Experiment in Springtime

Chapter 5

The horror passed and she began to move with brisk economy. Holding a handkerchief against the palm of her hand, she pulled the sheet up over Charles. (How calm he looked now, as if he had purified himself by spitting out all his venom and bile on her.) She picked up the tie from the floor, replaced it carefully in the box and set it on the bureau. All that fuss about a tie, it was really disgusting. She would not permit herself to believe that he had any other reason for fussing. The sole reason was the tie, and she could fix that easily enough — she would simply never buy him another one.

She took a final look at Charles. Later, when he woke up, he would be apologizing all over the place, he would grovel as he usually did after he’d lost his temper. She would, not too readily, of course, accept his apologies and they would resume their life together as if nothing had happened.

As far as she could tell, no one had heard Charles’s insane accusations. In one way it was a pity. Whenever he acted up like this, Charles was pretty careful to let no one hear him except her, so that people were fooled into believing that he was an extremely amiable man. The servants adored him (naturally — he made no demands on them); Laura and her mother thought he was wonderful (he was, with them); and his friends were continually telling her how lucky she was (lucky to be alive).

It was extraordinary how he managed never to give himself away to anyone else but her. She even felt a certain detached admiration for him in this respect, but it was tempered by a deep uneasiness: Is there something about me that brings out all this venom, could it be me?

She opened the door and stepped into the hall. Laura was standing at the head of the stairs and something about her posture indicated that she’d been standing there a long time, deliberately listening. She was wearing her school clothes, a red, baggy sweater and a plaid skirt, and she had a notebook under her arm.

“I just got home,” she said. “I was coming up the steps and I heard Charley shouting. I just wondered.” She glanced away, hugging the notebook, balancing her weight on the edges of the soles of her saddle shoes. She was thin and dark, with straight thick brows and narrow eyes that had a disconcerting I-know-and-you-know-that-I-know expression. She practiced this expression in front of a mirror every morning when she combed her hair, and it was quite effective. “I just happened to hear him.”

“Stand properly; you’ll ruin your shoes.”

“Are we going away?”

“Whatever gave you that idea?”

“I heard — I just wondered.”

“Of course we’re not going away. Charles is ill, he’s under a strain and sometimes he gets peculiar ideas.”

“Can I go in and see him?”

“No,” Martha said sharply. “He doesn’t want to see anyone. And stand properly.”

“The gym teacher said it was good for you to stand on the sides of your soles. It strengthens the arches.”

“You may tell the gym teacher for me that it also ruins the shoes.”

“Well, you can always buy new shoes but you can’t buy new arches.”

“You’re getting too fresh,” Martha said.

In her own bathroom she washed her wound and poured alcohol over it. The bite wasn’t deep but she hoped it was deep enough to leave a scar. Scars were useful weapons.

When she returned to the hall Brown was there with Laura. Brown jumped when he heard her step.

“Mr. Pearson has had another bad spell,” Martha said. “I’m going to phone the doctor.”

Unhurriedly she descended the steps.

Laura and Brown exchanged glances.

“She’s got a bandage on her hand,” Laura said casually. “See it?”

“No.”

“I bet they had a fight.”

“You’re a crazy kid,” Brown said, frowning.

“As a matter of fact, I heard them. I heard every single word. I could tell, if I felt like it. I will if you’ll let me have your car on Saturday.”

“You nearly wrecked it last time.”

“It wasn’t my fault. I told you all about it.”

“Beat it,” he said roughly.

“It’s lucky I’m a liberal or I’d have you fired for the way you talk to me when nobody else is around.”

“Try it, canarylegs.”

A flush spread up along her neck to her cheeks. “I couldn’t be bothered. We’ll be moving out one of these days anyway.”

“You’re breaking my heart.”

“Wait and see.”

“I’ve been waiting.”

“You’re not the only one.” She intensified her knowing expression. “I never liked it here much anyway. It’s disgusting to keep a butler in this day and age.”

She saw Brown’s eyes narrow in anger and she turned with an air of victory and walked away.

“One of these days I’m going to pin your ears back,” Brown called after her. “If I thought they’d stop flapping long enough for me to catch hold of them.”

“Oh, really?”

She balanced her notebook on top of her head to improve her posture and glided solemnly down the hall.

Once inside her bedroom (done in red plaid wallpaper that she’d picked out herself) she took up her position at the vanity mirror. She spent a good deal of time here, trying to decide what she looked like. Sometimes she looked quite beautiful, a subtle haunting beauty that brought gentle tears to her own eyes, and then she would decide to be an actress. But other times she looked perfectly awful and she visualized herself in cap and gown, receiving her Ph.D. in front of an admiring throng: “She’s not pretty, no, but what a mind the girl has, one of the truly great minds of the century!”

