Daybreak

by Belva Plain

  Timmy gave a faint smile. Breathing was still a struggle, and he did little talking, but now, at the end of the first week, his fever had broken, his temperature was almost normal, and he was ready to be moved out of intensive care to a private room.

  “I want to emphasize how important it is to be careful about cupping,” O’Toole warned Laura. “You absolutely must keep it up long after he’s at home.”

  So they really believed he would be coming home … Another battle won, she thought, although not the war. No, not the war. She was giddy after a week with no more than two or three hours’ sleep at night, and so tired. So tired. Alarm shook her, and she cried anxiously, “Was I not doing it enough? Is that why this happened?”

  “No, no, you’ve done everything right. That had nothing to do with it.”

  “It was tennis,” Timmy murmured. “My fault.”

  “Nonsense.” The doctor’s tone was hearty. “Nobody’s fault. Except,” he continued, modifying his tone, “that you do know your rules about getting yourself too hot or too tired.”

  Timmy nodded. When his eyes met Laura’s, she understood. He had been playing in the heat, had been losing the set, and hadn’t wanted to call it quits because he would have looked like a sure loser. It was the story of his life.

  When the doctor was finished, she walked out into the hall with him.

  “He’s going to make it this time,” said O’Toole. “Today is the first day I feel it’s safe to say that.” He looked sharply at Laura. “It’s been a terrible week for you and your husband. How is he?”

  “He’s been a wreck. I made him go to work this morning because on top of this awful worry, he’s been worrying about the business, too. He’s had a double load, poor man.”

  “You’re a good woman, and he’s a lucky man. I hope he knows it.”

  She had often remarked that age has a privilege: Elderly men and women can afford to speak with a bluntness that young people seldom attempt.

  “He does,” she replied.

  “Well, good. Now it’s time for you to take care of yourself. Try to get some sleep, and try to get out for a couple of hours, out of the house and away from this hospital. Timmy’s going to sleep all afternoon, anyway.”

  She had no idea what she might do, but the advice was probably sound, so she drove home prepared to try a nap, when the telephone rang.

  “Hello, Laura? This is Margaret, Margaret Crawfield. I won’t keep you, I only called to ask about your boy. Ralph told us what happened, and we’re so sorry.”

  “Thank you, we think, we’re pretty sure, he’s on the mend. Very slowly and with our fingers crossed. But you know all about that.”

  “Yes, we do. Well, please let us know whether there’s anything we can do.”

  The telephone clicked, leaving a vacancy: she had not asked during these last days about that second visit to the Crawfields, and of course Tom had said nothing either.

  She lay down on the sofa in the big dressing room that had once held her grandmother’s voluminous wardrobe. Dr. O’Toole had given her a good deal of relief this morning, relief that should have eased the way toward badly needed sleep, but somehow it had not done so. Wide-awake, she followed the pattern of birds that flew across the white-and-green toile wallpaper. So Ralph had told the Crawfields about Timmy. Ralph. Not Mackenzie, as until now she had thought of him. And suddenly she had a vivid recall of that afternoon in the coffee shop, a recall of her sense of him, of his quick comprehension, and of an odd moment in which a curious, knowing glance had passed between them …

  Really, really, he had been so kind, had taken so much trouble to smooth their way through a terrible, rough passage.

  It was just then that the telephone rang again.

  “I was concerned about your boy,” Ralph said.

  “Timmy? Thank God, he’s leaving the ICU. Things are looking much, much better. Last week this time—”

  “I know. I could tell by Tom’s face how bad it must have been. Did he tell you I’ve phoned a few times?”

  “He didn’t tell me. It’s not like him to forget.”

  “Don’t say anything about it. Tom can have no love for me. I’ve plagued him to do something he hated to do.”

  “Then the visit was a total failure again? These last days I never got around to thinking about it.”

  “Yes. The others tried, but Tom wasn’t willing, so I guess you’d call it a failure.”

  “If I only knew what to do!”

