lay in her arms thankfully, relaxing at last.

  ‘Oh, God, it’s good to have you back, Harriet. They’ve done exactly what I thought they would ‒ and I’m stuck! Maybe you can save my reason while I sit this out …’

  He had gone to work under the vague name of Chemical Warfare, and he could not talk about what the project was. ‘The application is impossibly remote,’ he said, ‘and I doubt that anyone will ever use one particle of what we’re doing. We’re working along with civilians … but at least they can go home every night. There are only six of us there, and none of us has any talent for the attractive notice of the brass. They will probably discover us in the files several years after the war is over.’

  He was billeted in temporary Army barracks on the campus, and he had been promoted to first lieutenant.

  Harriet took a job on the assembly line at Lockheed Aircraft, and rented a room in the house of a woman who worked close to her on the line. Her name was Mary Edwardes and her husband worked the midnight shift at Lockheed. They were making a lot of money out of the war. They sold Harriet their second car because the gas rationing had grown tight. She applied for her own ration card, and the car meant freedom for herself and Steve from the stifling, hot little bedroom, and the aimless walking on the campus at U.C.L.A. Steve was free at nights, and a part of each week-end. It would have been good if they had not lived with the knowledge that they had a long time to wait ‒ and that any day they might wake up and find that Steve was ‘on orders’ overseas. So they lived each day with the knowledge that they were the lucky ones ‒ fantastically lucky. They didn’t dare to talk about their luck, in case it should vanish.

  After four months the lab group was joined by a research group. The new unit was under the command of Mal Hamilton. He held the rank of major.

  Harriet told Steve all that she knew about Mal ‒ except what had happened the night Josh had left. Steve seemed suddenly to have come to life in the few days he had been working with the unit.

  ‘The man’s a genius, Harriet! … Or else he just has sheer ability to spot where people are going off wrong. This project’s a big thing. I don’t suppose we’ll ever be told the whole implication of it, but our part is quite big enough.’ He stretched luxuriously. ‘It feels good to be doing something that counts, instead of sitting on my backside, and sulking over a no-account little job … Makes me feel better about the guys that are taking it for me out there …’

  Harriet gripped him suddenly. ‘You don’t want to go, Steve? You’re not going to apply for overseas duty? …’

  ‘I’m not a hero, Harriet. I go when they send me, not before.’ Then he smiled. ‘Besides … who in his right mind would want to leave behind a creature like you?’ Then he caught her shoulder, and pulled her towards him on the bed.

  Harriet was frightened by the idea of contacting Mal, but the decision was made by Mal himself, who called her at the Edwardes house.

  ‘Why have you been hiding yourself?’ he said, and she thought that his voice sounded more relaxed and good-humoured than she remembered it. ‘Steve has only just gotten around to telling me. Have you turned stuffy, Harriet?’

  She laughed. ‘Well, Steve is a lieutenant, remember … and you’re his C.O. How was he to know that you ever remembered Harriet Carpenter from Burnham Falls?’

  His tone changed a little. ‘Listen, Harriet ‒ I usually pay quite a lot of attention to what Lieutenant Dexter says, and I count myself lucky to have him here in the unit. You don’t pick up M.I.T. graduates on the street, and this is a brilliant guy.’

  ‘That makes two of you,’ Harriet said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Never mind. I was just mumbling.’

  ‘Well ‒ all right. We’ll all meet for dinner, shall we? That’s settled!’ He hung up briskly.

  She waited alone for Steve and Mal in a bar on Wilshire. It was dark, and she couldn’t see Mal very well, but his manner told her that a great deal had happened to him in eighteen months apart from the gold leaf on his shoulder tab. He still had that thin, almost gaunt appearance but it went well with his uniform. He raised his glass to Harriet gravely. ‘I’m glad you got married, Harriet ‒ and that you’re here. I was afraid Burnham Falls might take hold by the hair, and not let you go.’

  ‘The war does a lot
of things, Mal …’

  He shrugged. ‘To all of us. I was dating a girl who lived in San Francisco when war broke out. We got married on December eight, before I joined up.’

  Harriet’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Married? ‒ Where is she now?’

  ‘San Francisco. We’re separated ‒ we’re getting a divorce.’

