Revolutionary Road (23 page)

  Howard Givings cleared his throat. "John, don't let's get started again about the lawyer. Steady down, now."

  The look on John's face now was that of reasonable patience tried to the breaking point. "Pop," he said, "couldn't you just sit there and eat your wonderful egg salad, and quit horning in? Turn off your hearing aid or something. Come on," he said to Frank. "I guess we'd better make this a private talk. Oh, and bring your wife too." And with an air of tense conspiracy he led them both away to a far corner of the yard. "There isn't any reason why they shouldn't hear this," he explained; "it's just that they'd keep interrupting all the time. Here's the deal. I want to find out if inmates of mental hospitals have any legal rights. You suppose you could find that out for me?"

  "Well," Frank said, "offhand, I'm afraid I don't know how I'd—"

  "Okay, okay, forget that part of it. In order to find that out you'd probably have to spend money. All I'm asking you to spend is time. Get me the name and address of a good lawyer, and I'll take it from there. The thing is, you see, I've got a good many questions to ask, and I'm willing to pay for the answers. I think I've got a pretty good case, if we can get around this business of the legal rights . . ."

  It might have been only that his gaze kept switching back and forth between the Wheelers' faces, with intermittent glances over their shoulders to check on what his parents were doing across the lawn—it might have been only that, in combination with the pallor and dryness of his lips and the fact that his hair stood up and out from his scalp in stiff bristles (he hadn't worn his cap today), but as his monologue in the sun progressed he began to look more and more like the picture of a racked, wild-eyed madman.

  ". . . Now, I don't need to be told that a man who goes after his mother with a coffee table is putting himself in a weak position legally; that's obvious. If he hits her with it and kills her, that's a criminal case. If all he does is break the coffee table and give her a certain amount of aggravation and she decides to go to court over it, that's a civil case. All right. Either way the man's in a weak position, but here's the point: in neither case is there any question of his own legal rights being jeopardized. Now, supposing the second of these two possibilities takes place. The guy doesn't hit her, does break the coffee table, does give her the aggravation—but the woman, the mother, doesn't exercise her option to take it to court. Supposing what she does instead is to call out the State Troopers. Supposing when she gets hold of the State Troopers she—
Pop!
"

  At this apparently meaningless shout he began backing away from them like a cornered fugitive, his face distorted in a mixture of menace and fear; when Frank turned around he saw the reason for this outburst was the slow approach of Howard Givings across the grass.

  "
Pop!
I
told
you not to interrupt me, didn't I? Didn't I? I mean it now, Pop. Don't
interrupt
me when I'm
talking.
"

  "Steady down, boy," Howard Givings said. "Let's steady down, now. It's time to go."

  "I
mean
it, Pop—" He had backed himself up against the stone wall; he was looking desperately around as if for a weapon, and for a second Frank was afraid he might pick a rock out of the wall and throw it; but Howard Givings continued his steady, mollifying advance. He had only to touch his son softly on the elbow to restore a kind of order: John continued to shout, but he was more like a child in a tantrum now than a maniac. "Don't interr
upt
me, that's all. You got something to say, you can
save
it till I finish
talk
ing."

  "All right, John," Howard Givings murmured, turning and leading him away for a quieting stroll along the edge of the lawn. "All right, now, boy."

  "Oh, dear," Mrs. Givings said. "I'm terribly sorry about this. It's his nerves, you see." She was looking up at the Wheelers in an agony of embarrassment, unable to decide what to do with the egg salad sandwich in her hand. "I'm afraid you'll have to—excuse us. We shouldn't have come today."

  "Lord," April said, washing out the iced-tea glasses when the visitors had gone. "I wonder what his childhood was like."                                   "Couldn't have been very great, I guess, with a pair of parents like that." She didn't say anything until she had finished at the sink and hung up the dish towel. Then: "But at least he had a pair of parents, so at the very least he must have had more emotional security than me. Is that what you're saying? 

  "What I'm saying? Jesus, take it easy, will you?"

