Revolutionary Road (16 page)

  "I do hope it doesn't seem an imposition," she whisperingly rehearsed as she rinsed out the tea things in the kitchen, "but I was wondering if I could ask a great favor. It's about my son John . . ." Oh, it didn't matter how she phrased it; she would find the right words when the time came, and she knew the Wheelers would understand. Bless them; bless them; she knew they would understand.

  She could think of nothing else as she hurried through the preparation and the serving and the washing-up of the early dinner; and when she was ready, when she paused in the hall to freshen her lipstick and to call "I'll see you later, then, dear" before setting off, she was as excited as a girl.

  But the moment she walked chatting and laughing into the Wheelers' living room her excitement changed to a kind of panic. She felt like an intruder.

  She had expected to find them as tense and disorganized as ever—both talking at once, bobbing and darting around her, getting in each other's way as they sprang to remove a sharp toy from the chair she was about to sit down on—but instead their welcome was serene. April didn't have to insist that the house was in a terrible mess, because it wasn't; Frank didn't have to blurt "Get you a drink" and go lunging off to wrestle and bang at the refrigerator, because the drinks were there, nicely arranged on the coffee table. The Wheelers had, apparently, been quietly drinking and talking together here for some time before her arrival; they were cordially glad to see her, but if she hadn't come they would have gone on together in perfect selfsufficiency.

  "Oh, just a tiny dollop for me, thanks, that's wonderful," Mrs. Givings heard herself saying, and "Oh, isn't it lovely to sit down," and "My, doesn't your house look nice," and a number of other things; and then: "I do hope it doesn't seem an imposition, but I was wondering if I could ask a great favor. It's about my son John."

  The muscular contraction in both the Wheelers' faces was so slight that the subtlest camera in the world couldn't have caught it, but Mrs. Givings felt it like a kick. They knew! It was the one possibility she had completely overlooked. Who had told them? How much did they know? Did they know about the smashing of the house and the cutting of the phone wires and the State Police?

  But she had to go through with it. Actually, her voice was telling them now, he hadn't been at all well. What with overwork and one thing and another, he'd had what amounted to a complete nervous breakdown. Fortunately he was back in this vicinity for a time—she'd have hated the thought of his being ill so far from home—but all the same it was worrying, to his father and to her. His doctors had thought it wise for him to have a complete rest, so just for the present he was—

  "—well, actually, just for the present he's at Greenacres." Her voice had become the only living thing in Mrs. Givings; all the rest was numb.

  And actually, her voice assured them, they'd be surprised at what a really excellent place Greenacres was, from the standpoint of—oh, of facilities and staff and so on; much better, for instance, than most of the private rest homes and whatnot in the area.

  The voice went on and on, steadily weakening, until it came at last to its point. Some Sunday soon—oh, not right away, of course, but some Sunday in the future—would the Wheelers mind very much if . . .

  "Why, of course not, Helen," April Wheeler was saying. "We'd love to meet him. It's very nice of you to think of us." And Frank Wheeler, refilling her glass, said that he certainly did sound like an interesting guy.

  "How about next Sunday, then?" April said. "If that suits you."

  "Next Sunday?" Mrs. Givings pretended to calculate. "Well, let's see: I'm not sure if— All right, fine, then." She knew she ought to feel pleasure at this—it was, after all, exactly what she'd come for—but all she wanted was to get out of here and go home. "Well, of course it's nothing urgent. If next Sunday's inconvenient or anything we can always make it some oth—"

  "No, Helen. Next Sunday's fine."

  "Well," she said. "Fine, then. Oh goodness, look at the time. I'm afraid I'd better be—oh, but you had something to ask
me
about, didn't you. And here I've done all the talking, as usual." When she took a sip of her drink she discovered that her mouth was very dry. It felt swollen.

  "Well, actually, uh, Helen," Frank Wheeler began, "we have some pretty important news . . ."

Half an hour later, driving home, Mrs. Givings held her eyebrows high in astonishment all the way. She could hardly wait to tell her husband about it.

  She found him still in his armchair in the yellow lamplight, sitting beside the perfectly priceless grandfather clock she had picked up at an auction before the war. He had finished with the
Herald Tribune
now and was making his way through the W
orld-Telegram and Sun.

  "Howard," she said. "Do you know what those children told me?"

  "What children, dear?"

  "The Wheelers.
You
know, the people I went to see? The couple in the little Revolutionary Road place? The people I thought John might like?"