Today she had a pimple on her chin and another beside her left ear, and she had just gotten a C in Lit. I, so she decided to become a psychologist. She narrowed her eyes and looked like a psychologist.

There, at least that was settled. She would be a psychologist, but for a while she’d keep it a secret. Last winter she had made the mistake of telling Charley she intended to become a missionary. Charley had laughed and laughed. Not two weeks after that she discovered that her inspiration, an aging Youth Leader from the Y.M.C.A., had a wife and two children and was not going to Darkest Africa or Darkest India but merely to another Y.M.C.A. A truly terrible blow, and she rallied from it only because she had to for the mid-winter exams.

Everything happens to me, thought the psychologist. Life is just one pitfall after another. One horrible, shattering disillusionment followed by another horrible shattering disillusionment.

But always she rallied, she survived. To look at her no one would ever dream what she had been through. There wasn’t a wrinkle in her face (pimples didn’t count, they could happen to anybody), and her forehead was as smooth and serene as a mountain lake. Life had beaten her but she came up smiling. She smiled, at the same time keeping her eyes narrowed so that she appeared to be squinting in strong sunlight.

Most infelicitous, she thought, frowning. A most infelicitous physiognomy.

She rearranged the mirrors to examine her profile. Her nose was nice, but the pimple beside her ear spoiled everything. It was no ordinary pimple, it was huge, it glowed, it was phosphorescent. She couldn’t bear it, she wished she were dead.

But, as usual, she rallied. She coated her face liberally with pancake makeup. It made smiling difficult, but who wanted to smile anyway? What was there to smile about? Oh, the horror, the disillusionment! Oh, the C in Lit., the Y.M.C.A. and the phosphorescent pimple!

My life is ashes, she thought. Just plain ashes.

Though Laura’s adolescent mind vacillated from one extreme to another, in her judgments and decisions about herself, she showed considerable maturity in judging other people. Nothing that went on between Charles and Martha escaped her, and years ago she had decided that she would never get married. Charles was all right when Martha wasn’t around. The fault must, therefore, lie in marriage itself. She remembered that her father and mother had been happy together, but she wondered now if it hadn’t been all a pretence for her sake. Perhaps her mother and father had felt exactly as Charles and Martha felt about each other but were better able to conceal it. It was a disturbing thought, and it worried her.

Sometimes when she was in bed at night all her worries would bunch themselves together and lie on her heart, heavy as lead. She had a recurring dream, a bad, shameful dream, in which Martha died and she herself was married to Charles. These dreams had begun when she was fourteen and whenever she had one she couldn’t bear to talk to Charles for days afterward. She would sit around, mute and stubborn.

Martha was puzzled. “What’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing.”

“Did something happen at school?”

“Uh uh.”

“Is there something you want and you don’t like to ask for it?”

“Uh uh.”

“Well, for heaven’s sake, what’s got into you?”

“I’m thinking.”

“She’s growing up,” Charles said.

She didn’t want to grow up. She wanted to be a little baby or an old woman or a dog or a horse or anything but Laura growing up.

Usually she got on very well with Charles. He seemed to understand that the house was too quiet and their mode of living too dull for a sixteen-year-old. He put himself out to be entertaining, deliberately creating noise and confusion. After dinner he would play the piano and sing very loudly to cover up his mistakes. Laura would sing with him, giggling whenever he struck a wrong note.

Now and then Martha came in, to empty Charles’s ashtray or pick up a piece of sheet music that had fallen on the floor. She didn’t try to stop the noise or even look disapproving. She simply ignored them both out of existence, as if she had gone suddenly blind, or deaf, or had moved into a vacuum where no sounds could penetrate and Charles was real and realized only through his ability to dirty an ashtray.

Once, when she came in, Charles stopped playing and swung around to face her.

“Martha...”

“Oh, don’t stop playing on my account, Charles.”

“We never have any fun together, do we?”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“Let’s go dancing tomorrow night. Buy yourself a new dress. We’ll have dinner at Chez Maurice and go around to the Embassy or some place afterwards.”

She had bought the dress, but the next afternoon she sent Laura to tell Charles that she had a headache and didn’t care to go out.

“But why?” Charles asked.

“I don’t know,” Laura said. “Maybe she has a headache.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“She was crazy about the dress. She took me with her to buy it. It’s awfully cute blue velvet with a slit in the skirt and a big white flower at the waist.”

“O.K. It’s all right. I’m getting too damn old to dance, anyway.”

