Corporation Wife

by Catherine Gaskin

  For four weeks since the Laboratories had started to function Tom had lived in the motel, going back to the apartment in New York on week-ends. He detested being separated from Sally, but since they had to start payments on the house and the new furniture, they had neither been able to afford to lose her four weeks’ salary, or what it would have cost to have her stay in the motel with him. He had tried not to think too much about Sally in these weeks, because the thought of her distracted and disturbed him; but now she was close beside him, and she was staying the whole night with him, and he could let himself feast on the sight of her, the long, lovely legs slung carelessly over the side of the armchair, the skirt hitched up past the knees, the blouse pulled tightly across her full, provocative breasts. Sally’s face was not beautiful, but she had a joyful, yet sensuous grace in her perfect body that endlessly fascinated him. It was an outworn, standing joke with him that she could have made the chorus line at the Latin Quarter at any time she had wanted to quit Columbia. They had been married only a few months after she had graduated with honours in English Lit. Tom was very proud of Sally.

  A teasing smile started slowly on her lips. ‘Well ‒ I like that! “What have you been doing all week?” Let me tell you, Tom Redmond … I quit my job last Friday, my husband was home all week-end, and was no help at all ‒ and ever since then I’ve been packing books, and wrapping things up in newspaper ready for the boxes, and then not being able to remember what’s inside.’ She extended her arms in a long stretch which made him want to go over to her. ‘It was like leaving off work to carry bricks.’

  ‘Sal ‒ has it been rotten for you? I should have come down …’

  ‘Fool! As if I can’t wrap a few plates without breaking up.’ She smiled fully at him. ‘I’ll tell you what I did do, though. Before I wrapped the plates I decided to ask Marge and Dick over for supper, and then Pat came, and she brought that artist boy-friend of hers, Sam ‒ you remember him, don’t you? We stuffed ourselves on spaghetti, and we had two bottles of wine, and they felt sorry for me because that would be my last non-Company party, and I told them I was sorry for them because they weren’t moving to Burnham Falls.’

  He was suddenly contrite, as he looked at her gay, laughing face. ‘Sal, you’re sure you don’t mind ‒ this place ‒ well, it’s all right, but there won’t be Marge and Pat, and all the rest of them.’

  ‘And do Marge and Pat and whoever the rest of them are make up a life? … There are always people, Tom ‒ plenty of people. That’s one of my problems. I’ve always got too many people in my life. I want more time for you … just quiet time with you. And I want some time to myself to get on with the novel. What better place than Burnham Falls for that?’

  He looked down at his drink, savouring the pleasure that her words had given him. Sally was so popular ‒ he still remembered the crowd that had always followed her at Columbia, perhaps drawn, as he was, by her warmth and friendliness, by her joy in whatever came her way. It made him feel exclusive and special that she wanted to spend time alone with him. And yet he felt guilty about it, as if he were depriving others of what was rare and precious.

  ‘You think you’ll be able to write here, Sal? … I mean, it won’t be too dull?’

  ‘Of course not! It’s exactly what I need. I need to stop talking for a while, and start thinking.’

  She continued slowly, frowning a little. ‘You know, Tom, I’m learning a lot about the physical side of writing that I didn’t know before. This week has been the first time that I’ve had whole days in which to do nothing but write … and when there’s no deadline pressing on you, it’s the hardest thing in the world to keep yourself sitting at the typewriter. You just look around the room and you can see a thousand other things that need doing. I guess I’ll just have to face up to the fact that writing a book is a lot more than just making notes on it.’

  ‘You will, Sal,’ he said. ‘You’ve got a lot of guts.’

  She shrugged. ‘Perhaps I’ve only got the guts and the will-power for the short things ‒ the things that show results quickly. I’ve always been Sally-who-gets-things-done … but quickly. This could take me years, Tom ‒ and I’ve only just started to realise it. It frightens me a bit.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be worth doing if it didn’t frighten you.’