  But she had already gone, banging the screen door behind her, to retrieve the children from the Campbells' house. She seemed calm and aloof through the rest of the evening, moving efficiently through the tasks of the dinner and the children's bedtime, and Frank was careful to keep out of her way. It began to appear that this was to be one of their silent nights, one of the times when they would read the papers in different parts of the room like two discreet, courteous strangers in a hotel lobby; but at ten o'clock, without warning, she broke the truce.

  "Sort of a denial of womanhood," she said. "Is that how you'd put it?"

  "Is that how I'd put what? What're you talking about?"

  She looked faintly annoyed, as if impatient with him for having failed to follow the thread of a continuous discussion. "You know. The psychological thing behind this abortion business. Is that what women are supposed to be expressing when they don't want to have children? That they're not really women, or don't want to be women, or something?"

  "Baby, I don't know," he said kindly, while his heart thickened in gratitude. "Believe me, it's a thing about which your guess is as good as mine. It does sound sort of logical, though, doesn't it? I do remember reading somewhere— oh, in Freud or Krafft-Ebing or one of those people; this was back in college—I do remember reading something about a woman with a sort of infantile penis-envy thing that carried over into her adult life; I guess this is supposed to be fairly common among women; I don't know. Anyway, she kept trying to get rid of her pregnancies, and what this particular guy figured out was that she was really trying to sort of open herself up so that the—you know—so that the penis could come out and hang down where it belonged. I'm not sure if I have that right; I read it a long time ago, but that was the general idea." He wasn't, in fact, quite sure if he'd read it at all (though where could it have come from if he hadn't?), and he was not at all sure it had been a wise thing to relate at this particular time.

  But she seemed able to absorb the information with no particular surprise. She was looking off into space with her chin in her two cupped hands and both elbows on her knees. She looked perplexed; that was all.

  "In any case," he went on, "I'm sure it's probably a mistake to try and draw your own conclusions from the things you read in books. Who knows?" He decided he ought to stop there and let her talk for a while, but she didn't say anything, and the silence seemed to demand to be filled.

  "I think we
can
assume, though," he said, "just on the basis of common sense, that if most little girls do have this thing about wanting to be boys, they probably get over it in time by observing and admiring and wanting to emulate their mothers—I mean
you
know, attract a man, establish a home, have children and so on. And in your case, you see, that whole side of life, that whole dimension of experience was denied you from the start. I don't know; all these things are very obscure and hard to—hard to get hold of, I guess."

She got up and walked away to stand near the bookcase, with her back to him, and he was reminded of the way he had first seen her, long ago, across that roomful of forgotten talkers in Morningside Heights—a tall, proud, exceptionally first-rate girl.

  "How do you suppose we'd go about finding one?" she asked. "A psychiatrist, I mean. Aren't a lot of them supposed to be quacks? Well, but still, I guess that isn't really much of a problem, is it."

  He held his breath.

  "Okay," she said. Her eyes were bright with tears as she turned around. "I guess you're right. I guess there isn't much more to say, then, is there?"

  He knew, as he lay awake between fitful spells of sleep beside her, later in the night, that the campaign was by no means over. There were still eleven days before the deadline, in any one of which she might violently change her mind. For eleven more days, whenever he was with her, he would have to keep all the forces of his argument marshaled and ready for instant, skillful use.

  His job now was to consolidate this delicate victory in as many ways as possible, to hold the line. It would be best, he decided, to lose no time in letting everyone know about their change of plans—the Campbells, everyone—so that the whole question of the Wheelers going to Europe could quickly be relegated to the past tense; and meanwhile he must allow no hint of complacency to undermine his position. He would have to be constantly on hand as a source of reassurance until the danger period was over. For a start, he decided he would stay home from work today.

"WE'RE NOT?"
Jennifer said that afternoon. She and Michael were standing in their bathing suits on the living room carpet, with towels drawn around their shoulders like cloaks. They'd been playing in the lawn sprinkler, and their mother had called them indoors ostensibly to "dry off for a minute and have some milk and cookies," but also, as it turned out, to hear a formal announcement, from both parents, that they weren't going to France after all. "We're not? How come?"