  “Maybe we should talk about it. Yes, I’m sure we should. Are you by any chance free this afternoon?”

  Laura hesitated. “Well, but I have to have an early dinner and then go back to the hospital.”

  “I only meant a couple of minutes at the Phoenix coffee shop. I plan to stop in at campaign headquarters, anyway.”

  Truly, she needed help with Tom … “All right. We’ll meet there. What time?”

  “Is four all right? And don’t meet me. I’ll circle around and pick you up at your house. I’m going to be in that part of town.”

  This is wrong. Well, if not wrong, not exactly right, either. But no, don’t be ridiculous! It’s no assignation, for heaven’s sake! It’s important to know what’s happening to Tom and to all concerned in this bizarre predicament. Since there’s no talking about it with Bud, who has both blinded and deafened himself to the subject, to meet this way is the best that can be done. So it’s right. Of course, it’s right.

  She bathed and used Gardenia body powder and perfume. The day was dim, which would make white linen seem tacky; instead she put on a blouse and skirt of blue-gray silk, a muted color to blend with the day, and then brightened the whole with a coral-flowered scarf.

  “I like those colors,” Ralph observed when she got into the car.

  “Thank you.”

  “I’m so glad to know that your boy’s come out of the woods.”

  “Thank you.”

  Suddenly, she felt awkward and knew she sounded prim, she to whom conversation came easily, she of whose social graces Bud was so proud, often so embarrassingly boastful. Her hands had folded themselves in her lap as if she were an unpopular girl waiting to be asked for a dance, or a patient in a dentist’s waiting room. And loosening her hands, she managed to think up a bright comment about Johnson’s latest speech, at which Ralph laughed, and so the air was cleared.

  At the Phoenix, they took the same table and began the same topic.

  “No, it didn’t go well,” Ralph said ruefully, “not at all. Laura, this is the saddest business I’ve ever had to deal with, and I’m no stranger to tragedy.”

  “Margaret telephoned my house while I was out today.”

  “Yes, she told me she was going to ask about Timmy. But I’m sure she hoped, too, that Tom might answer the phone. Arthur tells me she’s in anguish over Tom. She’s lost weight and can’t sleep.”

  “I’ll call her back tonight. But I can’t force him to accept them. I’ve tried, and I’ve only made him angry at me.”

  Ralph said thoughtfully, “Maybe none of us should try anything just now, but just sort of lie back and see what develops. If Tom should lose touch with you, he’d be left in limbo. No doubt that’s where he already feels he is.”

  “He has his father.”

  Ralph corrected her gently. “He needs his mother, too.”

  His mother. The woman who telephones, who is in “anguish” … Bitterness rose in Laura, a bitterness that she could almost taste. Here were two women who, if they were not the women they were, could quite naturally come to hate each other and leave the son, the object of their struggle, hating them both as well.

  She swallowed hard, saying, “I know. But fortunately, he and his father are unusually close.”

  “In their politics, too, I imagine,” Ralph said surprisingly.

  “Yes, they’re both Johnson men, although actually, Bud isn’t much interested in politics.”

  Ralph smiled. “The love of politics has to be in the blood. Some mig
ht say it’s a disease of the blood.”

  The conversation was circling, almost warily searching for a direction, a straight line. Sensing that, she waited.

  And Ralph said, “I guess I ran for every office in school and college. Won some and lost some. Funny thing is, Arthur Crawfield was my opponent a lot of the time, and we were best friends through it all.”

  “You grew up together?”

  “Yes, and stayed together when we both moved downstate. Then I went with my present firm and came back here, but we still manage to see each other often.” He said seriously, “They’re very special people, Laura.”

  Tom’s parents. This, then, was the straight line that Ralph had found. She wanted to follow it, to know more, while at the same time she didn’t want to know more. But it was expected of her to respond.

  “Tell me about them, please,” she said.

