A Charmed Life (31 page)

At once, she began to feel better. There was no reason to worry until she had talked to Jane. She combed her hair and did it up. She looked at herself in the mirror and could see no difference in her face. In the kitchen, the water was boiling. She could hear John in the parlor, shaking down the coals. Everything was all right. She was certain, now, that the picnic had come
after
the play-reading. “What’s the matter, Martha?” He had been watching her while she squeezed the oranges. “Nothing,” she said, smiling. “Was I making faces? I was thinking about the play.” The play, she thought, wryly, was
some
good. He was used to seeing her brood about it.

As soon as the breakfast dishes were finished, she went into her study and shut the door. It was no use calling Jane. Martha knew perfectly well that the picnic had preceded the play-reading. They had not had a picnic since the big storm that week end. She sat down at her writing-table and buried her head in her hands. How was it that she had never even considered the possibility that Miles might have made her pregnant? Without actually forgetting it, she had dismissed that night from her attention; John often said that she had an unconscious as strong as a horse. After the next day, the day Warren had left, she had hardly given Miles a thought. She was through with him for good; he held no further interest or terror for her. He was as dead as a clinker. And, strangely enough, except for the play, she had never felt happier or more secure with John. The air had cleared that night. She had stopped being haunted by the past, and John had stopped being haunted by the future. He had relaxed; she could tell from the way he slept. That was why it had seemed so fitting that they should have been rewarded this month with a child.

It could not be Miles’s, Martha said to herself, boldly, hammering on the desk. Her feminine instinct, her very bones told her that it could not be. If it were Miles’s, she would be throwing up and rejecting it. She would not have waked up happy this morning. Statistically, all the chances were against it. If she had slept with Miles once during the month, she had slept with John repeatedly. If she
were
pregnant, it could not be Miles who had caused it.

He simply could not be the father of an embryo inside her. Statistically or otherwise, the idea was too unlikely. It was well known that a woman could not conceive right after her period; that was what Catholics called one of the “safe times.” She and John had been making love all through the “fertile” days—the ovulation period. If she
were
pregnant, the baby must be John’s. It was the reason she had been seeking for their return to New Leeds.

Martha frowned. She had not intended to write this morning. How could she be expected to with this uncertainty weighing on her? Nevertheless, to her surprise, she found herself inserting paper in her typewriter and beginning to type out the second act. It was two o’clock in the afternoon when John knocked at her door, with a tray of sandwiches and milk. “You must have had a good day,” he said approvingly. “Yes,” said Martha, with a start. It was true. She had had an amazingly good day; her “condition,” if it were one, had completely slipped her mind, and it only recalled itself to her, like a shadow, as she began to drink her milk.

She did not think about it again till the next morning, when she woke to find that her breasts were still sore. This time, she was immediately conscious of an unpleasant, disturbing emotion, as if all night she had been having bad dreams. She rehearsed the same arguments, proving to herself that the baby, if there was one, had to be John’s. By the time she was dressed, she had convinced herself again. Again, she went to her study and wrote the whole morning, “losing” herself in the characters. In the middle of the afternoon, while she was marketing, she was positive that she had started to menstruate. But when she got home with the groceries, she found she was mistaken. That night they had dinner with the Coes. The next morning, she woke up rigid, literally scared stiff. Her only wish was to go back to sleep and dream that she had dreamed this. But she was wide awake.

A baby was a baby, she said to herself suddenly. What difference did it make whose it was? No one would ever know.

“But
I
would know,” she whispered. “Or, rather, I wouldn’t know. That would be just it.” Supposing, for the sake of argument, she were to let the child be born, without saying anything, what would follow? Assuming the worst, it might look like Miles; it might have red hair. But this was not the worst. If it looked like Miles, then at least she would know; other people would merely find a strange coincidence and somebody would talk about her Viking ancestors—Jane Coe or Miles himself. A new thought made her feel faint. If it looked like him,
Miles
would know! He would try to assert a claim on it, somehow. She would finally be what he had always wanted: the mother of his child. And even, she reasoned, if the child did not look like him, Miles might still decide that it was his. That is, if he thought about the dates. Fortunately, he was unnoticing in such matters: he could never remember that Thursday was the maid’s day off, and Sunday and Daylight Saving took him unawares, like giant firecrackers exploding under him as he sat, reflecting, on a sofa. But Miles was inconsistent; this
one time
he might notice and count back. In fact, with his suspicious nature, if a glint of the thought came to him, he would assume that the child was his, without further question. She could not tolerate this, even if it were only an inkling in Miles’s brooding mind. He would destroy all of them, given this opportunity. If he were to let on to John, John would probably kill him and go to jail for life. That would eliminate Miles, but she could not permit it. She would have to kill Miles herself.