That had been a year ago. The dress hung in a cellophane bag in Martha’s closet. From a little way off it looked brand new, but when Laura tried it on one day she noticed that there were smudges around the hem as if someone had worn it and danced in it, and the petals of the white flower drooped as if crushed between two bodies or bruised by a hand.

Someone had worn it. Not Lily — she wouldn’t have the nerve. Not Laura herself, because the dress didn’t fit her. So it was Martha. Maybe she put it on when she was alone in her room just to wear the thing out.

Or maybe, Laura thought with a shock, she even dances in front of the mirror holding a pillow the way I used to do when I was just a kid.

There was something frightening in this idea about Martha. It seemed to imply things Laura didn’t understand and to suggest sly secrets she didn’t want to hear. It left her with the same shameful feeling as her dream of being married to Charles.

She readjusted the mirrors again. The pancake makeup helped, and besides this was her best angle, three-quarters face. She looked pretty enough to be a chorus girl. She toyed with the idea of becoming the first chorus girl/psychologist in history. It would be hard, but at least she would get on the cover of Life Magazine, and never again would she have to get down on her knees and beg Brown to let her borrow his wretched little car. People would give her cars, also mink coats. Chorus girls needed strong arches, so she walked around the room ten times on the outside edges of her shoes.

Having thus rescued her life from the ashes and dusted it off, she proceeded out into the hall to look for Brown, a mean and stingy man, if there ever was one, and she wouldn’t be seen dead in his lousy car if she had one of her own.

From the landing halfway down the stairs, she saw the doctor’s car winding up the driveway. He was coming to see Charles, of course. Charley had fainted and Martha had a bandage on her hand.

She forgot all about finding Brown. She sat down on the windowseat, biting her thumbnail, realizing for the first time since she’d overheard the quarrel that it hadn’t been an ordinary quarrel. Charley was kicking them out — her and Martha and her mother. What terrifying, awful power men had. Charles had only to say “Get out,” and they were forced to leave.

But it was not Martha who left, after all. It was Charles himself. Dr. MacNeil explained it to Martha downstairs, after he had talked with Charles. He was puzzled, he said, he was at a loss. As Mrs. Pearson knew, he was an allergist and the study of allergies was, more than any other branch of medicine, closely related to the study of psychiatry.

Would Mrs. Pearson grant that Mr. Pearson showed some degree of neurosis?

Mrs. Pearson would be delighted to grant it.

Very well then, Mrs. Pearson would understand that this most unfortunate accident with the aspirin tablets would have a more devastating effect on the mind of a nervous and introspective man like Mr. Pearson than it would on an ordinary man.

Ordinary men do not become ill from aspirin, Mrs. Pearson pointed out.

How true. But suppose he did. Would not an ordinary man feel to a lesser degree exactly as Mr. Pearson felt, that his wife was responsible?

Was the doctor implying...?

No, the doctor was not implying. Mrs. Pearson could not have known that Mr. Pearson had developed an allergy to aspirin. He, himself, Mr. Pearson’s own doctor, could not make an accurate list of the things to which Mr. Pearson was sensitive. The list was continually changing, as was usual in the case of a genuine anaphylactic personality. The amount of histamine manufactured in Mr. Pearson’s system during the years he had treated him was enough to kill off the entire household.

Dear me.

Quite. Had Mrs. Pearson ever heard of the Freudian concept of the death-wish?

No, she hadn’t, she didn’t want to, and she wished he would go away and leave her alone. His eyes probed her like needles. He had a broad forehead and thick, black brows that moved with a life of their own. By contrast, his chin was round and fat and pink as a marshmallow, with a dimple in the middle as if a child had stuck a finger into it.

She concentrated on the dimple and said, “I didn’t let myself realize until today what Charles was actually thinking about me.”

“It’s hard for you, I know,” MacNeil said with professional sympathy. “But illness distorts the perspective of a man by narrowing his world, limiting it to one room and perhaps one person. In this case, you are the person. Whether it’s a matter of choice or necessity, I have always considered it unfortunate for members of a family to nurse each other during illness. Ordinarily family life produces enough friction under the best of circumstances, and when a man is ill his world, as I said, is narrower and more intense. His sensibility is exacerbated and leads him into extremes. He is both irritable and apologetic, both self-pitying and proud.”

“In a roundabout way, you’re advising a separation, aren’t you?”

“A temporary separation is vitally important.”

“I suppose it’s useless to try and reason with him?”

“You don’t reason with a delusion any more than you reason with a pneumonia virus. Your husband must be given time to heal. You, on your part, must realize more fully than you do now that he loves you very profoundly.”

She smiled dryly. “Charles can be very convincing sometimes.”

“Oh, he didn’t tell me that. It’s so obvious that he didn’t have to.”

“It’s not obvious to me.”

