She turned to him fiercely. ‘You don’t suppose I don’t think about getting married? I never wanted anything so much in my whole life as to marry you, Jerry. But when we get married ‒ if we get married ‒ I want this town to think that you’re as lucky to get me as I am to get you.’
‘I don’t know …’
‘Wait,’ she said. ‘Let me finish! There’s a lot of things you don’t know ‒ you and this town. That new plant’s going to mean another five or six hundred families moving in … and all the activity that’s going to bring. By the time you’ve finished college, Jerry, this won’t be a sleepy little town any more … but almost no one’s recognised this. Look … my own father! He thought he could get along nicely with his beaten-up equipment and his old jeep, and that outfit from Elmbury walked in and took the business from under his nose. If he’d had any real guts, he’d have mortgaged everything and raised some money to give them a bit of competition. But that’s my dad ‒ and I don’t suppose I really want him to change. But it doesn’t mean I have to be exactly like him.’
‘Jeannie! What’s all this about?’
‘I’ve been doing pretty well at Carter’s ‒ and Wally’s raising my salary to get me to stay. Since the families moved into Amtec Park I’ve been selling much more of the expensive brands, and Wally knows if the women come to me to buy Elizabeth Arden, they’ll stop and buy their drugs from him. And I think this is just the beginning, Jerry … Burnham Falls isn’t only a summer town any more, and we’ve got to remember that. Perhaps if I do well there’s a possibility of branching out … maybe into a place of my own, to sell lingerie and sweaters, stockings, robes. There’s a lot of business in that kind of thing … simple, not too expensive. I’ll bet if I could save half the money, The First National would give me a loan on the rest. Your father would think it was good business, Jerry.’
He was silent. For more than three minutes he said nothing at all; he had turned away from her and was staring down the road towards the lake, which he couldn’t see. Some of her enthusiasm had fallen away from her in this time, and she seemed suddenly much more aware of her surroundings.
She slipped her bra back on her shoulders and hooked it, and pulled her blouse closed. The silence continued.
‘What’s the matter, Jerry? Do you think I’m crazy?’
‘No ‒ not crazy. Too darned smart, if anything. You’ll be a bustling career woman making this town sit up and take notice by the time I’ve finished college. And by the time I’ve done my stint in the Army, you’ll probably be running for Mayor. I just never figured you for that kind of girl at all.’
‘I’m not trying to bust into your world, Jerry. All I want to do is sell a few face creams and lipsticks. Is that so bad? Or would you rather I made it my ambition to get to be Mr. Ed Peters’ private secretary? What I’m trying to say is that there are plenty of simple, unspectacular ways to do well without ever going five miles outside Burnham Falls. There’s too much work to do right here ‒ and this town could be for you, if you’d see it that way. We need some honest men to help run things ‒ or else we can sit back and let Amtec run the whole show. After all, why don’t we? Just turn over the schools, the churches, the town hall. I’m sure they’d do the job well, and as honestly as most ‒ and it would be much less trouble for us. Only it wouldn’t be Burnham Falls any more, would it?
‘I mean,’ she continued quickly, ‘I mean, your father knows there’s a job to be done in more than banking. But maybe you think it’s more glamorous to be a teller in a Wall Street bank.’
‘How do you know what I think?’ he said sullenly. ‘You’ve hardly let me open my mouth!’
‘Well, then ‒ say it!’
‘I don’t know where to start ‒ or how!’ He turned to her in a half-pleading gesture. ‘I don’t know what’s come over you. I think you’re warm and sweet, and I want to kiss you … and I’ve been thinking that was what you wanted too. And then suddenly ‒ crash! I start getting a spiel like a Chamber of Commerce clerk. It doesn’t sound like you at all.’
‘What does it sound ‒ mean and greedy?’
He shrugged. ‘One of the things I like about your father, Jeannie, is that he’s so ‒ well, relaxed about life. He doesn’t let it fret him. I’ve always thought of you that way.’
‘Jerry, I love and respect my dad. And I don’t want him to be any different from the way he is. But if I feel like using my energies in a different way from his, is that so wrong?’ She attempted a short, shaky laugh. ‘I’m a big, healthy girl … and I can get around to lots of things as well as raising kids and reading cook books. I somehow think I can do them all, if I’m given the chance.’
