Experiment in Springtime

Chapter 9

When he arrived at the house he went around to the back door to get the key to the apartment. Brown let him into the kitchen, murmuring something formal in the way of greeting. He was more subdued in the house than he had been in the apartment. Steve thought it must be the woman’s influence.

The woman was introduced as Mrs. Putnam, the cook. She stood at the sink watering a windowbox of green stuff that looked like parsley. She was very short, with wide sloping shoulders like a man’s, and a drawn delicate profile. She acknowledged the introduction with a pained fleeting smile.

“What’s that stuff?” Steve said. “In the windowbox.”

“Parsley.”

“I thought it looked like parsley.”

“It is parsley.”

“Well, what do you know,” Steve said. He didn’t care what was in the windowbox, he wasn’t even consciously trying to make Mrs. Putnam like him. But whenever he met a woman, no matter what her age or appearance might be, he couldn’t resist trying to personalize their relationship right away.

Aware of Mrs. Putnam’s relentless back, he turned to Brown again.

“Do I pay the rent to you or Mrs. Pearson?”

“I’ll handle it.”

“All right.” Steve took fifty dollars from his wallet. Brown gave him a receipt and a key ring with six or seven keys on it.

“It’s Forbes’s key ring,” Brown explained. “One of the keys belongs to the apartment. The others you can ignore. Are you going to do your own cooking, Mr. Ferris?”

“I might make a stab at it.”

“If you find yourself starving to death, come over here for a meal. Mrs. Putnam won’t mind.”

“Pleased, I’m sure,” she put in.

“Thanks very much,” Steve said. He was pretty sure that Brown had extended the invitation merely for the sake of finding out how good a friend he was of Martha’s. A good friend of Martha’s wouldn’t want to eat in the kitchen with the servants. He added carefully, “I’ll take you up on that.”

Brown looked a little surprised, but he didn’t say anything.

Steve finished unpacking in ten minutes. He had only a few clothes, two new suits, his old service underwear and socks, a camera, a portable typewriter, the shaving kit Beatrice had sent him last Christmas, and a leather writing case with a snapshot of Bea and Aunt Vi sitting grim and indivisible on the front porch of their house. In the envelope folder there were other pictures. Most of them were members of his squadron, but there were a few whose origin he couldn’t even remember: a couple of Land Army girls giggling straight into the camera, some pigeons in Trafalgar Square, a castle, a plane with a missing wheel, and a dreary transient-looking building labeled “Home Sweet Home.” At the bottom of the pile there was a creased snapshot of Martha. She was leaning against a big oak tree. She wore a light summer dress and the wind was blowing the skirt and her short yellow curls. She was laughing and holding down the skirt of her dress with both hands.

He took the picture and put it in his wallet. He didn’t want Brown to come across it and recognize her. Brown was the kind of man who might like to snoop into other people’s things in an innocent way.

There was a chest of drawers built into the wall. He put all his stuff into the top drawer and left the others empty. Using just the one drawer made him feel better. It emphasized the fact that he needn’t stay if he didn’t want to, or if anything happened. He could pack in three minutes and be out of here.

He closed his suitcases and put them in the closet. Then he strolled around the apartment, looking into cupboards, turning the stove off and on, seeing if the bed was comfortable, examining the books Forbes had left in the bookcase. He sat down again and took out the key ring Brown had given him. The keys were labeled with bits of cardboard: Ignition Chev. Door Chev. Ignition Cad. Door Cad. Apartment. House B door. Garage.

Seven keys. And that wasn’t half the number Brown had on his own key ring. Well, the more money you had, the more you had to lose and the more you spent on locks and keys. He remembered the house Martha used to live in. It had two doors, too, but neither of them was ever locked because someone had lost the keys years ago. Anyone could walk into the place any hour of the day or night, but nothing was ever stolen.

He separated the garage key from the others and went down and unlocked the side door of the garage. He climbed in behind the wheel of the Cadillac. He would have liked to take it out on the highway and test its speed. He started the motor. It had a nice steady hum that rose to a roar when he stepped on the gas. He let it roar for a minute, enjoying the feeling of being behind the wheel of a car again, instead of a plane or a jeep.

