Barbara Greer (48 page)

Very quietly, he said, ‘If you sit down, I'll tell you.'

She went to the sofa again and sat down. For a moment or two she faced him, her eyes bright and defiant. Then she put her hands to her face. ‘Oh, Carson. Please—please don't be kind to me.'

He stood up, went to the sofa, and sat down beside her. ‘I'm going to be kind to you,' he said, ‘because you're my wife and I love you very much. Now tell me something …'

‘What? What is it?'

‘Do you still love me?'

‘I don't know. I think I do, but I don't know.' She looked up at him again. ‘Do you know what terrifies me?' she asked. ‘I'm terrified that I'm not even the kind of woman who just has affairs—but the kind of woman who has to have affairs to be happy, who always has to have someone else besides her husband, a secret one somewhere. There are women like that, aren't there? And if I'm like that, Carson, it means that Barney really helped keep you and me together for the last two years—and not the rules. It means that having him there, in Burketown, to think about was something I needed in some crazy way to sustain my end of our marriage. And if that's the kind of person I am, what is there to hold you and me together now that he's dead?'

‘Nothing, unless you still love me,' he said.

‘But I don't know if I do.'

‘But you think you do …'

‘Yes. Oh, yes …'

‘That's all I wanted to know,' he said, and his voice shook slightly. ‘Now listen—please listen to me.'

‘Yes.'

‘Tonight, after talking to Jesse, coming here in the taxi, I had one idea.'

‘What is it?'

‘I don't know if it would work. Or if it would be possible. But I thought I might talk to your father, or to your cousin Billy, or whoever's in charge up there.'

She straightened up. ‘What about?'

‘A job.'

‘A job? What sort of a job?'

‘A job with the paper company.'

‘Oh, no!' she said. ‘You're not serious.'

‘Yes I am,' he said.

‘But why?'

‘I've got to get some sort of job. Perhaps they can use me. Besides, I think we ought to go to Burketown.'

‘I'll never go back there. I couldn't.'

‘But I think that's what we should do,' he repeated.

‘Why? Why do you think we should?'

‘Maybe they don't need another salesman. But if they do, it will be a job—'

‘There are hundreds of other jobs.'

‘Yes, but there are other reasons.'

‘What? What reasons are there?'

‘Well, one is that if they hired me perhaps I could do something for the company. At least I'd be in a position to try. From what I gather, it's been pretty badly managed. They're up to their necks in mortgages. I owe it to your family at least to try.'

‘Why? What do you owe them? You owe them nothing!'

‘I do, as a matter of fact,' he said. ‘I've never told you this, but it was your grandfather who helped me get this job—here, in Locustville.'

‘What?'

‘Yes. He helped a great deal. It was through his influence.'

‘Why didn't you ever tell me that?'

‘I suppose it was because I was ashamed of it,' he said. ‘Still, it's the truth.'

‘Well, what difference does that make? He's dead.'

‘And there's another, even more important reason—the main reason.'

‘What is that?'

‘I think we should go back there for your sake,' he said. ‘That's why I'd be willing to take almost any job they offered me, even if it wasn't a selling job. For instance, I was thinking—they might even let me have Barney's job.'

Very softly she said, ‘Why do you say it's for my sake? I hate it there.'

‘Of course,' he said. ‘It's not something that I want to do, either. I dread it, too, just as much as you do. It probably won't be pleasant or fun or anything like that. But after this—after what's happened—with this scandal and with it involving you—I think the worst thing in the world that you could do would be to run away somewhere and try to hide from it. The best thing would be to go back, and face it, and live with it—and show everybody that you can live with it. And I'll be there helping you show them. And it's more than just what effect it would have on what other people think. It's mostly the effect that it would have on you, and what you eventually come to think of yourself.'

‘No,' she shook her head. ‘No. I don't understand you. And I don't care. Because I'll never to back there, and that's all there is to it.'

‘But you've got to,' he said. ‘It's what will give you your maturity.'

‘My maturity. Don't you see—there's something wrong with me. Something was left out of me. Maybe it's the ability to mature. I should have matured, but I didn't. And it's their fault—they kept me from growing up. I know that now—something I never knew before. That's why I'm never going back.'

‘I used to think that marriage was a very simple thing,' he said. ‘I used to thing that being married would mean that everything got simpler, and all the problems got smaller and easier. But that isn't true. The opposite is true. Things get harder, and it's doing the biggest and the hardest things, being able to do them, forcing yourself to do them, that makes it work out in the end …'

‘No, no. I can't, that's all. Look,' she said, ‘I own a few shares of paper company stock and Peggy would like nothing better than to get her hands on them. I can sell my stock to her, Carson, and it would give us a little money to go on. We could move somewhere, far away, and start over again.'

‘No,' he said. That's the thing we can't do.'

‘And, with that money, there'd be enough so you wouldn't have to work for a while—you wouldn't have to take the first job that comes along.'

‘No,' he said again.

She stood up quickly and walked across the room. ‘Then you'll have to go alone,' she said. ‘I won't go with you.'

