She pulled a dandelion from the lawn on which we were sitting and flung it away. “Don’t feel you have to.”
“No such thing. I ought to settle down too. And we did have some pretty good times together.”
“We strike fire where that’s concerned. Well, all right, let’s. Sure, Don.”
She blossomed under the agreement, as, truth to tell, did I, after what seemed now a feckless and fruitless period of my life. My relief at the decision was more than the moral elation of one from whose skies the clouds of guilt have blown. Greta, her buxom bloom recovered, left the sanitarium one Sunday afternoon and drove back to Chicago with me.
My mother died just around that time, and feelings of sympathy toward me drew Greta farther out of her shell. Attending the funeral, in fact, was her first re-emergence in our community. All the emotions in which we had so far been clogged and choked suddenly broke free, like a fire that stops smoking and catches ablaze. We set a date, showers were sprung on her by fluttering girl friends, and invitations issued.
It was in the midst of this whirl of preparation that I received a mysterious and anonymous note in the mail. It was written in ink on a scrap of paper evidently torn from a sheet of foolscap, and read: “Do you know about her past?”
After my first burst of anger had cooled somewhat, I experienced a moment of wry amusement. Who but I, after all, had contributed to that past? Thus my informant, whoever he was, had unwittingly addressed his warning to the culprit rather than the victim. But then his (or her) not knowing the actual truth began itself to eat at me, as did my not knowing the identity of the writer. This uncertainty harrowed me for days. What troubled me too was a nagging familiarity about the handwriting. Whose was it? Where had I seen it before? I longed to show the note to Greta, but of course chivalry barred that resort. Then one evening the mystery was added to. After a week of stewing, during which Greta had struck me as behaving rather nervously herself, she asked me point-blank whether I had received an anonymous communication in the mail. Feeling that this released me from knightly obligations, I showed her the note.
“I wrote it,” she said.
“What kind of game is this?”
“It’s not a game. There’s something I’ve got to tell you.”
“Please do.”
She poured us stiff highballs, a unique measure in those parts and feasible only because her parents were out and unable to protest such use of the family medicinal bottle. We both paced the room, our glasses tinkling merrily throughout the following far from festive passage.
“After you went away, I had an affair with a man,” Greta related. “Nobody you know. He wasn’t Dutch Reformed. It was the boss in the office where I had a job for a short while. I got pregnant and had to go away and—” Here her voice broke as she lowered her head in tears. I waited for her to pull herself together and continue.
“Where I went—I can’t say ‘we’ because he behaved like a perfect cad—I won’t say. Some place out of the state. I left the child in the home there and—that’s all there’s to it, really. He was married. Not that he couldn’t have helped out with a little money. Men can be rats, all right, just as women can be fools. I don’t know which is worse.”
“Does anybody know about this?” I asked in a voice that seemed to be strained through some kind of dense but immaterial batting temporarily stopping my mouth.
“In Chicago? Not a soul.”
“How about the writer of the note?”
“You still don’t believe I wrote it. Just a sec.”
She went to her bedroom, where through the chattering of my ice cubes I heard a drawer being slid open. She returned holding in her hand the remainder of the sheet of paper from which the note had been torn. She set the two fragments side by side on a table and matched them into a whole, like parts of a treasure map of which individual pirates hold only a portion, requiring validation by the group as a unit.
“Why didn’t you tell me without going through all this rigmarole?”
“I couldn’t. I tried over and over to get up the courage, but the words just wouldn’t out. You know that feeling. I had to have them dragged out of me. I wished some busybody would tell you about it, so they would be. Like if you’d get an anonymous note or something. So I wrote such a note, and now the thing has been dragged out of me. It may sound crazy to you, but it’s off my conscience.”
“Conscience! You seem to have one that’s easily satisfied.”
“Please don’t. You’re free to go now. I won’t hold you to anything.”
“After the invitations are out! A fine thing that would be, wouldn’t it? What a rat that would make me out. You waited till I was nicely hemmed in by—”
“Oh, please!” Her voice broke again. “Can’t you imagine what I’ve been through? If they seem tricks I played, let them prove how desperate I’ve been to keep you. I begin to see only now how much I’ve wanted you. The engagement needn’t bother you. I’ll say I broke it. That’s what’s done in these cases. If you think you’d be getting damaged goods—”
“Oh, that’s not the point, and you know it. We don’t hold one another to virginity any more—and wouldn’t I be a great one to. The fact that you got into a mess doesn’t make any difference.”
“You mean you don’t mind?”
“Oh, Greta, of course I mind. In the same way you do. The affair itself was just an affair. It could happen to—”
Here my train of thought broke off, interrupted by a burst of illumination about another aspect of all this. The revelation must have shone in my face, for Greta looked at me and said, “What’s the matter?”
“Then it wasn’t I who caused your nervous breakdown. It was him.”
“Yes.”
“Pretty lousy of your parents to make me think I was the villain.”
“That’s why I had to tell you.”
“It doesn’t absolve them. What’s their excuse for doing me this dirt?”