Idling the motor he looked at the dashboard. It had been carefully dusted and polished, the gas tank was full, and even the clock was still running. Illuminated by a shaft of sun that streamed in from the open door of the garage, its hands pointed to 4:20. He checked it with his watch and found it was exactly right. He pictured Forbes coming down here just before he left, to give the car a last once-over and say goodbye to it like an affectionate mother. And then, as a final touch, winding the clock, as if to make sure of leaving behind him for a time some trace of his existence in the mechanical moving hands.

4:22. He could see the clock all right, but the shaft of sunlight had disappeared. Someone had closed the garage door.

So quickly that the action was almost a reflex, he leaned forward and shut off the ignition. Then he opened the car door and got out.

He said, “This is a pretty big garage. It would probably take quite a while to fill it with carbon monoxide, but you’d better open that door anyway.”

The girl put one hand up to her mouth. “Oh. Oh, I never thought of that. I just didn’t want people to — well, you know how people spy on people.” She kicked the door open with her foot, keeping close to the wall. It was clear that she thought of herself as keeping a rendezvous and intended to squeeze the last ounce of drama from the occasion.

“You don’t remember me,” she said.

“Certainly I do. You’re Laura.” He would never have recognized her in a crowd, though. She was at least six inches taller. Her black bangs were gone, and her hair hung straight and smooth down to her shoulders.

“Come on, let’s sit in the car,” Laura said.

He didn’t budge. “Why?”

“Well, I haven’t seen you for years. I want to hear all about everything. I heard Brown telling Martha you were coming, so I skipped a psychology lab. They’re not very interesting anyway, just finding out your hot and cold spots, et cetera.”

“It sounds fascinating.”

“Well, it would be if you didn’t have to remember it.” Her voice trailed away and she moved her hands in a fluttery, embarrassed way. “Are you... aren’t you surprised to see how grown-up I am?”

“Yes, I am,” Steve said. “Very.”

She seemed satisfied with that, and became more at ease. “Are you going to live here?”

“For a while.”

“That will be fun.”

“For whom?”

“I only meant, it will be fun to have someone to talk to sometimes. I get so bored.”

He noticed that she had put on a thick layer of lipstick. When she talked she barely moved her mouth, as if she were afraid of smearing the lipstick or getting some on her teeth.

“I’m sorry you get so bored,” Steve said wryly.

“Have you got a cigarette?”

“I have, yes.” He raised the engine hood of the car and looked inside, hoping she would take the hint and leave.

“I’d like one.”

“Look,” he said. “Aren’t we starting off on the wrong track? You can’t hang around garages smoking cigarettes. You’re getting to be a big girl now. People might get the wrong impression. You know how people spy on people, don’t you?”

She flushed and backed away. “You don’t have to be so mean about it. And you don’t have to say it’s for my own good, either. If you knew how dull things are around here, how damned bloody dull!” She started to emote, but remembered the lipstick in time and changed her expression to one of boredom. “Now that Charley’s gone, it’s worse. We don’t even talk anymore, nobody has anything to say. I might just as well crawl into a corner and die. And no one would care, no one! Why can’t I have a cigarette?”

“It will stunt your growth.”

“I haven’t grown for a whole year.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake.” He banged down the hood of the engine. He took out a package of cigarettes and tossed them at her. “I hope you turn into a pygmy.”

“I haven’t any matches either.”

“Okay.” He flung a packet of matches in her direction. “You’re sure there isn’t anything else I could offer you? A martini? A Scotch and soda?”

“You don’t have to be sarcastic. A lot of girls my age smoke and drink. You’re behind the times.”

“Apparently.”

She lit the cigarette expertly. “As soon as people get to be twenty-five they start to get stuffy. No matter how nice they were to begin with. They don’t want other people to have a good time because they can’t anymore. Old age is a terrible thing. It makes everyone so sour.”

