The Best of Everything (31 page)

It was strange that afterward April could hardly remember what had happened in the doctor's ofiBce. On the way home she wanted to describe it to Dexter, but all she could say was that, yes, it had hurt, but she really couldn't remember about the hurting. It was more a fact than a feeling. The doctor had looked exactly as she had imagined him, except that his fingernails had not been long and dirty at all but clipped and very clean. The nurse had given her a sedative pill and a paper cup of water. With that and tlie bourbon and gin she had drunk, and her numbing fright, and her eyes tightly closed the entire time of the operation, the whole experience seemed like a half-remembered dream. When she was dressed to leave the doctor gave her six different envelopes of colored pills. They were to pep her up and calm her down, stop the bleeding and make her sleep, and as soon as he had explained to her what each was for she immediately forgot it. He had written on the outside of each envelope how many she was to take each day, and that was aU she knew.

She hardly even noticed the trip in the limousine to Port Blair for her overwhelming sense of relief. She loved the doctor, he was kind, and she wished she had given some of her roses to the nurse. Her tongue felt fuzzy. She couldn't beheve anything had happened, she

only had the slightest sense of discomfort, and she had to tell herself she didn't have her baby anymore. Perhaps they had made a mistake and not taken the baby at all. She had read about that once in one of her confession magazines. She hoped the doctor had taken the baby. She couldn't bear it if he had only hurt it, and left it to grow up deformed. When she had left the doctor had said, "Everything will be just as it was before." She knew what tliat meant. It meant, forget. All this never happened. Tomorrow you will forget it. Tomorrow you will be well.

When they drove up to Caroline's driveway the lights were on above the front door. Caroline came out of the house when she heard the car. She peered anxiously at April's face in the darkness and glanced at Dexter questioningly. "She'd better go to bed," Dexter said.

"I sent my parents to the movies," Caroline said.

April opened her mouth to say something but no words came out. She felt drugged. How funny it would be, how it would startle them, if she were to ask as if nothing had happened, "Oh, what movie did they see?" But she couldn't speak, she felt too tired. She felt a swinging sensation as Dexter hfted her into his arms. There was a raising and lowering as he climbed the stairs. She closed her eyes and heard footsteps and murmuring voices and felt the coolness of a pillowcase. Oh . . . she tried to say, what movie did they see? But the thought of the words swung around her in a great arc and swallowed her up.

April slept soundly until eight o'clock in the morning, turned over luxuriously in the guest-room bed, and drifted off into a dream. There was a little boy about three years old, dressed in a light-blue cotton suit, with Dexter's face and eyes and her fair hair. He was half running along the edge of the little lake in Central Park, the one where children sail their toy boats in fine weather. He was following his boat, skipping and running, and April saw herself standing near by next to a park bench. She knew in the dream that he was her child, and she was smiling with love for him. Suddenly something catapulted her forward and she was pushing the child into the lake, feeling the resiliency of his small body against her hands. He did not even protest, he only looked at her with astonishment and the beginning of the reahzation of betrayal. It was she who was protesting, crying and screaming with the tears running down her face, and

hurling him into the lake regardless, powerless to stop. He sank to the bottom as cleanly as an angel flies. There was no struggle, he was simply dead. She knew from looking at him through the layers of murky blue and black water that he had died. It was she who felt the choking of drowning lungs, it was she who struggled for breath, feeling against her hands even at that moment the outline of the innocent body.

She woke up crying, and lay there crying for a long time afterward, not quite sure why. I killed him, I killed him, I killed him, I hate Dexter, she murmured to herself, long after she knew it had been only a dream. Was it a kind of mystic dream? Was that what her child would have looked like, had he lived?

She slept fitfully until after noon, when Caroline came to open the blinds and give her a glass of orange juice. In those few hotu-s dreams came and went, all of them horrible, all of them wakening her with tears and fright. In every dream the child was a boy, and he was always three or four years old, never a tiny baby. April became sure that the dreams contained something of the supernatural, that she was seeing the only glimpse she would ever have of the baby who was vanished forever.

"Did you sleep well?" Caroline asked.

"I kept dreaming."

"I don't wonder," Caroline said. Tou had a hard day yesterday. YouTl rest up this weekend. Which pills do you have to take?" She was pouring out the pills onto April's palm, counting them, arranging for everything like a nurse. "Do you think you can make it downstairs to lunch?"

"I have to wash my face."

"I unpacked for you last night. Your clothes are in the closet and your toothbrush and things are on the sink. The white towels are yours."

April got out of bed and walked gingerly to the mirror. Her face was white, her eyes had dark shadows under them. She looked anemic. Perhaps she had lost a lot of blood. She didn't really care.

"If you start to feel faint or anything give a yell. I'll be lurking in the hall."

"Thank you," April said.

When April had washed and dressed and combed her hair she felt utterly drained. Her movements were automatic. She felt as though

something very sad and useless and unavoidable had happened to her, but she could not quite figure out what it was. It was as though she had put a great guilt secret out of her mind but its imprint remained, hovering, waiting to grow again into the dreaded original. I won't think about it any more today, she told herself firmly.