  She put down her glass, stood up and came towards him. It was a slow, tentative movement, and she sought for words. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘there are times now when I can’t remember or imagine what it was like before I had you, and times when I think that I don’t deserve what I’ve got …’

  ‘Hush, Sal … hush!’

  She knelt beside the bed, and put her head in his lap; at once his hand reached out and began to caress the dark curling hair. Her voice was muffled when she spoke again.

  ‘Darling, there’s so much and I don’t know how to say it. I love you, and we’re going to have wonderful, beautiful children together … and there’s that gorgeous new house waiting for us. You’re ambitious, and I know that what you achieve is as much for me as for yourself. And still you’re generous enough to want me to write because it’s what I want. Dear God … I don’t know how to say thank you.’

  His caressing motion grew stronger, rougher. ‘Sal, you know you’re talking nonsense? Writing or not, I want a happy woman with me. You’ll do whatever you think you have to do.’

  ‘I want to do what’s right for you,’ she cried. ‘I mean … in everything. If the book gets in the way ‒ if it gets between you and me, or something you want, then there’ll be no book. I promise you that nothing is more important than you, Tom.’

  Looking down he saw that her eyes were filled with tears.

  ‘Sal, you’re a crazy thing.’ He went over. ‘Come here … come here.’

  Within his arms he could feel her shaking a little, but when he kissed her, the shaking was stilled. Then he could feel the voluptuous splendour of her body as it moved against his. The response to each other was instantaneous ‒ it had always been that way, right from the beginning. Without hesitation, and without clumsy speed he reached for the zipper at the back of her dress.

  She lay very still, in the deeper stillness of the room, and listened to the far-away swish of automobiles passing on the road outside. As the headlights swept the front of the motel, a repeated pattern of light fell across the Venetian blinds. The early spring dusk had come, and had strengthened to darkness. She had no idea how long she had slept ‒ it could have been minutes or hours. Beside her, Tom was also still, his breathing heavy and regular. As they had slept, their naked bodies had stayed close to each other, as if, even with their passion exhausted and consummated, they still could not bear the wrench of a physical parting. They lay so close, their bodies curled into each other with the grace and ease of animals, that there was room to spare in the bed. Sally pulled the blanket a little closer about Tom’s shoulder, her eyes wide open in the friendly darkness; she savoured the sound of his breathing, the sense of peace and love and confidence. She felt that she should pray, or do something like it, because there had to be some way, some positive action, by which she could express this happiness.

  She knew only the habit she had been taught all her life … ‘Holy Mother ‒ thank you.’ Whenever there had been joy or grief in the Brennan family, they had always prayed together, her father mostly out of respect for her mother’s piety, the children because they did as they were told. She remembered all the events of the family history that had been marked off by those rosaries ‒ the wedding anniversaries, the First Communion, the graduations. Sally also remembered the time her father had refused to pray with her, or to talk to her. That had been the time when Johnny Ryan had asked her to marry him, and she had said no. Her mother had come into her room and said quietly, ‘We’ll just kneel and say a few decades, Sal … you must give your father time to get over his anger. He had his heart set on it you know.’

  She did know, and she wondered sometimes how she had had the courage to turn down Johnny
, how she had been so very sure, even then, that there had to be someone like Tom for her, that there had to be more than the admiration and liking Johnny Ryan could attract from almost everyone he knew. Of course Mike had had his heart set on it; the marriage would have made him proud, would have been firmly along the lines of the tradition of the Irish in America. This was something her father cherished even more than the material benefits the marriage of his daughter to Johnny Ryan would have brought.