“Am I sour?”

“More than you used to be. You haven’t even smiled, for instance.”

“Haven’t I? Well, watch this one.” He smiled at her, very broadly.

She flung the cigarette on the floor and stamped on it, grinding it to shreds with the toe of her shoe.

“I guess I’ll go back now,” she said without raising her head.

“It would be better.”

“Do you ever get so... so discontented and — sad...?”

“Everyone does.”

She walked out slowly, as if she half-hoped he might call her back and explain everything to her.

He returned to the apartment, a little disturbed by the meeting. He had never been particularly fond of Laura. He had tolerated her because she happened to be Martha’s younger sister and because, at eleven, she wasn’t any more obnoxious than other eleven-year-olds.

But he found the new Laura rather pathetic. Sixteen, and suffering from growing pains, and passionate and conflicting desires. She wanted to live intensely or to die, to have a wonderful time or be a martyr; she wanted the excitement of a grand passion or the austerity of a nun’s cell. All extremes were possible, were even necessary to her in order that she might convince the world, which was gradually encroaching on her, that she was not an ordinary girl, but Laura, set apart and destined for extraordinary things.

Steve felt great sympathy for her, because he remembered his own adolescence. He’d been all appetite and acne, diffidence and conceit. His wrists grew overnight while his coat sleeves insidiously shrank. He blushed when any girl spoke to him, but with the utmost confidence he related all kinds of improbable sex experiences to his friends and listened with complete gullibility to theirs.

He had met Martha when he was seventeen and in high school. She was two years younger than he was, but with the worldly precocity of certain females she seemed already grown up and ready for the responsibilities of marriage and children. Their first date together was a dance at the school. Neither of them could dance very well, so they sat most of the evening on one of the benches lined up along the gymnasium wall and studied the other dancers with desperate intensity.

They danced the last number together, “I Love You Truly.” She was as tall as he was and their knees bumped every now and then as they waltzed the length of the floor. The gymnasium had, as it always did at the dances, a strong odor of sweat and unwashed feet, but Steve didn’t notice.

He leaned close to Martha. “You smell swell,” he told her.

“It’s only perfume,” Martha said.

She was very direct like that, when he first knew her. She was never coy, she didn’t feign interest in anything merely to please him. Later on, when he was in the university and she was a stenographer with a contracting firm he took her to a few football games. She didn’t like or understand football and so she didn’t watch the game. But afterwards she would describe all the people who’d been sitting near them, particularly the girls. She thought that since they were college girls they were worth noticing, and, occasionally, copying.

Now and then they discussed, seriously, the idea of marrying for money, he, some rich old dowager who would eat herself into the grave, and she, some elderly man with a weak heart. They decided that money was very important, and even if the dowager and the elderly man required a few years to die, the money would be worth waiting for.

But the day he got his first job as a cub reporter, he paid the down payment on a $75 diamond ring. When he gave it to her he was very happy. He thought it was wonderful to be only twenty-one and have a job and be engaged to the prettiest girl in the world. In the ensuing months, some of the wonder wore off. Though the circumstances remained the same, he began to interpret them differently. There he was, only twenty-one and already tied down to one woman and holding down a job that wouldn’t support them both. His own immaturity and the scornful attitude of his older, more sophisticated friends did nothing to help him.

Neither did Martha. She was very anxious to get married and showed it. When she met him in the evenings, she was starry-eyed, but in a few minutes she’d start talking about budgets and how much she’d saved and how much he could save if he really wanted to. He was always a little shocked that she could look so dreamy and moonstruck while she was talking about lunch allowances and necessary expenditures. The second quarrel came easier than the first, and after that there was a whole series of scenes, and they both realized that they couldn’t go on in this way. They must do something, break apart or get married, or become lovers.

They became lovers on the sofa in Martha’s parlor while the family slept upstairs. Silent and terrified, she lay down on the sofa, listening for sounds that would warn her if the family woke up. They didn’t, though they remarked off and on during the next few months that Martha was putting on weight, and how marvelous she looked with a little extra color in her cheeks and flesh on her bones.