‘And what am I supposed to do ‒ stand and cheer on the sidelines?’
Her voice grew curt. ‘If that’s the way you feel about it, we’d better not discuss it any further.’
‘You bet we won’t discuss it,’ he snapped. ‘But you’d better start to do some thinking. I’m asking you to marry me, and just leave me to handle my dad and all the rest of the details. Otherwise we can forget about the whole thing. If you think I’m going to stand around and watch while you turn into Miss Superwoman of Burnham Falls, you’re pretty much mistaken.’
‘Oh ‒ you’re just jealous, like all men, when a woman has an ounce of brains and chooses not to let them rot. I think you like lazy women ‒ they make you feel good!’
‘Perhaps I do! At least they’re women!’
Abruptly he leaned forward and jabbed the starter, and the car came to life. Then he filled and backed with sharp, aggressive movements slamming on the brakes at the last possible moment. Jeannie was thrown wildly against the door. She straightened in the seat, and gripped the edge of the window to steady herself. The big headlights of the car stabbed the darkness ahead; behind them was a cloud of dust. They bumped and jolted along the washed-out ruts of the dirt road, going too fast for the narrow twists and bends in it. Jeannie was troubled by the violence of Jerry’s anger ‒ he was usually so easy-going and amenable to what she said. If she had dared, she would have asked him to slow down ‒ she would have put her hand across and touched him, and he would have yielded. But she could not. The headlights reflected the crazy rhythm of the car, flashing to the sky, and down again as they hit the bumps, striking the dark mass of the woods as they rounded the bends.
With a last final lurch they emerged from the dirt road to the pavement. Jerry turned back towards Burnham Falls. With the good surface under him, he increased the speed. Jeannie clung more tightly, and her mouth went a little dry with fear. Jerry had never driven like this before ‒ she felt she knew nothing at all of the person who sat tensely at the wheel. It was as if she drove with a stranger. She crouched in the corner, small and lonely and afraid. They were coming to the spot where the road ran along the shore of the lake, the place where it dropped sharply to the rocks and water below. She saw the white guard rails suddenly race towards them with a sickening speed; she closed her eyes, and clamped her lips down tight to keep from screaming.
But there was no impact, and no sound of splintering wood. The even pace of the car continued, following the turns of the winding road. Some of normalcy returned to Jerry at last; gradually the speed fell off. At the junction of the Downside road and the highway, he stopped dead before turning. Jeannie opened her eyes again.
Four
Laura slammed the front door behind her with unnecessary force. She pulled off her hat with a gesture that was both impatient and irritable.
‘Gracie! … Gracie!’ She walked quickly through the entrance foyer to the bedroom wing of the house. Behind her she could hear the kitchen door swinging open and the quick steps of the maid. But Laura did not stop or look around; she continued straight on to her bedroom, where she dropped her handbag, gloves and hat on to a chair.
‘You called, Mrs. Peters?’
Laura didn’t look at her; she went into the dressing-room. Gracie automatically picked up the things she had left on the chair, and
followed her. Their eyes met for a second in the mirror before Gracie slid open a section of the wardrobe and began to put the things away.
‘Empty the handbag first!’ Laura said. She unzipped her dress and stepped out of it. Gracie picked it up and hung it in silence. As Laura pulled her slip over her head she said, ‘Mix me a martini, Gracie. Double … well chilled. And leave the ice and tray ready for Mr. Peters when he comes in.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’ Laura went into the bathroom and shut the door.
Inside she put both hands on the edge of the basin, and her head dropped forward limply; her eyes closed. Relax, she told herself … relax. The porcelain of the basin was cool beneath her hands. She reached forward and turned on the cold tap, and put her wrists under it. She soaked a cloth in cold water, and held it up to her temples and forehead. When at last she let herself look in the mirror, the tension creases between her eyebrows had loosened a trifle. ‘Careful ‒ careful,’ she whispered softly. ‘You’ll give yourself lines, and in a couple of years …’
She turned on the shower. The tepid water didn’t seem to refresh her. She would have liked to soak in the tub for twenty minutes, but there wasn’t time for that. She put her arms high above her head, and tried to stretch the tension out of her body, as she had been taught to, but now it didn’t seem to do very much for her ‒ not as in the old days when she had been working with Goodman, or rehearsing for The Leaven, and Larry had made her go through all her exercises faithfully so that she would relax before she slept. Perhaps the difference lay in the work she had been doing then and now ‒ the difference in being tired because Goodman worked her too hard, and because she had barely been able to control her boredom at a P.T.A. meeting.