These melodramatic possibilities were not highly likely, but they could not be ignored. She could not run such risks. It occurred to her that she and John could leave New Leeds, leave the country, even, to get away from Miles. This, she recalled with bitter irony, was exactly where they had started, when she had thought of kidnapping Barrett. It seemed as if there were something preordained in their situation that wished to condemn them to eternal exile, like poor Vronsky and Anna, like the Duke of Windsor:
“Vil spectacle aux humains de la faiblesse de l’amour.”
And this was not the worst. The worst would be not to know herself, for certain, whose the child was. If John should ever find out, he would share this misery. She knew very well what they would do; they would set out to have another child at once, just as if this first one were a defective. And this first one, poor waif, would always be a special case. They would always be looking at it for a clue as to whose it was. Whenever it was bad, John would be sure it was Miles’s. She herself might love it too intensely, in order to compensate for the doubt. In any case, she could not trust herself to give it a normal life; for her, with her speculative tendencies, that would be impossible, no matter what her intentions. Already, she could feel pity for this unborn being suffusing her, and pity was very unreliable, as a guide to conduct. It signified a conquered repugnance.

But all this, she told herself, was perhaps too abstract. When the baby was born, she might forget all these doubts and simply take it as it was, for its own sake. What if she and John had adopted an orphan, a foundling? They would not care for it any the less because its parentage was unknown. Ah, she replied: but there was a great difference between the totally unknown and a knowledge that has been narrowed to a choice between two possibilities. It would be idle to speculate about a foundling.

By the end of the week, a new, unexpected factor had assumed control of the situation: inertia. Martha felt like a blob of matter decreed by the laws of physics to continue in its existing state of motion unless some outside force interfered. Waking in the mornings to know, even as her eyes opened, that nothing had changed, she promptly fell asleep again. In her dreams, she saw luscious images: white pitchers of milk and sheaves of the reddest roses. The delicious lassitude that was taking hold of her was presumably a symptom of pregnancy. She wanted to do nothing but sleep and let nature take its course. The need for decision lost its urgency. It was surprisingly easy not to think about the problem. And if she simply forgot about it and let the days glide by, as they were doing, she would find that it had all been settled for her. Nature, physiology, would take it out of her hands. She had only to announce, one of these mornings, that she was pregnant, to acquire the status of a privileged person. She would not be
allowed
to worry; the doctor, John, his relations would see to that. She would be carried resistlessly forward, as if on a litter, to childbed—a sensually tempting vision. She was not afraid of labor, and she liked the swollen looks of pregnant women, even the dresses they wore. Her hips were fairly wide, for a small girl; she was healthy. It would all be simple and normal. The lawfulness of the whole picture had a special charm for Martha.

The obstacles in the path were too great, the other way. How could she have an abortion without John’s finding out? In the first place, she had no money. In the second place, she had not the faintest notion, any more, of how to set about finding an abortionist. There had been a drive against them since her last operation. Some girls, she knew, got their psychiatrists to certify them for a legal abortion, but she had never been to a psychiatrist. And how was she to go to Boston to start looking for an abortionist? John would want to know why. She did not even dare go to the doctor here in New Leeds to find out whether she was really pregnant. Somebody would be bound to see her in the doctor’s office. The next thing, John would hear. An actress she had played with was said to start herself miscarrying with a hatpin, but the thought made Martha quail. She did not have a hatpin, and in her present state of lethargy it seemed as difficult to procure one as to procure the services of an abortionist. Even if she got one, she would not know how to use it.

