The phone rang, and I grabbed it.
“I found that shoe you lost in my hedge,” Gladys announced. “I’ll mail it to you!” This time she was too quick for me—the phone slammed down at the other end, and my ear rang for at least an hour. No matter.
Whistling, relieved that the affair had ended so easily for us both, I inserted a piece of yellow copy paper in the typewriter and went to work…
Chapter Ten
Friday morning at ten-thirty, when I got out of bed, my wife and the car were missing. Beryl had left a note for me on the dinette table stating that she simply had to do some shopping, and that if I wasn’t home when she returned she would park the car for me at the newspaper lot after three-thirty and take the bus home. This was a standard operating procedure we had followed many times.
With a legitimate excuse I prepared my own breakfast, and instead of an argument or a strained silence I had an excellent, leisurely meal. Reading the paper I noted with a small degree of triumph that the M.E. had allowed my short item concerning the priest’s interpretation of the Roman Catholic rules about suicide to stand without any editing.
The house was quiet, the way I thought I liked it to be, but I was unable to do any constructive thinking about my play. I spent almost an hour scotchtaping the torn pages together again. Neither Beryl nor Buddy was allowed in my study without an invitation, and the room was usually dirty unless I cleaned it myself. Dusting, sweeping, and mopping consumed another forty minutes. The mail came: a letter from Beryl’s mother in Gainesville which I didn’t open, and a bill from the Don-Lawn Spray Company which I did. The lawn had been sprayed for chinch bugs—$15.00! I wrote a memo and paper-clipped it to the bill. Are we rich? R. I put the bill and Beryl’s letter on the dinette table, and took a shower, preparatory to getting dressed for town.
At three that afternoon, my coat draped over my arm, I entered Dr. Maxwell Goldman’s air-conditioned clinic. My mood was foul. I had missed the bus, and rather than wait twenty minutes in the hot sun for the next one, I had walked all the way to the clinic. The three-mile walk, in the humid, eighty-degree temperature, had been a mistake. My hair, my face, and my fresh white shirt were soaking wet with perspiration.
Three patient tumescent women, each with a fruit jar of urine clasped in their laps, occupied tangerine Eames chairs along the terra-cotta wall. I looked at them curiously and they stared back; resentfully, I thought. The middle-aged nurse got up from behind her desk as I approached. Through her white, transparent nylon uniform I could count four straps looping over each shoulder. I was puzzled. A slip and a brassiere could account for two sets, but the other two? All I could do was guess, and I decided she wore three slips instead of one, to make certain that no one could see a portion of her trunk through her transparent uniform.
“Do you have an appointment with Dr. Goldman?” The nurse said, sternly, efficiently.
“No. If I had an appointment I’d be carrying a full fruit jar just like everybody else. Just inform Dr. Goldman that Mr. Hudson wants to see him.”
She flushed easily, and jerked her head sharply to the right. “If you care to make an appointment, Mr. Hudson, I’ll see what dates I have open.” She turned the sheets of an open ledger on her desk.
“Never mind, nurse, I’ll see him now.”
“I’m afraid that’s impossible,” she said happily.
“I’m from the News-Press.” I showed her the press card in my wallet but she was unimpressed,
“If you want an appointment, Mr. Hudson,” she said doggedly, “I may be able to squeeze you in three weeks from today.”
A young girl came out of the doctor’s inner sanctum—she didn’t look pregnant to me—and opened a small red purse at the nurse’s desk.
“Is the doctor free now, little lady?” I smiled pleasantly.
“Yes, sir,” she replied timidly. “I mean, I’m all through ’til next Friday week.”
I started for the door and the nurse snagged my arm with her claws. “I said you’d have to make an appointment, Mr. Hudson!”
“Get your clammy hand off my arm!” I told her fiercely. I entered the doctor’s office and closed the door behind me. The nurse didn’t try to follow me inside, but her voice came in loud and clear through the intercom on the doctor’s desk.