“Old-fashioned morality.”
“Come again, please?”
“They figure you were ultimately responsible. You set me on the primrose path.”
“A likely name for it!” I dropped into a chair, feeling as though I were being physically stoned. “Does their position make any sense? I mean I’d rather it did. I mean one would rather think he was a stinker than be getting them for in-laws. So explain it to me a little more. Justify it.”
“It’s perfectly simple if you look at it in their light. You were my first. You seduced me, or whatever word you want to use. All the rest followed from that. Therefore, the child that resulted from an affair I might not have had if it hadn’t been for you might as well be yours. It is yours morally,” she concluded, taking on rather the tone her mother herself might have in this summation, were she capable of decent English.
“Can you get it back?”
“No. It’s too late for that. Oh, Don, don’t let’s torture ourselves with that. I for one have certainly been through enough.” She bent her head again, moaning the last words, and twisting her fingers about in her lap. She had set her drink down and was seated beside me on the sofa. “You’re sure you …”
“After all we’ve been through? The world is too many for me, baby. God knows I can’t make head or tail of it alone. I doubt whether two people can either, but I guess there’s no harm in their trying.”
We sat a moment in the deepening dusk. There were no lamps lit. As I brooded on all that had happened, and was happening, still another aspect of the whole situation struck me as deserving an airing now while everything was terrible anyway. Greta was quite herself again on the surface, but who could guess what might not lie beneath, what rocks and tangled growth composed the bottom of this calm sea. I therefore thought the point worth bringing up.
“Do you think people should marry if there is any—well, nervous history?” I asked.
She slipped an arm around me and drew my head toward her.
“Silly boy,” she said. “It’
s not your father I’m marrying. It’s you.”
I sold the disposal route for five thousand dollars to a church elder who owned a chain of them, and with the money finished my college education, of which only a year remained. I did not return to the University of Chicago but enrolled in a downtown school with a lower tuition and a good business-administration department. Wigbaldy had advised me in the sale and offered to help me in any tiding over I might later need in my transition to a better career—which was decent of him, though hardly more than the family owed me in the circumstances.
There was a slight skirmish over religious matters, which I thought it best to have out in a preliminary way at least. For one thing, I proposed a civil ceremony. I was clamorously reminded that you can’t have such a thing at a wedding. I yielded this point, sensing that Greta was only trying to spare her parents’ feelings, not hewing to views of her own which might clash with mine. But I made an issue of the precise wording of the vows. I wanted liberalized ones, with no outmoded Pauline nonsense exacting from the bride the promise to “obey” the groom. Here I put my foot down, rather in the manner of a husband determined to show at the outset who was boss. “I’ll have no obedience around here!” I said, banging the table. “Is that clear?”
“Is it an order?”
“Yes.”
“But you can’t ask Reverend Van Scoyen to use any but the official church form.”
“I suppose you’re right.”
The danger of our being given a model home was narrowly averted, Wigbaldy having just sold the last “unit” in his latest development, preliminary to doing a little traveling with the profits. In fact, he and Mrs. Wigbaldy were sailing for Holland two days after the wedding—“a second honeymoon for the missus and me.” Our honeymoon consisted of a week end at the Windermere, that Hyde Park hostelry whose name, you may recall, had always so potently conjured the Worldly life I had from boyhood promised myself, and which in young manhood I had sighted more closely as, dallying on the rocks at Lake Michigan, I had gazed northward at the lights along the shore.
We made the most of our few days there, dining the first evening on roast pheasant and champagne at a table laid in a window of our room affording a long, sweeping view to the south. Greta insisted on having a second bottle sent up after we had polished off the first, and nursing that, we talked about where we might like to look for an apartment. We were to stay in the Wigbaldys’ bungalow for the three months of their absence, during which period we would have to conduct our hunt. Rentals were scarce.
Carrying her glass, Greta came around and knelt beside my chair. She nibbled the lobe of my ear. “We’ll live at the foot of Gingerbread Lane, in a house nailed together with cloves.”
This gave me rather a turn. My legs stiffened as with an old disquiet, a kind of horror almost, under the table. Then I laughed as I realized to my relief that she was drinking far more than was good for her.
ten
Midway through the second year of our marriage my wife had a religious conversion. She left the church and joined another.
The impression that this is nothing at all could arise only from the ignorance of one unversed in the rigors of orthodox indoctrination. The thing indicated fervor—more fervor than is required lackadaisically to stay on. It indicated a freshet of emotion strong enough to drive her out of a denomination whose dogmas she could not honestly embrace into one whose tenets she could. I should not speak of tenets in the plural. “No creed but Christ” was the slogan of the temple, revivalistic in nature, which twice each Sunday and once in midweek she helped throng. Thus was ended a conformity based on “custom and superstition,” as the Dutch dominees themselves called an adherence to outward forms, in favor of a church against which, however, their strictures were even more vehement: one which did not preach, for instance, the elementary Christian principle of infant damnation.