  "Oh. No; what?"

  "Well, first of all I happen to know they're not at all wellfixed financially; they had to borrow the whole down payment on the house, for one thing, and that was only two years ago. In the second place . . ."

  Howard Givings tried to listen, but his eyes kept drifting down the newspaper in his lap. A twelve-year-old boy in South Bend, Indiana, had applied for a twenty-five-dollar bank loan to buy medicine for his dog, whose name was Spot, and the bank manager had personally co-signed the note.

  ". . . so I said, 'But why
sell
? Surely you'll want to have the place when you come
back.
' And do you know what he said? He looked at me in this very guarded way and said, 'Well, that's the point, you see. We won't be coming back.' I said, 'Oh, have you taken a job there?' 'Nope,' he said—just like that. 'Nope. No job.' I said, 'Will you be staying with relatives, then, or friends, or something?' 'Nope.' " And Mrs. Givings bugged her eyes to impersonate the zenith of irresponsibility. " ' Nope—don't know a soul. We're just going, that's all.' Really, Howard, I can't tell how embarrassing it was. Can you imagine it? I mean, isn't it all sort of—unsavory, somehow? The whole thing?"

  Howard Givings touched his hearing aid and said, "How do you mean, unsavory, dear?" He guessed he had lost the thread. It had started out to be something about somebody going to Europe, but now it was evidently about something else.

  "Well, isn't it?" she asked. "People practically without a dollar to their name, with children just coming into school age? I mean people don't
do
things like that, do they? Unless they're—well, running away from something, or something? And I mean I'd hate to think there's anything—well, I don't know
what
to think; that's the point. And they always seemed such a steady, settled sort of couple. Isn't it queer? And the awkward thing, you see, is that I'd already committed myself on the John business before they came out with all this; now I suppose we'll have to go through with it, though there hardly seems much point to it any more."

  "Go through with what, dear? I don't quite see what you're—"

  "Well, with taking him there for a
visit,
Howard. Haven't you been listening to any of this?"

  "Oh; yes, of course. What I mean is, why doesn't there seem much point to it?"

  "Well,
because,
" she said impatiently. "What's the
value
of introducing them to John, if they're going to disappear in the fall?"

  "The 'value?' "

  "Well, I simply mean—
you
know. He needs
permanent
people. Oh, of course I suppose there's no harm in having him meet them, taking him there once or twice before they—it's just that I'd been thinking in terms of a much more long-range sort of thing, somehow. Oh, dear, isn't it all confusing? Why
do
you suppose people can't be more—" She wasn't quite sure what she was saying now, or what she meant to say, and she found with surprise that she'd been twisting her handkerchief into a tight, moist rope the whole time she was talking. "Still, I suppose one never—can—tell about people," she concluded, and then she turned, left the room, and fled lightly upstairs to change into something comfy.

  Passing the shadowed mirror on the landing, she noticed with pride that her own image, at least when seen fleetingly from the corner of an eye, was still that of a swift, lithe girl in a well-appointed house; and on the ample carpet of her bedroom, where she quickly stripped off her jacket and stepped out of her skirt, it was almost as if she were back in her father's house, hurrying to dress for a tea dance. Her blood seemed to race with the emergency of last-minute details (Which kind of perfume? Oh, quick—which kind?) and she very nearly ran out to the banister to call, "Wait! I'm coming! I'll be right down!"

  It was the sight and the feel of her old flannel shirt and baggy slacks, hanging from their peg in the closet, that steadied her. Silly, silly, she scolded herself; I
am
getting scatty. But the real shock came when she sat on the bed to take off her stockings, because she had expected her feet to be slim and white with light blue veins and straight, fragile bones. Instead, splayed on the carpet like two toads, they were tough and knuckled with bunions, curling to hide their corneous toenails. She stuffed them quickly into her bright Norwegian slipper-socks (really the nicest things in the world for knocking around the house) and sprang up to pull the rest of her simple, sensible country clothes into place, but it was too late, and for the next five minutes she had to stand there holding on to the bedpost with both hands and keeping her jaws shut very tight because she was crying.

  She cried because she'd had such high, high hopes about the Wheelers tonight and now she was terribly, terribly, terribly disappointed. She cried because she was fifty-six years old and her feet were ugly and swollen and horrible; she cried because none of the girls had liked her at school and none of the boys had liked her later; she cried because Howard Givings was the only man who'd ever asked her to marry him, and because she'd done it, and because her only child was insane.