“That’s all right,” he said calmly, “I’ll talk to him.” He hit the switch on the gray box, cutting her off in midsentence. “Well, you’re in to see me,” the doctor said briskly. “What do you want?”
I didn’t know; I hadn’t thought that far ahead. To stall for time I lit a cigarette I didn’t want to smoke. Dr. Goldman wore a white three-quarter length jacket, so he looked like a doctor. Except for an iron-gray tonsure encircling his tanned head, he was bald, and his curving nose was pocked with deep, large pores. He was a slender man, but his hands looked strong and capable.
“I’m sorry to intrude this way, Doctor,” I apologized. “I’m Hudson, from the newspaper, and I’m working on a story. A three-week wait for an appointment seemed a bit too long.”
“Go on. I have patients waiting,” he said grimly.
“The late Mrs. Huneker was one of your patients. And I’d like to have—”
“I’ve already informed one of your reporters over the phone that I have no comments concerning Mrs. Huneker.”
“I know you did, and that’s why I’m here. If you have no comment that means you’re covering up something. What is it?”
“I’m not covering up anything,” he barked. “There isn’t anything to tell.”
“Then you shouldn’t mind answering a few questions.”
“But I do, and particularly at this time. I’m very busy now. If you have some questions, put them in writing and mail them to me. And when I have time I’ll answer those I consider ethical.”
“All I want to know is whether Mrs. Huneker was pregnant?”
“No. No she was not.”
“Could she have had any children? That is, if she wanted to?”
“I told you I was busy. I must ask you to leave.”
Through an open door behind the doctor’s desk I could see a brown leather examining table, the kind that has stirrups to hold a woman’s feet when her legs are spread. I lifted my chin. “You had Mrs. Huneker on your table in there a few times, I suppose, with her feet in the stirrups?”
“Get out. Get out of my office.” The doctor had his voice nicely under control but I could sense his inner fury.
“I’ve often wondered about gynecologists. Why would any man go into a dirty business like this?”
Dr. Goldman clicked the switch on the intercom. “Clara,” he said, “get me the publisher of the News-Press on the phone.”
“Tell her to call long distance. The publisher lives on Long Island, in New York,” I suggested.
“Make that the managing editor, Clara,” the doctor amended.
There was no point in remaining; I had managed to antagonize the man. I left his office and closed the door. The nurse was pawing through the telephone book, so I gave her the newspaper office number, to make it easier for her, before going outside.
The clinic was a low, white, brick building in the center of a black asphalt sea. I hadn’t been inside long enough to cool off, but I had caught my breath in there. After coming out of the air-conditioning the sun seemed twice as hot. I tried to puzzle out my anger at the doctor—there didn’t seem to be any good reason for it—and then I recalled the time some six months before when Beryl had had a bad cold and had gone to see Dr. Robertson. He was a man in his early thirties, and Beryl hadn’t been in his office five minutes before he had her stripped from the waist down and on the table with her feet in the stirrups. When she told me about it later I had wanted to go down to Robertson’s office and break his jaw for him. He had no excuse whatsoever to give her a pelvic examination; she’d only had a cold, for Christ’s sake! She had talked me out of going to his office, but I had avoided him after that. As a father I had to admit that gynecol
ogists and obstetricians were useful, but as a husband and lover I couldn’t help resenting them. But my original distrust of obstetricians stemmed from before our marriage. After all, they would be out of pocket if it weren’t for babies, and they conspired against young couples, married and unmarried, playing on their ignorance about such matters to get young girls pregnant as soon as it was humanly possible. Or so it had worked with Beryl.
In fact, the idea of getting married was not even a remote idea in my mind when I was dating Beryl at college. I had carnal designs on her, and that was as far as my thinking went. But night after night I was getting nowhere. I got close, but unlike horseshoes, I seemed to be playing a losing game. She would neck, up to a point, but she always kept her legs crossed. And she had a ridiculous rule about playing with her breasts. She would take out either the left or the right, but never both at the same time; one had to stay in the brassiere pocket at all times.