  “Naturally, I know more about Arthur. He’s a brain, for one thing, the kind of brain who becomes a department head at Harvard or someplace, one of those ‘name’ teachers who live on to be ninety and still have people fighting to get into their classes. He really would have loved that life, but when the family needed him in the business, he gave it up, came home, and has never spoken one word of complaint as far as I know. So now he runs a department store, and very efficiently, too.”

  “That’s a rather touching story.”

  “It could be sad, but Arthur’s not given to sadness. Somebody had to take care of a business that had been built out of sweat. You heard how it started, like most of the great American department stores, with a Jewish immigrant peddling through the countryside. Well, the father died, there was a widow, there were three sisters, two still in college and the third a young widow herself with four babies and no inheritance from her husband. So Arthur took over.”

  “And Margaret?” she asked.

  “Oh, Margaret is all heart. She’s not cerebral, like Arthur but she’s smart in her own way. I always think of them as the rare, perfect match. He and I were at somebody’s house one night when they met. There was a crowd, and we were having a good time. And suddenly, Margaret walked in. He couldn’t take his eyes from her. You could almost feel the thing that sprang to life between them in the first minute. It was like a current—extraordinary. They were married six months later.” Reminiscing, Ralph looked off into the middle distance. “I always think that’s the way I want to be married, that way or not at all. I want to feel: This is the one, the only one, and if I can’t have her, then I’ll go on the way I am.’ I do believe that’s the right way to be married. Perhaps I’m absurdly romantic. Do you think I am?”

  She was remembering that she, too, had wanted it to be like that, a purity, without compromise. The only one. And that way or not at all.

  “I certainly don’t think you’re absurd,” she answered quietly.

  “I’m glad you don’t. Arthur and Margaret don’t think I am, either.”

  There was an instant’s pause then, during which their eyes met and shifted as Ralph raised his cup.

  “I’m drinking too much coffee, and I know it. This campaign’s bad for the health. Late nights, rubber chicken banquets, coffee. But I’m afraid I’ll survive.”

  “How’s it going? I’ve quite lost touch this week. A world war could have started for all I knew.”

  “We’re still ahead, but according to the polls, our lead’s shrunk a bit. Johnson is a formidable opponent, let me tell you. He’s an orator, and he’s good-looking. The women go for him.”

  “It depends on the woman. A matter of taste.”

  That smug, tidy face belonged in an ad for male cosmetics, while the face on the other side of this table, this long Lincoln face with the strong nose and the fine, bright, kind, intelligent eyes was—well, one wouldn’t, or at any rate she wouldn’t, be apt to forget it.

  And she said abruptly, “If all keeps going well, as soon as Timmy’s home again, as soon as I can, I want to go back and help you win this election.”

  “You wear many hats. Mother and politician and pianist and what else?”

  She noticed that he had not put “wife” on the list. And before she could answer, he continued, “I just recently learned about your music. One of my partners heard you play at somebody’s party, and he was impressed. ‘Marvelous’ was his word.”

  “No, I’m not ‘marvelous.’ I am ‘very good.’ Good enough to teach talented pupils, but no more than that. However, I’m happy with it. I look forward to September, when lessons begin.”

  Again there was a pause, a meeting of the eyes and a turning away. And Ralph spoke quickly, as if to fill the gap.

  “Tell me how you got started and where you trained.”

  Time pulled at Laura: the house, the dinner, the hospital, all waited. With a slight move of the wrist, she was able to see her watch. Half an hour had gone by. Another fifteen minutes, she told herself, and not a minute more.

  And so she began the simple story of the first lessons and the extravagant piano provided by the dear, extravagant aunts, and the advanced classes, the whole, straight story.

  Then Ralph told his own tale.

  “For a while at college, I was very serious about the classical guitar. I even went to Spain one summer to study at the source. I had the craziest teacher, eccentric, comical, and wise. He was a master of flamenco music, an addict. And he made an addict out of me. It’s like fire in the blood.”

  So they talked on. It surprised each to discover in the other a person who truly knew something about music besides the usual lip service that is paid to this greatest of the arts by those who want to seem as if they know something about it.

