Random Winds (23 page)

“And I,” Mary spoke so low that he could barely hear her, “I wanted to get away from that dim house. Would I have waited three years more? I don’t know. You can’t imagine how I wanted to get away and—and live!”

“I can,” Martin said.

“Yet I ask myself, was it really as bad as all that? I’ve
told you before, one has no right to be a fifteen-year-old romantic when one’s twenty.”

“You’ve made up for it,” he said gently.

“Oh yes, I’m a hundred years older!” She clasped her hands under her chin; her rings flashed in the darkness. “How easily one throws oneself away! As if one could replace oneself and all the lost days. I would do differently now.”

“You can’t be sure of that. We torture ourselves, all of us do, with questions that can’t be answered.”

“I wonder,” Mary said, “whether my children will ever wonder about me someday and ask whether I’ve been happy.”

“That’s a strange thought.”

“Not really. I often think about my mother. You would have liked her, Martin. She was so different from Father. I never knew why they married. I think he was overawed just because she was so different from him. Sometimes at the table she would talk, and I knew he wasn’t even listening. He didn’t care about any of the things she loved.”

Martin looked down into the trees. The dark pines and her evocation of old memories were suddenly oppressive.

“Don’t,” he said.

“Don’t what?”

“Talk about sad things.”

“I didn’t mean to be sad. You do the talking, then.”

“No, I’d rather hear you. I don’t know you enough, Mary. I should need a lifetime to know you and I won’t have it.”

“Now you’re the one who’s talking of sad things.”

What’s to become of us, he thought, now that we have begun something that can’t go on and also can’t end?

He roused himself. “Come. We’ll go down and walk on the beach. It’s too beautiful to waste a minute of it.”

In Nice they walked on the Promenade des Anglais, while a stream of smart, snub-nosed Renaults went by. Stepping quietly in the hush of grandeur, they looked at shop windows and marble lobbies. From a terrace they observed a nineteenth-century panorama: wide effect of water and gauzy sky, of sails, white dresses, pillars and balustrades.
Sprightly music played and no one, Martin saw, noticed that the musicians had threadbare cuffs.

“Let’s go back to Menton,” he said abruptly.

“You’re a funny duck! We just got here!”

“Do you mind? If you really do, I’ll stay.”

“No. We can have a country lunch if you’d rather.”

“Then I’d rather.”

At a market in a walled village on the Grand Corniche they bought food: cheese, fruit, bread and the shriveled black olives of the region. On the side of the road they stopped to eat.

“Better than all that splendor,” Martin remarked.

“It made you uncomfortable?”

“Yes, that sort of thing’s a snare. A doctor must never let himself forget ordinary people. It’s only too easy.”

“For you, do you mean, or for anyone?”

“I’m no different from anyone else. Or maybe I am. I want beauty terribly, and beauty in this world can be expensive.”

“I think you’re too hard on yourself.”

“That’s what Jessie always says.”

Mary looked away. Her face was sad. “I’d managed for at least two hours not to think of her until just now.”

“We’re not going to hurt her,” he protested. “Neither of us wants to or will.”

“But I’ll know when I look at her, or at you, or at myself.”

He closed his eyes, shutting out the noon brightness. “We couldn’t have helped it—the whole thing, from the beginning.”

“I’m so sorry for us all!”

“For Alex, too?”

“No, he’s as happy as possible, in his circumstances. You know,” she said, “I’ve accepted all that … Did you ever think I really would?” There was a spiritual beauty in her face as the sadness ebbed into grave calm.

“Yes,” Martin said, “I did think you would. I remember, on the day we met, how compassionately you spoke of Jessie.”

“But to be truly compassionate, one needs to have suffered.
One needs to have been alone. I know that now. I didn’t then.”

“Mary … tell me, is it terribly hard for you now, the way things are?”

She was silent for a while. He did not interrupt her silence.

Then she said, “You might say it’s as if I were a widow, living with a kind brother. Not the worst fate in the world, I suppose. Thank God, I have my children and my art, such as it is.”

But if she didn’t have the children, she would be free. Yet, if she were free and he not free, how would he feel about that? Guiltily, Martin repressed the selfish thought.