Though he, too, noticed the miraculous physical change in Martha, he knew she was suffering from a feeling of guilt. When she was with the family her eyes shifted in a furtive way and she was unnaturally talkative and noisy, like a bird which makes a great racket over an empty nest to distract attention from its real one.

Alone with him, she was moody. Sometimes she cried, or she was cold and silent, or talked in a cynical, brassy way about their relationship. And because his own guilt echoed hers, he grew enraged with her. Most of the time he was with her they quarreled but when he wasn’t with her he felt strangely protective and responsible for her. He tried to figure out the cause of the situation, what was at fault — nature for maturing the female more rapidly than the male and having her ready for the responsibilities of marriage when she was still very young — or the economic system which forced the male to postpone marriage; or just the plain biological instincts which didn’t recognize the necessity for the ritual of marriage.

He thought a great deal about it but he always came to the same conclusion. He didn’t want to get married because he couldn’t support a wife. The present was precarious and he couldn’t depend on the future. To double the burden would be to double the risks.

He left early in the year 1941. She took it very calmly, giving him back his ring in a matter-of-fact manner. He refused to take it. He argued, and lost his temper. He told her he loved her, he was coming back, he wanted her to wait for him.

“You may change your mind,” she said, and dropped the ring casually into his pocket. “You couldn’t stand being tied down.”

The last he saw of her she was standing on the porch of the house. The snow was falling and he couldn’t tell whether she was crying or not because the snow kept melting on her eyelids and her cheeks.

He had one letter from her. It came before he left the country, while he was still at the camp in Florida. It was a crisp little note to the effect that it was “bad taste” for him to continue writing to her. Their engagement was broken and “people” were beginning to think it was funny for her to get so many letters. She didn’t want any “talk.”

People, bad taste, talk. She’d always been very conscious of them and now her consciousness had doubled, nourished by her feeling of guilt. She had sinned and she had enjoyed sinning, and though no one found out about it, she was incapable of acting natural any longer. She must satisfy her conscience by appeasing the whole world.

If she had given any indication that she wanted him back, he would have come running. He missed her a good deal. In the regimentation of his new life, his ego took a beating that her presence could have softened for him. Quite a few of the boys at camp were married and their wives lived in the town. Most of them were cheerful, good-looking girls who sat and drank beer with their husbands on Saturday nights. They didn’t appear nervous or irritable, the way he’d expected women to be who knew their husbands were going to leave them shortly and stood a good chance of never coming back.

The more he saw of wives, the more taken up he was with the idea of marrying Martha and bringing her down to camp. One night, after a shattering experience in a new fighter, he phoned her. While he was waiting for a chance at the phone, he planned what he was going to say: Listen, Martha, I was wrong, I was a chump. Martha, let’s get married. You could come down here and I could be home a couple of nights a week and over the weekends. There are lots of wives here. They’re a swell bunch, you’d like them. How about it, darling?

The phone rang and rang but nobody answered.

It was after that that her letter came and he realized he was just pipe-dreaming. She would never marry him; or, if she did, she would never forget his initial reluctance. It would come between them for the rest of their lives because her pride would never entirely heal. He sailed for England without seeing her.

He looked out across the lawn to the house. He wondered if Martha was there now, thinking over the same things as he had. What had she felt when she met him on the street? Surprise and resentment, that was obvious. Perhaps a sudden desire for revenge, too, using Charles as the weapon. The empty apartment might be merely a part of a preconceived plan she had for getting back at him; it would help to assuage her vanity, to be in a position to do him favors and make him feel obliged to her.

He didn’t actually believe she had such a plan, but its possibilities annoyed him. For a moment he thought of packing and leaving right away, just in case. But the rent had already been paid and he couldn’t afford to throw away fifty dollars. Nor could he afford to turn down favors.

He thought of at least a dozen reasons why he should stay, but the real one hadn’t yet occurred to him — that he wanted to be near Martha.