  "Because Daddy and Mommy have decided it would be better not to just now," April said. They had settled on this answer a few minutes before (there was no point in telling them about the baby yet) and the words had a stiff, madeup sound which she tried to counteract by adding, very gently, "That's how come."

  "Oh." The total neutrality of expression on both children's faces was emphasized by the fact that their eyes were still sun-dazed and their lips, under smiling spoors of milk, were blue from having stayed in the water too long. Jennifer lifted one bare foot and used it to scratch a mosquito bite on the ankle of her other leg.

  "Is that all you've got to say?" Frank demanded, with a little more heartiness than he'd planned. "Not even 'Hurray' or anything? We thought you'd be pleased."

  The children looked briefly at one another and performed bashful smiles. It had become increasingly hard, lately, for either of them to know what was expected. Jennifer wiped away her milk mustache. "Are we going to France later, then, or what?"

  "Well," her mother said. "Maybe. We'll see. But we certainly won't be going for a long time, so it's nothing you need to be thinking about any more."

  "So we'll be staying here," Jennifer said helpfully, "but not forever and ever."

  "That's about right, Niffer. Give Mommy a kiss now, and then how about both of you going out and getting some sun? And try staying out of the water for a while, okay? Your lips are all blue. You can each have a couple more cookies, if you want."

  "Know what we can do, Niffer?" Michael said as soon as they were outside again. "Know that place up in the woods where the big tree's fallen over and it's got this little branch you can sit on and make a pretend soda fountain? We can take our cookies up there and you can be the lady coming into the soda fountain and I can be the soda fountain man."

  "I don't feel like it."

  "Come on. And I'll say 'What would you like to eat today?' And you'll say 'A cookie, please,' and I'll say—"

  "I don't
feel
like it, I said. It's too hot." And she sat well away from him on the scorched grass. Why was it "better not to just now"? And why had her mother looked so funny and sad when she said "That's about right"? And why had her father stayed home from work when he wasn't even sick?

  When Michael finished eating he ran crazily out along the crest of the front-yard slope, flailing his arms. "Look at me, Niffer, look at me, look at me—I'm falling down dead!" He wobbled and fell, rolled over a few times and lay very flat and still in the grass, giggling to himself at how funny it must have looked. But she wasn't watching. She had walked up close to the picture window and was peeking inside.

  They were still sitting on the sofa, leaning a little toward each other, and her mother was nodding and her father was talking. It was funny to see his hands making little gestures in the air and his mouth, moving and moving, with no sound coming out. After a while her mother went away to the kitchen and her father went on sitting there alone. Then he got up and went down to the cellar and came outdoors with his shovel, to work on the stone path.

"Oh, I don't know whether to be sad or glad," said Milly Campbell a few nights later, squirming deep into the sofa cushions. "I mean it's a darn shame and everything for
you
folks, I guess you're awfully disappointed, but I mean personally I'm just as pleased as I can be. Aren't you, sweetie?"

  And Shep, after a tremulous sip of gin and tonic that brought the ice cubes clicking painfully against his front teeth, said he sure was.

  But the truth was that he wasn't sure of anything. For weeks now, in an effort to put April Wheeler out of his mind, he had drawn solace from a daydream in which ten years had passed: the Wheelers were coming back from Europe, the Campbells were meeting the boat, and from the moment April came down the gangplank he saw that she'd grown thick and stumpy from her decade of breadwinning. Her cheeks had sagged into jowls, she stood and moved like a man and talked in a sarcastic, squint-eyed way with a cigarette wagging in her lips. Whenever this vision faltered he contented himself with a single-minded cataloguing of her present imperfections (She
was
too heavy across the beam; her voice
did
get too shrill when she was tense; there
was
something nervous and artificial about her smile), and every time he saw a pretty girl, on the beach or at traffic lights on his daily drive to Stamford and back, he would use her to strengthen his belief that the world was full of betterlooking, more intelligent, finer and more desirable women than April Wheeler. Throughout this period too he had schooled himself to be more than ordinarily fond of Milly. He had paid her numberless little courtly attentions; once he had picked out an expensive blouse at the best shop in Stamford and brought it home to her ("What do you mean, what for? Because you're my girl, that's what for . . ."), and he had enjoyed the impression that she was flowering into a new serenity at his touch.