“You don’t want it to be.”

“He’s jealous and possessive. I don’t call that love.”

“He’s that way because he’s uncertain of you.”

“He has no reason to be. I don’t know what Charles wants of me. I always have the impression that he wants me to do something, say something, be something that I’m not.”

Warmth, the doctor thought, he wants some signs of warmth in your nature. Oh, well.

He rose, suppressing a yawn. He was tired of talking and the woman depressed him. She seemed immovable and cold as marble, and if any of his words had ever struck her, they had bounced off again without leaving a dent. At the same time he felt somewhat sorry for her. She could not help her frigidity. Perhaps with another man she could have had a happy, or at least, normal marriage. He wondered whether at some level of her mind she was harboring a guilt complex, or whether the explanation was simply that Pearson was not impotent but sterile.

He picked up his instrument bag from the floor.

“How does your hand feel now?”

“It’s all right.”

“Good. Take care of it. Human bites are often more dangerous than animal bites.”

He departed with the feeling that he had just said something profound.

After he’d gone she discovered that all his talking and pretending to consult her had been mere camouflage, that the arrangements for Charles to leave had already been made. It was Laura who came down and told her.

“I heard them talking,” Laura said.

“You shouldn’t eavesdrop.”

“I didn’t eavesdrop. Charley’s door just happened to be open and I just happened to be sitting on the landing. He’s going away tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?”

“To a cottage on the lake. It belongs to a friend of the doctor’s. Forbes is going with him because Forbes can cook. They’re going to take the Chevvy coupe. Charley said to leave the big car for you.”

“That was nice of him,” Martha said. She was oddly affected by Charles’s concern for her. Though he was ill, though he despised her and suspected her of the worst possible crime, he wanted her to be comfortable while he was away. At least that’s how it sounded at first. After she’d considered it a minute, she began to wonder uneasily if Charles’s irony was getting so subtle she couldn’t recognize it. Talking to him was so difficult these days. It was like walking through a room strung with invisible wires; you could be aware that the wires were there, but you couldn’t prevent yourself from stumbling over them if you moved at all.

The following morning MacNeil came again. He re-bandaged her hand and told her that Charles was going to leave in the afternoon. He spoke of the cottage vaguely as being on the lake but not too far from the city.

“Why aren’t you sending him to a proper nursing home if he needs attention? Forbes can’t look after him the way I did.”

“The hospitals and nursing homes are badly overcrowded,” MacNeil replied. “And Mr. Pearson perhaps doesn’t need as much attention as you thought he did. His main need is to get away from this house and from you, to put it bluntly.”

She saw Charles only once before he left. She was waiting at the front door to say goodbye to him when he came down the stairs with Forbes. From a distance he looked perfectly well, though he walked slowly and held onto the banister for support. At the bottom of the staircase he put his hand lightly on Forbes’s shoulder and they crossed the hall toward her, walking in step.

The interval before they reached her seemed interminable. She thought of saying something light to bridge the gap of time and mood, but when she finally spoke it was the wrong thing to say, and the wrong tone to say it in.

“Well, Charles,” she said heartily. “You’re all dressed up!”

He had on grey flannels and a tweed coat with a brown turtleneck sweater underneath. She couldn’t remember seeing him in such informal clothes before. They made him look younger and the bulky sweater helped to conceal his thinness.

“Am I?” he said.

Forbes, with a little nod to Martha, opened the door and went out.

“How are you feeling, Charles?”

“Fine.”

“I hope — get a good rest, won’t you?”

“Certainly.”

“Did you leave your address with Brown?”

He said flatly, “What do you want my address for?”

“Well, in case anything turns up.”

“Nothing will turn up.”

“It wouldn’t look right for me not even to know where you are.”

He regarded her quizzically. “No?”

“Why won’t you tell me where you’re going?”

“Because I don’t want to see you again for a long, long time. If you knew where I was, you might be tempted to run out and see me. Not for humanitarian reasons — merely to check up. You’re a great one for checking up on things.”

Forbes returned. “Everything’s ready if you are, Mr. Pearson.”

“I’m ready. Well, goodbye, Martha.”

“Good-bye.”

She raised her face perfunctorily for his kiss. He stared at her for a moment. Then he said coldly, “Aren’t you forgetting I bite, my dear?”

The door slammed.

She hurried into the living room and watched him from the windows. She saw Forbes help him into the coupe and lay a blanket over his knees, then Forbes got in beside him and started the engine. Before they drove off, they both began to laugh.

That was the picture of him she kept seeing over and over again — Charles looking quite healthy and young again in the turtleneck sweater, driving off to a place she didn’t know, laughing at a joke she couldn’t share.