“Listen to me,” he said. “We’re overanalyzing. Let’s just accept, instead. What’s past is past. There’s nothing we can do about it now.”

She stood up. “You said we mustn’t spoil our days here, and you were right So, no more talk! Let’s go back to the beach and pretend we have all the time in the world.”

Three more days. For long hours they lay in a hidden hollow of the beach, under the escarpment of the hills out of whose rocks these ancient villages had been carved. On a promontory, like a finger thrust out into the sea, the tearing wind had bent pines into the attitude of prayer. But in this windless hollow the warmth was kindly, the air was like silk on the skin and the sand like silk.

He took her hand. It seemed to him that strength flowed from one to the other through their hands. And he thought that ultimate joy would be to lie forever in this sun, to float in this sea—for was the sea not once our home?—and to wake in the first light with this woman next to him.

Coming back to their room one day they found the maid cleaning. “I saw you walking yesterday,” she said. “M’sieur and Madame looked so happy.” She spoke with the awkward boldness of one who is naturally shy. “I watched you laughing, and I felt happy, too. I’m going to be married on Saturday.”

“Oh,” Mary cried, “we shall be gone by then! Is he the
young man who waited for you at the end of the drive last night?”

Blushing, the girl nodded. “You could have come to the wedding in my village. It’s not far from here.”

Mary reached into the closet for her dressing gown, white silk embroidered with red Chinese poppies. “I want you to have this,” she said and, as the girl protested, “No, I want you to. I’ve been so happy wearing it. It will bring you luck.”

“I wonder what sort of children they’ll have,” she said when the girl had left. “She, with her round face and pug nose? The boy is thin and has a craggy nose. He looks gentle.”

“You wonder about everything, don’t you? You’re probably the most curious person I’ve ever known,” he answered, smiling at her.

There was a radiant joy in her eyes. He saw that for the moment her spirit was unencumbered. He wished it might always be so …

“I would like to have gone to that girl’s wedding,” Mary said.

“Why would you?”

“I saw a country wedding here once. The bride was a farm girl in a homemade dress. After the ceremony she laid her bouquet at the feet of the Virgin in the side chapel. I think they pray for many children, I’m not sure. I would pray that I had chosen the right man … Afterward they drove away in an old car with daisy streamers tied on. It was very touching … I cried.”

Could it have been like that for us? Martin wondered.

One more day. In the afternoon they went walking inland. Everything drowsed. Birds were silent. Houses with closed shutters lay sleeping in the heat. Plane trees in long alleys were quiet in the windless air.

“Siesta time,” Mary said.

“I know. But we can’t waste it” And he said, “I’ve never made love on the grass.”

She laughed. The sound was happiness, and this happiness was beautiful to Martin, seductive and yet pure.

“Why wonder? Let’s find out.”

They walked on past a field where cows rested in the shade, then climbed a fence into a dark little grove. Still the world slept; there was no one in sight. Behind a curtain of living green they lay down, in the hush and murmur of the breathing meadow.

The last day. Late in the afternoon Martin came out to the terrace and paused in the doorway. Unaware of his presence, Mary sat with bowed head. She had changed into traveling clothes; their neutral tan was sober in the pastel afternoon. And this sober color, the curve of her skirt and her bent head created a melancholy which, if you were to translate it into music, would quiver into a minor chord and die on the air. He stood there looking and looking. There was something in his throat. He kept swallowing, but it wouldn’t go down. The she saw him.

“The bags are downstairs,” he said.

She nodded.

“They’ve taken the car. Well get a taxi to the station.” He sat down and took her hand. It lay limply in his. “There’s time for something to eat,” he said.

“I can’t.”

“But you must,” he said and asked the waitress for a tureen of soup.

And he sat there wishing, wishing that they were just beginning, that they were going away somewhere, to Afghanistan or Patagonia, where they would shed everything: names, past, everything.

“What have we done?” Mary whispered.

“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing to hurt anybody, since that’s what you mean.”

“Nobody?”

“No. Alex wouldn’t care and Jessie will never know.”

“And what about you and me? What is to become of us?”