  Mike had lived all his life under the influence of his older brother, Oliver, who had received a prison term, and almost a death sentence for his part in the Easter Rising of 1916. This gave him a special, honoured place in the eyes of his countrymen, and in Mike he inspired awe and profound respect. When he was released from prison he published the verses, written in the Gaelic, he had composed there. Then he became for Mike the embodiment of the shining, romantic qualities of the soldier-poet, a boy’s hero who was appropriately worshipped. Oliver stayed behind when his parents and Mike emigrated to America. He stayed behind and spent his life in service to the Government of De Valera, and to the hope of the reunification of Ireland. For a time he had been Minister without portfolio, had been a prime mover in the drive to get tourist trade to Ireland, and he had continued to write and publish poetry. Two volumes of his poems had been translated and published in New York. It was the idealised image of his brother which Mike had striven to live up to all his life, an image which had also, in a sense, shaped the lives of Mike’s children.

  The Brennans had settled in Brooklyn, and Mike had been apprenticed to the printing trade. His unfulfilled need to follow Oliver’s example had led him naturally towards the Democratic Party, and his trade had been useful to them. He not only printed for them, but gradually learned the whole business of party propaganda, and since the Democratic sweep of the thirties he had held full-time jobs for the Party. He knew he was a faithful, but only a small cog in the wheel; but it was the best he could do for Oliver. His greatest pride was still in his brother’s achievements.

  If Sally had married Johnny Ryan the marriage would have been something Mike could have offered to Oliver. Johnny’s father was high in the list of City officials, a man who had made money before being invited into the administration and so could afford to play the political game with some dignity; Johnny himself was a famous quarter-back on the Notre-Dame team. In Mike’s eyes, there could have been no better marriage for Sally.

  The Brennans lived in a Brooklyn apartment that was too crowded by the six children that had been born to Eileen and Mike; they were a boisterous, talkative, sentimental family ‒ ambitious, and a little more hard-working than most of their neighbours. Four of the children went to college ‒ not glamorously or easily, but by scholarships, by working during the vacations, and by reason of the unnatural frugality Mike and Eileen practised.

  Mike had genuinely grieved when Sally had turned down Johnny Ryan, and he had looked with suspicious, unfavourable eyes on Tom Redmond. He had been hardly reconciled to the thought of Sally marrying Tom by the time of the wedding, the time that Tom’s people had come up from Houston, and the time that Oliver had made his first visit to the United States.

  Tom’s father was a judge of the Texas Supreme Court, a scholarly man whose Southern accent had been clipped only a little by his attendance at a Northern college.

  Beside Johnny Ryan, Tom seemed a nonentity ‒ his first-class honours in physics from Georgia Tech seemed pallid beside the fame of Johnny Ryan, his humble job in Amtec was nothing to what Johnny, propelled by his father, might attain … Congress, the Senate, the State Governorship. Tom had been recruited for Amtec straight off the campus of Georgia Tech, and had been doing post-graduate work, his course paid for by Amtec, at Columbia, when he had met Sally. The fact that Tom had already got his Ph.D. meant almost nothing to Mike.

  She knew afterwards that the memorable thing about her wedding for Mike had been Oliver’s presence at it. He was certainly enough to overshadow any bride. He was in New York on the first stage of a lecture tour through the States, and his business was to drum up publicity for the Irish tourist trade. He looked as an Irish poet and revolutionary hero should have looked ‒ tall and bony, with careless, beautiful tweeds; Sally privately considered him a superb showman, and she loved him because he understood within minutes how it was between her and Tom.

  Sally had moved into Tom’s apartment down in the village ‒ the one-room apartment that had a view of the Hudson. She had taken a job, with the New York Public Library, a temporary one because they already knew that in the spring Tom would be moved to Burnham Falls. Sometimes on Sundays Sally would go over to Brooklyn to meet her father and go with him to the midday Mass, and Tom would be waiting for them outside the church when it was over; they would walk back to the Brennan apartment for Sunday dinner. Seeing the happiness in Sally’s face, Mike came to give an unwilling kind of respect to Tom. When she talked of writing, he listened approvingly, thinking of Oliver; Tom’s pride in Sally was obvious.

  In the kitchen, her mother, basting the roast, said thoughtfully to Sally, ‘You’ve got the right man, Sal. There can’t be two peacocks in the one family ‒ and he’ll let you strut and show off to your heart’s content.’