  ‘Oh … I’m sorry.’

  He took a sip of the martini. ‘There was hardly time for it to be a tragedy ‒ we were only together seven months. We just mistook the excitement of war for something of lasting excitement about each other.’

  He fumbled in his wallet and produced a snapshot. Harriet bent to examine it beside the shaded table-lamp. She saw a beautiful girl, tall, with black hair whipped by the wind. ‘Mal! … She’s absolutely lovely!’

  He nodded. ‘That’s what I thought.’

  Steve moved close to Harriet to look at the snapshot. ‘She sure is! … This her car?’

  Mal made a slight motion with his hand. ‘I was crazy enough about her to give her a foreign sports job for a wedding present. She liked to drive very fast, and I thought that all beautiful women should have cars like that. It was the first time in my life I’d ever earned a decent salary, and I gave it all to her. She had the car about six weeks ‒ smashed it up on the Coast Highway, and nearly killed herself.’

  Harriet said nothing. She was grateful that the dimness of the bar hid her expression somewhat. Vaguely she had begun to comprehend what the change was in Mal, what only eighteen months had done to him. She sensed that with leaving Burnham Falls, with selling the house and putting away every association with the town, he had suddenly opened up to live the kind of life he had denied himself through all the years of school and college and the years after. With money in his pocket, for the first time he had been free of the necessity to hoard it. He had gone out to grab at life, to buy what he had only been able to look at before. Up till then he had closed his mind to people and emotions, and he was unskilled in judging them. The strange friendship between herself and Mal that summer had been the beginning of relaxation in him, of giving way at last to his wants and desires. From that friendship with a schoolgirl he had gone seeking something fuller, overeager now that the bonds of austerity and discipline had gone. He had found a beautiful girl and married her, and had given her a car as a silly plaything, because for him it was a symbol of what had been unattainable, and what he could now suddenly afford to buy and to give away. She looked closely at Mal, and she could sense no bitterness in him, or in his words. He had accepted what happened as a bad bargain, shrugged his shoulders, and walked away. But he had not closed up again. He was open and expectant in a way he had never been in Burnham Falls. His face, no longer so tight and concentrated, was much more attractive than it had been. He looked as if his problems no longer rode about on his shoulders.

  He raised his glass. ‘So that’s my small history ‒ too bad it didn’t turn out like yours, but I’m not grieving. Drink up, Harriet ‒ Steve ‒ we have a lot of time to make up.’

  The months went by, and a year was gone, and Harriet began to think that perhaps the war would pass over Steve and even pass over Josh, who had survived in the Pacific so long, and, now that the defeats were being wiped out, would surely live through until the end came. She never thought of it as victory, because she knew there would be no triumph in her when it was finished, only a deep thankfulness if Steve and Josh were still alive. In this thought she also included Mal.

  Because their research unit was small, it had been possible for a friendship to grow between Steve and Mal in spite of their difference in rank. The men in the unit talked to one another as scientists, not as soldiers, and since none of them were regulars, there was no one to uphold, or even remember, the formalities of rank. Neither Steve nor Mal ever spoke of their work, even when, as it sometimes happened, there was a rush to get through some phase, and they worked at the lab round the clock, and Harriet would see neither of them, except for a quick meal, for three or four weeks. Then at other times the work load was lighter, and there would be a whole week-end free; they would pool their gas ration and drive into the desert, looking at the mountains, snow-capped and remote, and feeling the rough, dry wind on their faces. In these moments when Steve was away from the lab, and momentarily putting aside the problems waiting for an answer, he would begin to talk about after the war. He wanted to stay in California.

  ‘What do you think?’ he asked Mal. They sat over beers in Palm Springs. ‘I’ve got a few ideas in plastics I’d like to develop, and I think I could attract some capital into them. This is a pretty good place to start, isn’t it?’

  Mal shrugged. ‘The best place will always be where you prove those ideas. When you prove them, there’ll be plenty of people with money to invest.’

  ‘Well … what are you going to do?’

  ‘Take a job for a few years and save some money. Then I think I’ll go out on my own. There ought to be enough people with problems who’ll hire me without having to pay me a salary.’

  ‘You and I might …’ Steve’s voice trailed off. He looked down at his beer quickly.