“In case somebody comes snooping around,” she said, “it’ll only take a sec to put one back.”
Inasmuch as these necking and groping sessions were always in the front seat of my car, I couldn’t argue the point with her, but I wasn’t getting anywhere with her either. After a prolonged petting match that led nowhere I broke away from her, and hunched glumly over the steering wheel to watch the movie for awhile. We were at the drive-in, as usual, and again, as usual, the sound was switched off on the little speaker that rested on the car window. Some actor’s lips were moving a mile-a-minute on the screen as he talked to Janet Leigh, but I had a hunch that he wasn’t getting anywhere with her either.
In my mind I ran over the arguments I had used to no avail with Beryl already, searching my mind for a fresh approach. One argument, which I had marked off my list forever, was the one where the atom bomb is brought up—“Any day now the bomb is liable to be dropped, so why should we wait under such circumstances—life is so short—we only have the security of insecurity,” etc. This line of reasoning had only made Beryl hysterical with laughter. But I was all out of fresh ideas, and when dating a campus beauty, who had been equally as pretty in high school, a fresh approach, or a new line is almost impossible to devise. She had heard them all, each and every one of them. And then I thought of one:
“Beryl,” I said, “have you taken the course yet called Marriage and the Family, the one referred to as Sex 203?”
“No, not yet, but they say it’s a snap course.”
“It is, but there’s an interesting statistic I learned in this course. Did you know that sixty percent of the married couples in the United States indulged in pre-marital intercourse?”
“That many?”
“That many. So when you refuse me, turn me down cold this way, you’re only cheating yourself out of a practice that’s commonplace. That’s all. Do you see what I mean?” The silent lips on the giant screen flapped away, and I wondered how he was making out—
“That’s different,” Beryl said quietly, in a high, small voice. “You never said anything about ‘pre-marital’ before, Richard. I knew you liked me, and all, and I’ve been expecting you to propose right along—although I thought it’d be more romantic. I know that all the girls who are engaged—well, they don’t wait, and it’s the expected thing. So in that case…all right.”
It took a couple of moments for the purport of her roundabout acquiescence to sink in, and I was more than a little bewildered by the unexpected turn my suggestions had taken. I hadn’t proposed! The idea of proposing hadn’t even entered my mind; she’d twisted it all around. Was she stupid or was she diabolically clever? But I wasn’t thinking clearly; all I could think about was the fact that she had calmly said, “All right.” And I suppose that acceptance, after nights and weeks of futile struggling and arguing, outweighed any and all thoughts about the fact that I would be engaged, committed to marry her following the act itself. But what did being engaged mean? It was nothing; many are called, but few are chosen, and I could get out of the marriage when the time came. The important thing was right now.
I reached for her, and was met by a stiff arm holding me at arm’s length. “No,” she said firmly.
“But you just said—” I began huffily.
“I said, ‘All right,’ and I meant it. But not here, in this place, on the front seat of your car like two animals. It isn’t right, and you know it.”
I turned on the car engine, put the speaker back on the rack with my left hand as I turned toward her. “You name it. We’ll go anywhere you say, and right now.”
“No,” she shook her head. “Not now, not tonight, right after proposing. Wait till Saturday; that’s only four days, but it’ll give you time to think it over, to cool off. And then, if you still want to be engaged, we can go away for the weekend. To Jacksonville, or Valdosta, somewhere where we can go to a hotel or a motel. And besides, I don’t want to get pregnant; and I’ll have to buy a diaphragm.”
“You don’t have to do that. I can use a safety.”
“No. Men don’t like that. My doctor told me so when I talked to him about sex one afternoon when I was still in high school. We’ll either do it right, and my way, or not at all.”
“We’ll do it your way.”