  But soon it was over; all she had to do was go into the bathroom and blow her nose and wash her face and brush her hair. Then, refreshed, she walked jauntily and soundlessly downstairs in her slipper-socks and returned to sit in the ladder-back rocker across from her husband, turning out all but one of the lights in the room as she came.

  "There," she said. "That's much cozier. Really, Howard, my nerves were just like
wires
after that business with the Wheelers. You can't imagine how it upset me. The point is I'd always thought they were such
solid
young people. I thought
all
the young married people today were supposed to be more settled. Wouldn't you think they ought to be, especially in a community like this? Goodness knows, all
I
hear about is young couples
dying
to come and settle here, and raise their children . . ."

  She went on talking and talking, moving around and around the room; and Howard Givings timed his nods, his smiles, and his rumblings so judiciously that she never guessed he had turned his hearing aid off for the night.

"FLY THE COOP,"
Jack Ordway said, stirring his coffee. "Kick over the traces. Take off. Pretty nifty, Franklin."

  They were sitting at a ketchup-stained table for two in the dark corner of the Nice place, and Frank was beginning to regret having told Ordway about Europe. A clown, a drunk, a man unable to discuss anything at all except in the elaborately derisive tone he used for talking about himself—wasn't this the desirable kind of confidant to have in a thing like this? But he'd told him, nevertheless, because in the past few weeks it had become more and more difficult to carry his secret alone through the office day. Sitting attentively in staff conferences while Bandy outlined things to be done "in the fall" or "first of the year," accepting Sales Promotion assignments that would theoretically take him months to complete, he would sometimes find his mind sliding readily into gear with the slow machinery of Bandy's projects before it occurred to him to think: No, wait a minute—I won't even be
here
then. At first these little shocks had been fun, but the fun of them had worn off and soon they had become distinctly troubling. It was getting on for the middle of June. In another two and a half months (eleven weeks!) he would be crossing the ocean, never to be concerned with Sales Promotion again, yet the reality of that fact had still to penetrate the reality of the office. It was a perfectly, inescapably real fact at home, where nobody talked of anything else; it was real on the train each morning and again on the train each night, but for the eight hours of his working day it remained as insubstantial as a half-remembered, rapidly fading dream. Everyone and everything in the office conspired against it. The stolid or tired or mildly sardonic faces of his colleagues, the sight of his in basket and his current work pile, the sound of his phone or of the buzzer that meant he was wanted in Bandy's cubicle—all these seemed constantly to tell him he was destined to stay here forever.

  The hell I am! he felt like saying twenty times a day. You just wait and see. But his defiance lacked weight. The bright, dry, torpid lake of this place had contained him too long and too peacefully to be ruffled by any silent threat of escape; it was all too willing to wait and see. This was intolerable; the only way to put an end to it was to speak out and tell somebody; and Jack Ordway was, after all, the best friend he had in the office. Today they had managed to avoid Small and Lathrop and Roscoe for lunch, and had started it off with a couple of weak but adequate martinis; and now the story was out.

  "There's one small point I don't quite grasp, though," Ordway was saying. "I don't mean to be dense, but what exactly will you be doing? I don't see you languishing indefinitely at sidewalk cafés while your good frau commutes to the embassy or whatever—but that's the point, you see. I don't quite know what I
do
see you doing. Writing a book? Painting a—"

  "Why does everybody think in terms of writing books and painting pictures?" Frank demanded, and then, only partly aware that he was quoting his wife, he said, "My God, are artists and writers the only people entitled to lives of their own? Look. The only reason I'm here in this halfassed job is because—well, I suppose there's a lot of reasons, but here's the point. If I started making a list of all the reasons, the one reason I damn sure couldn't put down is that I like it, because I don't. And I've got this funny feeling that people are better off doing some kind of work they like."

  "Fine!" Ordway insisted. "Fine! Fine! Don't let's get all defensive and riled up, please. My only simple-minded question is this: What kind do you like?"

  "If I knew that," Frank said, "I wouldn't have to be taking a trip to find out."

  Ordway thought this over, tilting his handsome head to one side, lifting his brows and curling out his underlip, which looked unpleasantly pink and slick. "Well, but don't you think," he said, "I mean to say, assuming there is a true vocation lurking in wait for you, don't you think you'd be just as apt to discover it here as there? I mean, isn't that possible?"