She felt completely helpless and aware of her dependency on John. If she could only tell John, he would get her whatever she needed: a hatpin, ergot, a psychiatrist, a curettage. But the one thing she was certain of was that she must not do this, not even if she were dying. If everything urged her to have the baby, it was because, if she did nothing, he would never know. The deceit practiced on him would be for his own protection. And if she were to have an abortion, it would be his child she would be murdering, in all probability—the very child she had been yearning for. The word, abortion, coming from her, would blast his faith in human nature. And of course he would guess the reason.

The marvel was that, so far, he had noticed nothing, so far as she could tell. He was full of gentle attentions because he thought she was absorbed in her play. This innocent chivalry was why he must never find out. He was too fastidious; his soul would never recover if he knew. He would not mind the act itself so much as the grotesque fact of pregnancy following on it: the horrible mess, the afterbirth, so to speak, of the act. He could not conceive that she would not have taken precautions. His strictness could not bear even small lapses in her, slips of memory. A lapse on this scale would send his whole world sliding into troll-land. If it had been anybody but Miles that she had slipped with, it would not have mattered so much. But he had saved her from Miles in the first place. Miles, for John, was the Other; that was how they had construed him together, studying his traits with wonder, as if in some old Book of Monsters. And for her to have lain with him, breeding, was a sort of hideous perversion, like sleeping with your wicked uncle.

To Martha, as the person involved, it did not look quite that way, even now. True, she would much rather
not
have slept with Miles, but she could not pretend that the act itself awoke any deep remorse in her. In its consequences, it was horrible, but in essence it was only rather ludicrous, a misadventure. She still could not believe that having slept with Miles could make any difference to the true reality, which was her life with John. This true reality, surrounding her at every moment in the routines of their household, seemed to affirm that nothing could change: if she would only shut her eyes and forget, the bad dream would go away.

Yet all the while the moral part of Martha knew that she would have to have an abortion because all her inclinations were the other way. The hardest course was the right one; in her experience, this was an almost invariable law. If her nature shrank from the task, if it hid and cried piteously for mercy, that was a sign that she was in the presence of the ethical. She knew this also from the fact that she felt no need to seek advice; what anyone else would do under the circumstances had no bearing. The moral part of her seemed to square its shoulders dissociating itself from the mass of weakness that remained. It was almost a social question, she observed with a wan interest: the moral part of her would stop speaking if she did not do what it commanded. But how, she cried out, weeping. How am I to do it, all by myself? There was no answer. The rest of her, the low part, apparently, was supposed to devise the methods. The lawgiver was impractical, a real lady, disdaining to soil its hands, leaving the details to its servants. Martha could have laughed aloud, except for the pride and awe she felt in the acquaintance. She would not have guessed she had so much integrity. In the midst of her squirming and anguish, there was a sensation of pleased surprise.

The first step, she told herself, would be the easiest: merely going to the doctor, which would not commit her to anything. But she kept delaying. As long as she put it off, she could still live in hope and go to sleep at night, half-expecting her period in the morning. Several numb days passed before she found herself in the local doctor’s consulting room, having complained to John of peculiar pains in her stomach. At once, she was sorry she had come. The old office she remembered had been redone, in a modernistic style, with chromium and pebbly fabrics and paintings by the local artists. She sat facing the doctor across a blond wood desk. His voice was too loud; she had to ask him to lower it, because John was waiting outside. And right away the explanations began. She had to tell this stout, coarse young man with gold-rimmed glasses that she thought she might be pregnant but that she did not want her husband to know yet. He examined her perfunctorily and took a sample of urine to send away to the laboratory for the rabbit test. She could come back in three or four days. “Three or four days!” cried Martha. “In New York, they let you know in twenty-four hours.” A boundless irritation with New Leeds swept through her. It was not modern, only modernistic, like this awful furniture. “Can’t you tell me yourself?” She longed for the old doctor, now resting in the cemetery, who used to treat dogs and had no traffic with laboratories. “Why, it’s as big as an orange,” he always said, when the young wives came to him to learn whether they were pregnant. “Not at this stage,” said the young doctor. “I would only be guessing.” “What’s your hurry?” he went on jocosely. “You’ll have a good seven months to wait.”