Below them lay eternal blue, azure and turquoise, blue upon rippling blue. He stared out over the water.

And Mary repeated, “Tell me, what’s to become of us?”

“I don’t know … I’ll think … There must be something.”

“Oh God!” she cried.

“Dearest. Dearest. Don’t.”

She turned her face away.

The waitress came back with the tureen. “Careful, it’s hot! Shall I bring a salad?”

“Madame is not feeling well. This will be enough,” Martin said.

“So now we just get on the train and go back,” Mary cried. “Nothing more? And that’s all? I’m twenty-eight,” she said, and he understood that she meant “I’m too young to settle for ‘nothing more.’ ”

The wheels of daily living turn regardlessly. So he paid the bill and tipped the waitress, checked in his pocket for the train tickets and summoned a taxi.

The train clattered northward. At a rural stop, a couple with three children entered the compartment; the youngest was asleep on the father’s shoulder. The man’s face was tender; his hand cupped the small head.

When a rag doll dropped to the floor from the girl’s sleeping hand, Martin picked it up. And he remembered Claire, who slept with a doll in a tattered orange dress.

At the same moment Mary said, “Emmy and Isabel have dolls like that. Alex bought them in France.” Her lips trembled.

If Mary’s children were mine, Martin thought, and Claire belonged to Mary—

She laid her head on the back of the seat. He remembered that she had told him how she found escape in sleep. Rest then, he thought, drawing the shade to keep the light from flickering on her face. Her breasts rose and fell under the tan silk. He remembered their perfume. If they had been alone in the compartment, he would have put his head next to hers. But now these strangers were here, sitting like monoliths on Easter Island. Every time he looked up, he met the curious eyes of these innocent strangers, and he hated them.

All through the long trip to England, to the parting place, his thoughts went round and round like a poor
blinded mule at the threshing floor. There must be a way … There is no way.… There must be a way …There is no way …

They were astonished to be met at the railroad station in London by Alex Lamb. Even before the train had come to a halt under the glass roof and the iron fretwork they saw him scanning the carriages, then running toward them.

“Nothing wrong with the children, it’s all right!” he called. When they came up to him he lowered his voice. “But you have damn well made a mess of things! All hell has broken loose.”

“What? What are you saying?” Mary cried.

“Good Lord, Fern, I don’t mind! But dammit, if you had only told me! Then I would have known what to say.”

On the platform, surrounded by luggage and hurrying feet, they heard the story.

“You see, Jessie got the idea that it would be jolly to call the hotel in Paris and let Claire talk to her father. And the concierge told her—” Alex turned to Martin. “He told her that you had left. Or rather, he said that Monsieur and Madame had left, that he himself had got them a reservation on the Blue Train for Nice.

“So then Jessie, having thought that over, telephoned my house and asked for Fern. And I said, quite naturally, that you’d gone to Nice for a week’s rest from the children and me. How could I have known? You really ought to have told me!” Alex repeated.

“Jesus Christ!” Martin cried.

“I hope you’re not upset about me,” Alex said. “You’ve been told that I’m not likely to play the role of outraged husband. Jessie, of course, is something else.”

“How is she now?” Martin asked.

“Now? I really couldn’t say. She was rather bad off when I saw her on Saturday. I went right up to town to talk to her, but it wasn’t any use. She and the child left Monday on the
Leviathan
for New York.”

The double doors of the familiar library had been slammed and the curtains pulled tight, trapping Donald Meig’s anger in the shadowed room. His words beat the walls like fists.

“You Goddamned scum! Her own sister! I wouldn’t have cared if it had been anyone else! What the hell. I wouldn’t even have blamed you all that much. But to shame the family that took you in and—No, let me talk. If it weren’t for me, you’d be doling out aspirins and driving thirty miles in the middle of the night for two dollars—if and when you could collect.”

Martin trembled. It had been a hard voyage through ferocious seas, with the ropes up in the corridors and the passengers vomiting in their cabins. After disembarking, he had rushed at once to the train. Now, tense with a poisonous mixture of humiliation and foreboding, he stood before a man who appeared to have gone mad with rage. Meig’s eyes glittered like the glass lumps in the deerhead on the wall.