  "No. I don't think it is. I don't think it's possible for anybody to discover anything on the fifteenth floor of the Knox Building, and I don't think you do either."

  "Mm. Must say that sounds like a good point, Franklin. Yes indeed." He drank off the last of his coffee and sat back, smiling quizzically across the table. "And when did you say this noble experiment is going to begin?"

  For a second Frank wanted to turn the table over on him, to see the helpless fright in his face as his chair went over backwards and the whole mess of dishes went up and over his head. "Noble experiment"! What kind of supercilious crap was that?

  "We're going in September," he said. "Or October at the outside."

  Ordway nodded five or six times, gazing at the concealed smears of meat and potato on his plate. He didn't look supercilious now; he looked old and beaten and wistfully envious; and Frank, watching him, felt his own resentment blurring into an affectionate pity. The poor, silly old bastard, he thought. I've spoiled his lunch; I've spoiled his day. He almost wished he could say, "It's all right, Jack, don't worry; it may never happen"; instead he took refuge from his own confusion in a burst of heartiness.

  "Tell you what, Jack," he said. "I'll buy you a brandy for old times."

  "No, no, no, no," Ordway said, but he looked as pleased as a stroked spaniel when the waiter cleared the plates away and set the rich little cognac glasses in their place; and later, when they'd paid their checks and walked upstairs into the sunlight, he was all smiles.

  It was a clear, warm day, with a sky as clean and deep as laundry blueing above the buildings, and it was also payday, time for the traditional after-lunch stroll to the bank.

  "Needless to say I'll keep this strictly
entre nous,
old scout," Ordway said as they walked. "I don't suppose you want it noised around. How much notice you planning to give Bandy?"

  "Couple of weeks, I guess. Haven't really thought about it."

  The sun was pleasingly warm. In another few days it would be hot, but it was perfect now. In the cool marble depths of the bank, whose Muzac system was playing "Holiday for Strings," he entertained himself by pretending it was the last time he would ever stand in line here, the last time he would ever shift his feet and finger his paycheck as he and Ordway waited their turns at one of the ten tellers' windows that were reserved at lunchtime, twice a month, for Knox employees. "You ought to see us shuffling around that damned bank," he had told April years ago. "We're like a litter of suckling pigs waiting for a free tit. Oh, of course we're all very well-mannered, very refined little pigs; we all stand very suavely and try not to jostle each other too much, and when each guy gets up close to the window he takes out his check and sort of folds it in his fingers or palms it or finds some other way of hiding it without seeming to. Because it's very important to be casual, you see, but the really important thing is to make damn sure nobody else sees how much you're getting. Jesus!"

  "Gentlemen," said Vince Lathrop, at Frank's shoulder. "Shall we take the air?" He and Ed Small and Sid Roscoe were pocketing their passbooks and their wallets, their tongues still sucking random shreds of Awful place food from the crevices of their teeth, and this was an invitation to join them in a digestive stroll around the block.

  He pretended it was the last time he would ever do this, too; the last time he would ever join this slow promenade of office people in the sunshine, the last time the approach of his own polished shoes would ever cause these wobbling pigeons to take fright and skitter away across the spit and peanut shells of the sidewalk, to flap and climb until they were wheeling high over the towers with alternately black and silver wings.

  It was better to have told somebody; it had made a difference. He was able to glance around at the talking faces of these four men and feel truly detached from them. Ordway, Lathrop, worried little Ed Small, pretentious, boring old Sid Roscoe—he knew now that he would soon be saying goodbye to all of them and that in another year he'd have trouble remembering their names. In the meantime, and this was the best part, in the meantime it was no longer necessary to dislike them. They weren't such bad guys. He could even join happily in their laughter at some mild joke of Ordway's, and when they turned the last corner and headed back to the Knox Building he could take pleasure in the comradely way they spread out five abreast across the sidewalk, inspired by the sun to step out briskly and swing their arms with all the apparent "unit pride" of soldiers from the same platoon on pass (What
out
fit, Mac? Sales Promotion, Fifteenth Floor, Knox Business Machines).

  And Goodbye, goodbye, he could say in his heart to everyone they passed—a chattering knot of stenographers clutching packages from the dimestore, a cynical, heavysmoking group of young clerks who leaned against a building front in their shirtsleeves—goodbye to the whole sweet, sad bunch of you. I'm leaving.