‘Of course there's no assurance it would work. I can't promise you it would work. But the thing we'd have to do is try. And I don't mean we'd have to stay in Burketown for ever, either. Perhaps a year, perhaps two years. As long as it takes.'

She stood with her back to him. ‘Didn't you hear what I said?' she asked him quietly. ‘I said you'll have to go alone. I won't go back there with you.'

‘Barbara—'

‘What?'

‘Don't you understand why we must do this?'

‘I'm sorry.' She turned and walked toward the kitchen door. She hesitated, then turned and pushed open the screened door that led out on to the little terrace. The air was chilly as she stepped out, and she shivered. He rose and followed her.

He stood behind her in the doorway. ‘Barbara,' he said, ‘do you want to hear my philosophy of life?'

She looked at the night and the trees and the neat little garden. ‘All right,' she said.

‘I was thinking—on the plane, coming back. It's funny, but riding on a plane always make me think philosophical thoughts, about life and what life is all about because—well; to me at least, a plane trip is always like courting death. I think each time I take off that I'll never land alive and I always thank God when I do. That may sound silly and cowardly, but that's the way I am. And perhaps it's a good thing if it makes a person stop and think,' he said. ‘Do you understand what I mean?'

‘Yes,' she said. ‘Yes, go on …'

‘And I was thinking today, on the plane, about God, and how God made the heavens and the earth and the fishes and the beasts—and He made Man, shaped him and moulded him. But then I thought, God is a crazy potter. Look at the strange shapes He's turned out on His wheel. But in His own mad way, He managed to make a bit of sense from it all. He was mad, certainly, to create such a thing as love. Because it's love tht makes the pottery crack the worst—like home-made clay left out in the sun too long. But then I thought: He also gave love the power to patch up the cracks—not perfectly, not good as new perhaps, but patched nevertheless. And then I thought about myself, what I am. Like any madman, God turns out certain masterpieces now and then. But I'm not one of them. I'll never write a bit of poetry or paint a picture, or leave much of a footprint in the sands of time. I'm a salesman. Does the world need salesmen? You could argue about that, I suppose, but anyway that's what I am. I'm not one of God's masterpieces. But I can offer you something, Barbara. I can offer you a place, a plateau, from which to view the world if you are looking for such a place. And I can offer you my love. What you've said—what you told me about Barney, about the boy in Hawaii—that doesn't matter so much to me, Barbara, because, to me, those are only little cracks and perhaps I can help you patch them. With my love, I mean. And if you will come with me to the place I have in mind, all I'll be doing will be selling paper, selling napkins, selling whatever there is to be sold. That will be your husband—from nine to five, anyway. But the rest of the time I'll be loving you, Barbara—in this place. There'll be no more rules,' he said softly, ‘except this one. And this isn't a rule at all, but a promise. Does anything I've said make any sense to you?'

His words sounded very simple, even innocent. And yet they affected her in a queer way, moved her in one of those rare—increasingly rare as we grow older—floods of longing, happiness and love. She turned and looked at his face. It was a simple, unspectacular face with no surprises in it. But it was his dear face, the face she had loved so dearly back at Princeton, the face she had watched from the darkened seat next to her in dozens of movie theatres, the face on the pillow in the morning, drunk with sleep, the face he turned to her when suddenly a pleasant thought for them both occurred to him (‘Let's go out to dinner. Let's take a drive in the new car'). It was the face that she had grown so used to seeing, whose expressions and moods and depths and smiles she knew so well—her husband's face. She let this feeling hover over her, as it seemed to, with small, silently beating wings. His face now was troubled and anxious, waiting for her answer. In his hand he held a cigarette, rolling it this way and that, nervously, between his long well-knuckled fingers.

‘Barbara,' he said quietly, ‘it doesn't make any difference where we live, does it? As long as we love one another?'

She had been about to speak when he added—spoiling, though only slightly, the effect his words had just had upon her—‘Besides, it's only temporary.'

After all, he would be always Carson.

‘All right,' she said. ‘I'll go home with you.'

She turned quickly away and stood on the little terrace, her back to the house, looking out at the tiny strip of view, at the broad, dark valley, at the silhouettes of the prim brick houses on the street, and, beyond the houses, to the hollow in the hill where all of the lights of Locustville swam before her eyes. Locustville had always seemed most beautiful at night, like Italy! And she thought: Yes, it's all right; I never knew where home was.

She suddenly discovered that Dobie was standing just beside her. Their talk had awakened him and he stood in his pyjamas, rubbing his eyes, but, half-asleep, he hadn't seen his father standing in the shadows. She saw Dobie's face looking up at her. She knelt, placing her hands beneath his armpits, and lifted him into her arms. He was getting so heavy that she almost lost her balance and stepped back quickly to regain it. She held him tightly.

‘
Where
are we going, Mummy?' he asked her.

‘To grandmother's house, Dobie,' she said. ‘Over the hill to grandmother's house.' She carried him toward the door. ‘Won't that be fun, Dobie?' she said. ‘Won't that be fun?'

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1959 by Stephen Birmingham

Cover design by Amanda Shaffer

ISBN: 978-1-5040-4047-1

Distributed in 2016 by Open Road Distribution

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