I drove her home, and her neat, orderly mind formulated plans on the way. She would tell her parents she was going to spend the weekend with her girl friend in Orlando, so I’d have to pick her up at the Student Center, not at her home, etc.
I agreed with her all the way. And when I kissed her good night, the promise was implicit in her soft lips.
“I love you, Beryl,” I said, and it was the first time I had ever said it—and I did. “Will you be at the Center Saturday?”
“I’ll be there. Will you?”
“Of course. You don’t have to test me—I’m ready to leave right now.”
“We’ve both got classes tomorrow,” she said practically, and she got out of the car.
I drove back to the dorm, and stumbled across the parking lot, with aching stones. And looking back, I must admit that she was fair. Four days were plenty to change my mind, and I wavered several times before Saturday rolled around, but there was never any real doubt in my mind that I’d meet her when the time came. On the contrary, I thought that she would change her mind—and when this thought occurred to me it would almost drive me mad with rage. Those four days were an eternity to me. I sat deaf, dumb, and blind through every lecture.
Saturday morning I was awake at five-thirty A.M. Before noon, I took three showers, and changed clothes as many times, deciding finally to wear my best suit, a black mohair job. I also borrowed a pair of pajamas from my roommate. I had none of my own, and his were too small for me, but I thought it would look more respectable that way, to lay out a pair of pajamas for the sake of appearances when we checked into a motel. I either slept raw or in my underwear, but she could find out about that later. In the back of my skull, however, I was already thinking of ways to break our engagement, or to pick a bitter quarrel— afterwards. But the “afterwards” might be over an extended period of time; this possibility didn’t escape me. If it turned out that I had a good thing here, I could play her along for several months before breaking things off sharply. After all, an engagement wasn’t anything tangible, like a date set for the marriage. The time to break up would be when she began to push for a certain date; then she’d find out that I didn’t push so easily.
I got to the Student Center on-campus at eleven A.M., and she was there, so beautiful a hard lump leaped into my throat. She wore a white dress, and with her long black hair hanging down her back; and with the sweet Mary Jane shoes she was wearing, she reminded me of Alice, the Alice of Wonderland. She didn’t look much more than sixteen or seventeen, and I began to worry about whether I could pass her off as a wife when I checked into a motel. I held open the door for her— another first for me—and tossed her bag into the back seat.
She sat demurely, looking straight ahead, with her hands folded in her lap. “I’m glad you came ea
rly, Richard,” she said. “I had to come early, because I couldn’t wait at home any longer.”
“Didn’t you expect me?”
“Well—yes, and then again, no!”
We both laughed then, and the tension was broken between us. It was a beautiful day, and at that moment I realized what a wonderful day it really was. I had never been any happier before in my entire life—and I marked everything in my mind, knowing that such days would be rare in the future—the way she looked, smelled, smiled, the color of her fresh, young skin, and even the clean, white, half-moon scar on her knee.
I had no real plan, and not much money. I had borrowed seven dollars, and I had sold my second-hand typewriter for eighteen more, and that was all. Valdosta was an ideal city for the purpose, and I had driven five miles up the highway before I realized that I would have to cross the state line into Georgia— which meant a violation of the Mann Act. At the next dirt road I turned in, and backed around.
“We’d better not go to Valdosta, honey,” I said, “I used to play golf at the country club there when I was on the Golf Team, and too many people up there know me by name. Let’s go to Daytona Beach instead. It’s farther, but we can go swimming in the morning. All right?”
“I don’t care.”
“And besides,” I added, “you look so young, it’ll be better if we check in after dark. You can sit in the car, and—”
“Oh, I thought of that!” she said brightly, opening her purse. “I got my aunt’s driver’s license out of her purse, and all you have to do is sign the register with her husband’s name. Howard Sibley. And if they say anything about me, I can show them the license—”
“How old is your aunt?”
Understudy for Death Page 14