  “You’ve never been abroad?” asked Ralph. And when she said that she had not, he counseled, “You ought to go. You must go, in fact. To hear Mozart in Salzburg or Beethoven in Vienna—ah well, you see, I am a romantic after all. Can’t get away from it.”

  She smiled. “But not an absurd one.”

  Her wrists were resting on the table. Light flashed on her wristwatch and startled her. The few minutes had turned into an hour and a half.

  “Do you know what time it is?” she cried.

  “I’m sorry. It’s my fault. Come. I’ll have you home in ten minutes.”

  A quietness came over them on the way, a quietness so abruptly marked, so deep, that Laura had to break it.

  “We wanted to solve Tom’s problem, and we haven’t done it at all.”

  “Time will have to solve it, Laura, for good or ill. It always does. But it’s Tom who has to make a decision. No one can do it for him.”

  “For good or ill,” she repeated. “Which do you think it will be, honestly?”

  “I have no idea, none at all.” Ralph gave her a shrewd look. “But I do know this. It will be hard for you, either way. The more Tom leans toward you, the greater will be the Crawfields’ pressure on him, and he’ll be taking that hard. But if, by some chance which I find almost impossible to envision, he should ever go in their direction, why then—I don’t need to say any more.”

  She did not answer. To lose her Tom, the vigorous, chuckling baby boy, the eight-year-old scamp, the high school scholar, the son who writes poems for her birthday, even the young man who writes for that scurrilous paper—

  She said mournfully, “If only there might be some middle way.”

  “That’s what we have to hope for.”

  When the car stopped in the driveway, an aberrant thought almost formed itself into words on her tongue: When shall I see you again? You are so sane, such a man. I need to see you again. And immediately came chastisement: You are a fool, Laura Rice, a big damn fool. What can you be thinking of?

  “I hope,” Ralph said, “I shall find you working away the next time I drop in at headquarters. That will mean that Timmy’s doing fine.” He laughed. “To say nothing of the fact that I want all the help I can get.” And as she moved out of the car, he added, “I’m sorry we didn’t solve Tom’s problem, Laura. But will you remember m
e to him anyway?”

  “I will. And thank you for everything, for trying and for being a friend.”

  She was inserting the key in the lock when the door opened and Bud faced her. “For Christ’s sake, where’ve you been? Who’s that who brought you home?”

  “Ralph Mackenzie.”

  “Ralph Mackenzie! What’s going on here, Laura? What is this?”

  “Going on?” As she walked toward the kitchen, he stood in her way. But she pushed past, saying, “Nothing’s ‘going on.’ I worked at the campaign. You know I’m against Johnson. I haven’t made a secret of it. Now I’ll have something on the table in fifteen minutes so we can get back to the hospital.”

  “Yes, we do have a sick son, don’t we? But, of course, Mackenzie’s campaign is more important.”

  “That’s not fair, Bud! I was with Timmy from half-past eight this morning until half-past one. It was Dr. O’Toole who told me I must get out for a few hours, now that Timmy’s so much better.”

  Bud stood in the kitchen doorway while she put out the cold supper that had been prepared in the morning. Whenever she turned, she felt his eyes on her back. Guilty thoughts produced a flush that was hot on her neck.

  “How did you get downtown? Your car’s in the garage,” he demanded.

  “Ralph telephoned to inquire about Timmy, which was very kind, I thought, and when I mentioned something about going to work a bit on the campaign, he offered to give me a lift. Since he was to be in the neighborhood anyway,” she amended.

  “You’re blushing red as a beet. Is this guy making a play for you? Is that it?”

  “If I’m blushing, it’s because your remark is so idiotic.”

  The lie now burned all the way to her forehead. Yet it wasn’t altogether a lie, was it? Really, this is much ado about nothing, she thought, and said, “Ralph has been a friend to us, Bud.”

  “Such a helpful friend. A real friend of the family.”

  “Don’t sneer. He truly is. He’s taken a lot of trouble to help Tom.”