  It was a splendid sense of freedom, and it lasted until he was back at his desk, where the buzzer that meant he was wanted in Bandy's cubicle was mournfully bleating.

  Ted Bandy never looked his best in fine weather; he was an indoor man. His thin gray body, which seemed to have been made for no other purpose than to fill the minimum requirements of a hard-finish, double-breasted business suit, and his thin gray face were able to relax only in the safety of winter, when the office windows were shut. Once, when he'd been assigned to accompany a group of prize-winning salesmen on a trip to Bermuda, Roscoe's
Knox Knews
had carried a photograph of the whole party lined up and grinning on the beach in their swimming trunks; and Roscoe's secretly made enlargement of one section of that picture, showing Bandy doing his best to smile under the weight of two great, hairy arms that had been flung around his neck from either side, had enjoyed weeks of furtive circulation among the cubicles of the Fifteenth Floor, where everyone pronounced it the funniest damn thing they'd ever seen.

  Bandy was wearing something of that same expression now, and at first Frank thought it was only because the June breeze from the window had comically dislodged some of the long side hairs that were supposed to be combed across his baldness. But he discovered with a start, on entering the cubicle, that the main cause of Bandy's uneasiness was the presence there of a rare and august visitor.

  "Frank, you know Bart Pollock, of course," he said, getting to his feet, and then with an apologetic nod he said, "Frank Wheeler, Bart."

  A massive figure in tan gabardine rose up before him, a big tan face smiled down, and his right hand was enveloped in a warm clinch. "Don't guess we've ever been formally introduced," said a voice deep enough to make the glassware tremble on a speaker's rostrum. "Glad to know you, Frank."

  This man, who in any other corporation would have been called "Mr." rather than "Bart," was general sales manager for the Electronics Division, a man from whom Frank had never received anything more than an occasional vague nod in the elevator, and whom he had despised from a distance for years. "I mean he'd be perfect Presidential timber in the worst sense," he had told April once. "He's one of these big calm father-image bastards with a milliondollar smile and about three pounds of muscle between the ears; put him on television and the other party'd never have a chance." And now, feeling his own face twitch into a grimace of servility, feeling a drop of sweat creep out of his armpit and run down his ribs, he tried to atone for this uncontrollable reaction by planning how he would describe it to April tonight. "And I suddenly caught myself sort of
melting
in front of him—isn't that funny? I mean
I
know he's a horse's ass;
I
know he's got nothing to do with anything that matters in my life, and all the same he almost had me cowed. Isn't that the damnedest thing?"

  "Pull up a chair, Frank," said Ted Bandy, smoothing the hairs back across his head, and when he sat down again he shifted his weight uncomfortably from one buttock to the other, the gesture of a man with hemorrhoids. "Bart and I've been going over some of the reports on the NAPE conference," he began, "and Bart asked me to call you in on it. It seems . . ."

  But Frank couldn't follow the rest of Bandy's sentence because all his attention was fixed on Bart Pollock. Leaning earnestly forward in his chair, Pollock waited until Bandy had finished talking; then he rapped the back of his free hand smartly across the paper he was holding, which turned out to be a copy of
Speaking of Production Control,
and said:

  "Frank, this is a crackerjack. They're just tickled to death in Toledo."

"And I mean isn't that the damnedest thing?" he demanded of April that evening, laughing and talking at the same time, following her around the kitchen with a drink in his hand while she got the dinner ready to serve. "I mean isn't it ironic? I do this dumb little piece of work to get myself off the hook with Bandy, and this is what happens. You should've heard old Pollock go on about it—all these years he hasn't known I'm alive, and suddenly I'm his favorite bright young man. Old Bandy sitting there trying to decide whether to be pleased or jealous, me sitting there trying to keep from laughing myself to death—Jesus!"

  "Marvelous," she said. "Would you mind carrying these in, darling?"

  "And then it turns out he's got this big—What? Oh, sure, okay." He put down his glass, took the plates she handed him and followed her into the other room, where the children were already seated at the table. "And then it turns out he's got this big idea; Pollock, that is. He wants me to do a whole series of the crazy things.
Speaking of Inventory Control, Speaking of Sales Analysis, Speaking of Cost Accounting,
Speaking of Payroll
—he's got it all mapped out. I'm supposed to go out to—"

  "Excuse me a sec, Frank. Michael, you sit up straight, now, or there's going to be trouble. I mean it. And don't take such big bites. I'm sorry; go on."