  ‘Might get together?’ Mal finished. ‘We might do that, Steve. It could be worth a good try…’

  They said no more about it, but it was there, at the back of their minds whenever anyone mentioned the future. But mostly no one talked about the future.

  During that year Mal had two promotions and became a full colonel. Steve moved up to the rank of captain. Joe wrote about the boom of business at the factory, still working at full capacity on war contracts, and he told them the news from Burnham Falls.

  Then Josh wrote that he was engaged to an Australian Army nurse. The snapshot he sent showed a sweet-faced girl with delicate features, and pale hair. Harriet wondered how Burnham Falls would look in the eyes of an Australian; she smiled to herself when she thought that it was just possible that this Army nurse would be the first Australian ever to come to Burnham Falls.

  Then after Christmas 1944 the Allied Armies started the break-through that led right into Germany. By May the war was over in Europe, and Harriet began to feel frightened. All the attention now focussed on the Pacific, and the outcome of the war there was inevitable; but Josh had had more than three years of fighting, and she wondered if he could last the time. Along with that, from Mal’s frequent trips to Washington, and to another place he didn’t name, she sensed that the work in the lab was reaching some kind of conclusion. Before Japan could be beaten there still seemed plenty of time for Steve to be sent overseas, and to be killed.

  It happened as she imagined it might; Steve got his orders and was gone within twenty-four hours. It was A.P.O. San Francisco. Mal took her to dinner the night after he left, and tried to reassure her.

  ‘I’m sorry, Harriet ‒ I was told to send a man for a particular purpose, and Steve was the obvious one. I can’t talk about it ‒ you know that. But I can tell you he isn’t going to be involved in fighting. That’s all I can say. For you, it’s a matter of waiting.’

  She nodded to him, dumbly and gratefully, gathering up that precious crumb of comfort. She believed him, and was thankful for his presence, and his calmness. When he drove her home afterwards, she sat with her hands folded in her lap, silently, remembering how Mal had driven her back to the lodge that night when she had walked to his house; to-night was a little like that time. She felt complete trust in Mal; Steve was going to be all right. It was, after all, only a matter of waiting, and the waiting would be over soon. A feeling of peace descended on her.

  Having settled the matter of Steve’s return, and living contentedly with the thought, the telegram was a worse shock than it might have been. The military transport plane carrying Steve had run into enemy fighters and had been shot down, and no survivors had been located. The telegram was waiting for her at the Edwardes house when she got back from Lockheed, and so was Mal. It was he who told her before she ripped the envelope open.

  He held her for hours
afterwards like a child, until at last the pills he gave her took effect, and she could sleep. And it was he who telephoned Joe in Burnham Falls, and Steve’s father.

  The next months were a time of grieving, cold, and steady and unrelieved, a time of frightening loneliness, a corroding time when Harriet felt as if some inner part of her were being rubbed and worn away until her sensibilities were thin and quivering. She had loved Steve ‒ yes, but what she had accepted before, and taken for granted, she now wanted back with a desperate hunger. With Steve’s love she had become a woman, and as a woman she needed him with her. It seemed impossible to her that she must grow reconciled to the fact that the waiting time was now endless. She wanted love, but she was not prepared to admit that her lover could not be Steve.

  Mal was a part of those months, though distant and shadowy because her thoughts were not with him, nor was she noticing him very much. But it seemed that always when she had reached a point when exhaustion and sleeplessness had made her numb and uncaring, Mal would appear at the Edwardes house, and take her out to dinner, driving perhaps in the Hollywood hills, or to Malibu. He ignored her disinterest and silence, talking about nothing in particular, forcing her to make some replies to his questions. He ordered martinis for her until the hard knot in her stomach eased a little, until her words came more quickly and did not have to be dragged from her. Sometimes she was aware that she was on the verge of drunkenness, but it, in its turn, brought her a deadening kind of sleep, and she was grateful. He never took her to the officers’ mess, or mentioned the work in the lab. Without fully realising it, she started to count on him to be with her. One day three months after the telegram, she found herself telephoning him to see if he could get away from the lab early enough to go to the beach at Santa Monica. It had been the first voluntary motion she had made towards living in that time.