  Sally protested. ‘I don’t want to show off ‒ I want to write!’

  Eileen gave her a long look. ‘And what else is writing, may I ask?’

  In the darkness of the motel room, Sally heard those words again, and her arms tightened a little about Tom. She had got the right man ‒ sane, and wise and calm. She felt a small, loving world of security close about her, and she lay and thought about the empty house that stood waiting for them.

  Seven

  On Main Street the darkness of the spring evening was cold. The budding elms thrust gaunt branches towards a cold, brilliant sky. The warmth of the day had gone completely with the sun. The street was almost deserted; those who lingered there looked as if they had no particular reason for hurrying home. It was the dinner hour, close to seven o’clock; most of the stores were closed, the single lights in their windows seemed blank and stark. The wind whipped in coldly from the lake.

  Behind the cosmetic counter of Carter’s drug store, Jeannie Talbot shifted from one foot to the other, her eyes on the wall clock with the ancient spotted face that was so incongruous beside all the recently installed modern fittings. Then she turned aside, picked up her duster, and once more wiped over the already spotless surface of the counter. She looked with pride at the display of bottles and jars, tinted the delicate pastel shades that were the trade marks of the manufacturers, at the gleaming gold lipstick cases and compacts. She enjoyed the world of fantasy that surrounded cosmetics, which was probably why she was an able saleswoman of them. Every afternoon she came here from school to preside over this counter during the busy hours, to make patient, helpful suggestions while her own classmates took an agonising length of time to choose a shade of lipstick, or, when an older woman was her customer, to slip into the sales talk she had memorised from the advertisements. She had learned tact and persuasion; when she held a jar of cream in her hand and told them what it promised, they looked at her own glowing, youthful skin and they believed her. On her advice Wally Carter had even taken to stocking two of the more expensive brands, and they were now selling at least as well as the others. Jeannie had reminded him that with the new families coming into Amtec Park he had got to start thinking about a different class of customer, and that he’d better make up his mind to stock a few of the famous makes of perfume. Wally grumbled, but he did what she said.

  Jeannie now laid aside the duster; she had five minutes still to go. She made one last notation in her order book, and closed it with a little snap. Technically it was Wally who still gave the actual orders to the salesmen, but a number of them were now calling in the hours Jeannie was in the store whenever they had a new product to introduce; she liked the small sense of importance this gave her.

  When the clock pointed to seve
n, Jeannie went in past the dispensing rooms, to the room at the back. She took her coat and scarf off the hanger and put them on. ‘Good night, Mr. Carter,’ she said as she passed the dispensing bench again.

  ‘Good night, Jeannie. Take care …’

  There was only one customer in the store ‒ a man she had never seen ‒ sitting at the soda counter sipping his coffee as if he didn’t want to go out again into the cold. She nodded a good night to Benny, the counter man.

  ‘’Night, Jeannie.’ He paused a second in refilling the coffee urn to watch her go.

  Outside, she instinctively pulled her coat closer against the cold. As she stepped out into the street, Jerry Keston turned from the display of men’s clothing he had been studying in the next-door window.

  ‘Hi, Jeannie.’

  ‘Hi.’ They fell into step together naturally. ‘Why didn’t you come inside? It’s cold out here.’

  He shrugged and grinned. ‘What would I do? Buy a lipstick?’

  Two or three times a week she found him waiting outside Carter’s when she was finished. They always walked together back to her house near the shellac plant. They were in the same class at the Burnham Falls High School, and would be graduating together in June.

  To-night they walked for some way in companionable silence, halting at the traffic light, listening to the crash of gears as Abel Morris’s jeep changed down on the hill. They were opposite the dignified, two-storey building of the First National Bank as they crossed.

  ‘Dad must have gone home,’ Jerry said. ‘His light was on when I passed.’

  Jeannie glanced back at the unlighted bank windows. ‘I wonder what it feels like to be alone in the bank ‒ shut up with all that money. Kind of scary, I’d think.’