She stepped out of the shower, and dried herself carefully, even in her haste still going through all the motions that were a part of the ritual ‒ massaging lotion into her legs, arms and shoulders, with an extra amount on the elbows and heels, dusting herself lavishly with powder. She resented this need for haste, and the fact that it was necessary to bathe and change here instead of in a hotel in New York before their dinner engagement. It was impossible to retain the look of untouched freshness she demanded of herself after a sixty-mile drive. But Ed had refused, rather shortly, to leave the Laboratories any earlier, and had pointedly reminded her of her own meeting that afternoon. So now she was rushed and nervous, irritated by the circumstances that seemed to conspire to make her appear not at her best. The careful examination she gave her reflection in the mirror that covered one wall of the bathroom was not narcissistic, but deeply critical ‒ the slightest sign of extra flesh or sagging muscle meant that she had to give a little longer each day to exercise, and to start leaving the butter off her breakfast toast. There were no signs ‒ not yet; but you had to keep watching, just as you kept watching for the lines between the eyebrows.
She left the towels on the floor, and went through into the dressing-room. From one of the drawers she took out a fine, lacy elastic foundation garment, that zipped up the front, and covered her from breast to thighs. It had been made especially for her, had cost $150, and she had five more in the drawer. They had been designed so that, on television, her gowns would fit without a wrinkle. She put on stockings, and slipped on light evening sandals, put her robe on, but did not fasten it. It was then she walked over to the dressing-table, and took the first sip of the martini Gracie had left on a silver tray.
The chill of the liquid had clouded the glass; she twisted the cool stem a little, and some spilled and trickled down over her fingers. She put them to her tongue and licked them; they tasted of the talcum. She quickly took another sip, a long one. She liked the raw, sharp taste against her tongue, and the way it burned in her throat. There wasn’t anything quite like a martini ‒ at first it repelled, sent a shudder through your whole body, then you felt the glow spread through you, the slight blurring of the edge of fatigue, a little click that abruptly lifted you from the mood that had been, into a state far more meaningful and sharp. It had a way of shifting the focus. She drank half of it almost in a gulp.
Now she sat idly and thought ‒ when she didn’t have time for thought. She thought of the day past, but by now some of the irritation had gone … and the evening before her seemed as it ought to be, as it had always been before Burnham Falls. She shrugged, and tried to put aside what she had done that day, because it had nothing to do with the evening. She had no intention of walking into the Oak Room to meet Phil Conrad trailing the aura of a suburban housewife. Let him think that she spent her days reading Proust and O’Neill, and that she had never heard of the P.T.A.
The day had begun when she had looked up from the newspaper at the breakfast table and seen Selma Talbot getting out of her husband’s jeep at the side gate down on the road. The woman walked up the path to the side door, wearing her washed-out cotton dress; she was big-breasted and full-hipped, and her face had the worn look of a woman for whom life has not been easy. But there was something rather splendid about her at the same time ‒ perhaps in that free, swinging walk, Laura thought, or the way she held her head, with its coil of faded gold hair. Selma came to do the heavy cleaning three days a week. Laura rarely saw her. She was part of the background, an adjunct to Gracie and the cook. But this morning the sight of her vaguely disturbed Laura; she didn’t know why anyone like Selma Talbot, who scrubbed floors and did the ironing, should look so untroubled and serene. It was while she watched Selma walk up that path that the phone rang with the start of the day’s irritations.