  And now it was all shot to hell. The Wheelers weren't going anywhere. Milly was sitting here chattering about pregnancy and babies, with her new blouse already missing a button and gray around the armpits; April Wheeler was as cool and beautiful as ever. He cleared his throat. "So you figure you'll be staying on here indefinitely, then?" he asked. "Or will you be getting a bigger house, or what?"

"Ah," said Jack Ordway. "So. Foiled by faulty contraception. Well, Franklin, I can't say I'm sorry. You'd have been sorely missed here in the old cubicle, I can promise you that. Besides which—" he leaned elegantly back in his creaking swivel chair and threw one ankle over his knee— "apart from which, if you'll forgive me, the whole European scheme did sound a bit—a tiny bit unrealistic, sort of. None of my business, I'm sure."

"Pull up a chair, uh, Frank," said Bart Pollock. "What's on your mind?"

  It was the hottest day of the year, the kind of a day when everyone on the Fifteenth Floor discussed how scandalous it was that a company the size of Knox did not have air conditioning, yet Frank had expected that Pollock's private office, here on the Twentieth, would somehow be cooler. He had imagined too that Pollock would greet him standing up, perhaps striding across the carpet with hand outstretched, and that as soon as the formalities were out of the way ("Frank, I'm tickled to death . . .") they might adjourn to do business over a brace of Tom Collinses in some air-conditioned cocktail lounge. Instead they were sitting stiff and damp under the irritating buzz of an electric fan. The room was smaller than it looked from the outside, and Pollock, wearing a surprisingly cheap summer shirt through which the outlines of his soaked undershirt were clearly visible, looked more like an exhausted salesman than a top executive. His desk, though appropriately wide and glass-topped, bore as many disorderly piles of paper as Frank's own. Its only ornament suggesting the luxury of rank was a cork-and-silver tray that held a stout little thermos jug for ice water and a tumbler, and a careful inspection of this display revealed that all its elements were finely coated with dust.

  "Mm," he said when Frank had finished. "Well, that's fine. I'm personally very glad you've come to this decision. Now of course, as I've told you—" He closed his bulbous eyes and tenderly rubbed their lids. This didn't mean he had forgotten anything; Frank could see that. Everything was all right. It was just that no man could be jubilant in a room like this, on a day like this; and besides, what they were talking about was, after all, a matter of business. "As I mentioned that day at lunch, this whole project's still in the development stage. I'll be calling you in for conferences from time to time as the thing shapes up; meanwhile I'd suggest you keep on with these whaddyacallits, these promotion pieces of yours. I'll give Ted a buzz and tell him you're working on something for me. That's all he'll need to know for the time being. Right?"

"Changed your what?" said Mrs. Givings, frowning fearfully into the black perforations of her telephone. She was nearing the end of a bleak and very trying day, the whole afternoon of which had been spent at Greenacres—first sitting for unendurable lengths of time on various benches in the waxed and disinfected corridor, waiting for an appointment with John's doctor, then sitting in wretched politeness beside the doctor's desk while he told her that John's behavior in the past several weeks had been "not very encouraging, I'm afraid," and that "I think we'd better call a halt to these outings of his for a while, say five or six weeks."

  "But he's been perfectly fine with us," she had lied. "That's what I was going to tell you. Oh, things did get a little out of hand this last time, as I said, but in general he's seemed
very
relaxed.
Very
cheerful."