Greta’s move seemed the emotional product of our failure to have any children, either to damn or to save. She thought her barrenness a punishment for having had one which she had not kept—though keeping it would have required her confessing, before a slavering congregation, the sin of adultery. The change was made in the face of all my pleas to “give me time”—a chivalrous recognition that sterility is as often as not the man’s. No dice. I did not protest strongly beyond a certain point, seeing no objection to married couples going their separate ways on the subject of religion provided there are no children over whose rearing the split can become fatal. Ours did not, as I say, meet that requirement.
The difference between us arose, not over the conversion as such, but over the misconduct with the bygone employer the memory of which had motivated it. She now spoke of it obsessively as a sin. I continued to view it as a simple indiscretion, and with a broad-minded tolerance for which I was sharply rebuked and which, as her piety waxed in intensity, she called on me to repent. This I refused to do.
“I don’t see how you can defend what I did,” she said. “Sometimes I wonder whether you have any standards at all.”
Our views on this score were irreconcilable. The Tabernacle evangelist to whom she had confessed her guilt, Reverend Tonkle, came to call on me to try to make me see the error of my ways. My attitude remaining, on this point, adamant, he expressed the wish to pray for me, whereupon we sank all three to our knees, I with them in the general emotion, since I saw no objection to extending a guest this courtesy. Ardent pleas for my soul were raised, and the hope expressed that my hardened heart would be softened by the sun of God’s grace, to the end that the two joined by him in holy wedlock might live together in Christian fellowship. None of this altered the situation in the least. I went about my way “conniving at the deed” in question, unregenerate still.
“I forgive her,” I said stubbornly.
“That is not the question. It’s whether God will forgive you,” Reverend Tonkle said. “It’s your immoral attitude that’s wrong.”
“He was a married man, Don,” Greta remonstrated.
“That was no worse than your being unmarried. Maybe his home life wasn’t all it might have been. Maybe he was unhappy. I think these affairs impose a morality of their own.”
“Oh!” she gasped in dismay. “May God forgive you for that.”
“Be that as it may, I still think what I always have. I do not condemn you.”
This was too much for her, and for Reverend Tonkle too, and they both gave off for now with the assurance that they would continue to pray for me in future.
The gulf between Greta and me over these incompatible outlooks widened with my refusal to go to the Tabernacle—after, that is, the one or two services to which I accompanied her to jolly her along and to satisfy my curiosity. These left nothing to be desired in the way of Bible-banging evangelism. Any pentecostal tongues of fire she hoped to see descend upon me were dampened by the spectacle of Reverend Tonkle’s tub thumping. They got results, as the number of those shuffling forward to make “decisions for Christ” attested, but I was not among them.
Nothing can drive so deep a wedge between two people as the hostility of one toward beliefs held dear by the other, and matters went from bad to worse for Greta and me. Then, as suddenly as they had started, they began to clear up. Greta found herself unexpectedly pregnant, and I myself again unexpectedly cherished. Even my “moral attitude” was no longer deplored. In her radiance she became less disapproving of my refusal to go to church, then finally lax in attendance herself. This was all to the good. She now had something to keep her home.
Since we know so little about the roots of externals themselves mysterious, it may very well have been that her success in conceiving a child resulted in part from emotional fires set by her religion. I did not look a gift horse in the mouth, at any rate. The religion itself had played its role for one who, in addition, now had evidence that the hand of God had not stricken her with infertility as punishment for past transgressions. The winds of human instability blow us into unexpected havens. We picnick
ed in bed on Sunday nights now, with snacks of cheese and crackers and sardines and what not, washed down with mugs of cocoa, which I happily brewed. I was utterly at peace. One night as we lay glutted, watching her ripening stomach for signs of the infant kicking, as she liked to have me do, I remembered Louie and my uncle arguing over my pregnant aunt. The whole wrangle and its hysterical aftermath, when we thought my aunt was going to have the baby then and there, came back so vividly that I laughed. “What’s so funny?” Greta asked. I told her the story.
She was instantly roused.
“You mean,” she said, sliding up in bed and wadding the pillow behind her so that she might sit more comfortably, “the stages of evolution are enacted in a human embryo? That right now this baby is a reptile or something?”
I hedged, fearing that I had blundered onto a subject that was touchy in the light of her recent experience and might prove explosive. When I tried to choke it off, she persisted. “No, explain it to me. I’d like to hear more about it.”
My account proved to be halting and inexpert. Seeing that sound scientific documentation was all that could get me through, I got out an old biology textbook and simply let her read the passages in question herself. She read for an hour or more, and with very little sign of being nonplused by the revelation. “Hmm,” she said finally, laying the book face-down on her stomach. “The whole thing is kind of a miracle in itself. Very beautiful.”
“Of course, Creation is Creation, whether it takes a week or a billion years.”
So far from having her faith “shaken,” therefore, she seemed to have been set aglow by the sense of wonders incarnate in her, a development which put me contrarily in the mood to thank Heaven. My relief was premature. The discovery brought Reverend Tonkle once again to our door, clutching in a pale hand his limp-leather Bible.
The Blood of the Lamb: A Novel Page 12