The phone call was from Harriet Dexter, warning her that she would be facing some ruffled feelings at that afternoon’s meeting. The new consolidated school building had been started in Burnham Falls, but it would take a further year to complete, and already some of the planning seemed out of date. The administration problems were already there. The first major clash on curricula and the use of space designed into the building was shaping up between Susan Hill, the present principal of the elementary school, and Marion Jennings, who was a noted educator, and the wife of Lionel Jennings, one of the top men at the Laboratories. She had been on the faculty at U.C.L.A., and it was known that when the new school was ready Susan Hill would be asked to retire, and Marion Jennings would take over as principal. The trouble lay in the fact that Miss Hill had been born in Burnham Falls and had taught school there for almost forty years; she was solidly backed by the older members of the community, who saw the new school merely as a piece of extravagant modern pampering of the children, and as a steep climb in their tax bills. Burnham Falls would back Susan Hill all the way ‒ in spite of her non-progressive ideas, she was a good teacher, with a natural gift for training children. On the other hand, Marion Jennings had written two books on education that were widely used in the West ‒ on any count, Burnham Falls was extraordinarily lucky to have her to take over the new consolidated school. Clearly the job of principal was beyond the administrative experience or capacities of Susan Hill.
Laura listened to all this with a growing feeling of dismay. She had, rather unwillingly, accepted election to the school board, because she had recognised it as a gesture to her position as Ed’s wife. What she didn’t know until afterwards was that Harriet Dexter had stepped down to allow her to take that place. As a member of the school-board, she had also to be active in P.T.A. ‒ the fact that Ed had two daughters made her, technically, a parent She had dutifully listened to Marion Jennings’ advice on how to proceed, but she learned more from Harriet. None of this eased her sense of bewilderment and frustration as she took her place for the meetings; she was a childless woman helping to make decisions that would affect other women’s children ‒ and the only role she understood or was fit for was to stand behind the footlights in a theatre, or to talk into a television camera. It seemed daily to grow more impossible to traverse the distance between Burnham Falls and Broadway.
At the end of her conversation with Harriet, she asked her to lunch. It was not a day to be alone.
But th
e worst thing had been picking up the new copy of Life and seeing the two-page spread on Larry ‒ pictures of Larry working in his apartment in New York, and dining with a group of people at Chambord. His wife, Mary, was beside him in the group, not looking at all changed from the time Laura had seen her, wearing the quiet dress, and the too-severe hair style. Then there were pictures of them together in London and Paris, where his new play had been produced even before its Broadway opening ‒ and the pictures of the villa in Italy they had rented for the summer. The story was titled ‘International Playwright’. Larry wrote the kind of plays that transposed with ease across the Atlantic. Of Mary there was the brief remark that, although she appeared to remain in the background, Larry referred to her constantly, and refused to travel unless she was with him. It was simply stated that she was his second wife. There was no indication of the identity of Larry’s first wife.
Because of the article she drank two martinis at lunchtime, and forced one on Harriet, who didn’t want it. It wasn’t a good start for a P.T.A. meeting. She was vaguely ashamed because she gargled to take away the smell of the alcohol before she set out with Harriet. On the way to the meeting she drove the Thunderbird wildly, and a little dangerously. She felt that she should apologise to Harriet about the driving, but she didn’t.
Through the long drawn-out meeting she endured a splitting headache, and when she asked Harriet for aspirin, she was grateful because Harriet didn’t look either sympathetic or reproachful. She knew she wasn’t being effective as the bridge between the new people of Amtec and the town ‒ not what she thought everyone had expected her to be. She made little or no impression on the meeting, merely nodding in agreement with the speaker from time to time, and drawing elaborate doodles on the pad on which she was supposed to make notes.
But she forgot a little about Larry and the meeting as she sat before the mirror now with the martini glass between her fingers. There was the evening to think about, the return to the familiar things ‒ the walk through the crowded room in a dress that made every man look at her in a way that every woman envied, the talk of show business, the big names and the big salaries. She belonged there, and even after a year of Burnham Falls, she still believed that she would find her way back. Then she looked at the clock and realised that if they were to be on time for the appointment with E. J. Harrison and Phil Conrad they would have to be on the road in thirty minutes from now. It was suddenly painful to remember when the Oak Room and the Plaza had been only five blocks away.
Corporation Wife Page 18