  "Yes. Unfortunately, we can only proceed on the basis of our own, ah, our own observations here in the ward. Tell me, what does his attitude seem to be at the conclusion of the visits? How does he seem to feel about coming back to the hospital each time?"

  "He
couldn't
be sweeter about it. Really, Doctor, he's just as willing and cooperative as a lamb."

  "Yes." And the doctor had fingered his loathsome tie clasp. "Well, actually, you see, it would probably be a healthier sign if he showed some reluctance. Let's say"—he frowned at his calendar—"let's say at least until the first Sunday in September. Then we might try again."

  He might as well have said never. By the first Sunday in September, in all probability, the Wheelers would be on their way to the other side of the world. Now, feeling enormously tired, she had called the Wheelers to cancel the next date they had made—she would have to find other excuses for the other Sundays from now on—and April Wheeler, whose voice sounded small and very far away, was trying to tell her that something was changed. Why did everything always change, when all you wanted, all you had ever humbly asked of whatever God there might be, was that certain things be allowed to remain the same?

  "Changed your what? . . ." Then all at once Mrs. Givings was aware of the blood in her veins. ". . . Oh, changed your
plans.
Oh, then you're
not
ready to sell . . ." and her pencil began to draw a row of black, five-pointed stars across the top of her scratch pad—to draw them with such furious pressure that their joyful shapes were embossed on all the pages underneath. "Oh, I
am
so glad to hear that, April. Really, this is the best news I've had in I don't know how long. So you'll be staying here with us, then . . ." She was afraid she might begin to cry; but luckily April was apologizing now for "all the trouble you've gone to about putting the house on the market," which allowed her to retreat into the protection of a cool, tolerant businesswoman's chuckle. "Oh, no, please don't mention that. Really, it's been no trouble at all. . . . All right, then . . . Fine, then, April . . . Good. We'll be in touch."

  When she put the receiver back it was as if she were returning a rare and exquisite jewel to its velvet case.

A bad dream or a shrill bird, or both, woke him much too early in the morning and filled him with a sense of dread—a feeling that his next breath and blink of wakefulness would recall him to the knowledge of a grief, a burden of bad news from yesterday that sleep had only temporarily eased. It took him at least a minute to remember that it was good news, not bad: yesterday had been the last of the first week in August. The deadline had come and gone. The debate was over, and he had won.

  He raised himself on one elbow to look at her in the blue light—she was turned away from him with her face hidden under a tangle of hair—and nestled close to her back with his arm around her. He arranged his face in a smile of contentment and his limbs in an attitude of total peace, but it didn't work. Half an hour later he was still awake, wanting a cigarette and watching the sky turn to morning.

  The peculiar thing was that in the past week or so they hadn't mentioned it. Each afternoon he had come home ready to intercept whatever last-minute points of argument she might raise—he had even cut down on his drinking, so that his head would be clear for discussion—but each evening they had either talked of other things or hadn't talked at all. Last night she had set up the ironing board in front of the television set and worked there, glancing up every few seconds from the steaming whisk and glide of the iron to peer, frowning, at whatever mottled image was cavorting on the screen.

  What do you want to talk for? her profile seemed to be saying, in reply to his uneasy gaze from across the room. What is there to talk about? Haven't we done enough talking?

  When she turned off the television and folded up the ironing board at last, he went over and touched her arm.

  "You know what this is?"

  "What what is? What do you mean?"

  "Today. It's the last day of the—you know. If you'd gone ahead with that business, this would've been your last day for doing it."

  "Oh. Yes, I suppose that's true."

  He patted her shoulder, feeling clumsy. "No regrets?"

  "Well," she said, "I guess I'd better not have any, had I? Be a little late for them now, wouldn't it?" She carried the ironing board awkwardly away, one of its legs dangling, and she was all the way to the kitchen door before it occurred to him to help her. He sprang to her side.

  "Here, let me take that."

  "Oh. Thank you."

  And in bed, without a word, they made a sensible, tem perate, mature kind of love. The last thing he said before falling asleep was, "Listen. We're going to be all right."