Caroline's mother was standing in the dining room, arranging leaves in a bowl of fruit that stood on the center of the table. She had met April once before, in New York. "Hello, April," she said warmly.

"Hello, Mrs. Bender. How are you?"

"Oh, fine."

There were four at the table, Caroline and April and Caroline's parents. Caroline's younger brother was visiting friends of his. The colored maid brought out cups of bouillon. Dr. Bender ate silently, watching the women with a look of amusement on his face. It was as if he knew he was outnumbered and would have to spend the entire meal listening to gossip, and had determined to make the best of it and even like it. April could hardly meet his eyes. She wondered whether he would think she was pale.

"I saw Kitty today," Mrs. Bender said to Caroline. "She certainly has her troubles."

"Why?" asked Caroline, buttering a roll.

"You know that nice son of hers, the oldest one who was just graduated from Princeton?" Mrs. Bender turned apologetically to April. "Forgive us for talking about people you don't know, but I hardly ever see my daughter any more since she's working and has her own apartment, so when she favors us with a visit I have to catch up."

"I don't mind at all," April said.

"Excuse me," said Caroline, and turned to the maid. "April takes milk."

"I wish you'd drink milk," said Mrs. Bender, "instead of aU those Martinis."

"Oh, Mother!" Caroline said, laughing.

"That's why April has such beautiful teeth," Mrs. Bender said.

I never drink milk, April thought, glancing at Caroline. It's just now when I'm sick. If she only knew.

"All right," said Caroline, "all right. I'll have some milk too."

"Good for you," said her mother. She helped herself to some cold roast beef from a platter the maid was passing around. "Anyway, poor Kitty. You know her son was going to go to medical school. He was accepted in three of them. And diu"ing the summer he got mixed up with a girl—I won't say exactly what kind of girl, but she's the type who won't stop at anything to get what she wants. She's a model in a department store, but she's not pretty. I don't know why she was hired, except she has a well-proportioned figure. Now here's a boy with more money than he can spend, a wonderful future, handsome and popular as can be. You should see the girl, hard as nails. She was obviously after his money, because for her birthday he bought her a mink stole. Can you imagine? Everybody knew something fimny was going on."

April cut her roast beef into tiny pieces and tried to eat one but it stopped at her throat.

"Well, Kitty just kept hoping, closing her eyes to what was going on. How can you tell a twenty-one-year-old boy what to do? Believe me, Kitty cried her eyes out in secret. The next thing we knew, that girl got herself pregnant and now he's going to marry her!"

Dr. Bender looked up with a twinkle in his eye. "If she 'got herself' pregnant all by herself, as you seem to imply, I'd like to meet her. She'd make a fascinating medical history for an article I could write."

"You know what I mean," Mrs. Bender said. "Those girls know how to hook a man. Don't tell me they don't know how to be careful." She glanced around the table. "April, dear, you aren't eating a thing. Would you like some mustard for your roast beef?"

"No, thank you," April said.

"It's very good roast beef. We had it last night. I'm sorry you came too late for dinner."

"So am I," April said. Her voice was hardly audible.

"Well, anyway," Mrs. Bender continued cheerfully, "this girl is two months gone and—"

"Mother," Caroline interrupted with a touch of acerbity, "we have a wonderful new book coming out that I know you'd love to read. I'll try to steal one of the first copies and bring it home for you next time I come."

"That'll be nice," Mrs. Bender said. "You'll probably be coming up in about ten days to go to that wedding. You can see the gloating

bride and the poor foolish boy." She shook her head. "You know, you read about these things happening all the time, but if it ever really happens to someone you know it's such a shock. It's just a shame, a nice young boy like that with his future ahead of him. Now he'll have a stigma over him for the rest of his life."

"Don't be dramatic, Mother," Caroline said dryly. She turned to April. "My mother's just peeved because she had her eye on him as a prospect for me."

"Oh, Caroline!" her mother said.

April could see the room moving in waves of color. She looked down at her plate. The roast beef looked so bloody where she had cut it that it turned her stomach. She could taste something like the beginning of tears in the back of her throat.

"Well," Mrs. Bender said lightly, "we won't talk about such gruesome things. We'll just be glad we don't hear about more peopla like that, or at least no one we know." She smiled at April. "You don't eat a thing, April, no wonder you're so thin. You and Caro-hne. You must be trying to starve yourselves to death."

It wouldn't be such a bad idea, April was thinking. She smiled weakly at Mrs. Bender and concentrated on her plate, trying to eat, trying to block out the sound of that cheerful, insensitive voice and the words it was saying, the moral pronunciamentos, the shared hypocritical grief, the shocked glee. She wondered whether things like that would aflfect her now, this way, for the rest of her Hfe.

Chapter 15

The tag end of winter is a dull time for actors in New York; the plays have opened for the season and those few that remain to open have already been cast, it is too early for summer stock, and all that is left is television and radio. Gregg Adams was among the fairly lucky ones. She found enough work to keep aUve, and although none of it brought her to the attention of the public it still kept her from having to get a job as a waitress or a filing clerk, as many of her friends had to do. She played one of a group of teen-

agers in a filmed television commercial, and every time it was put on the air she received a check. She had two small parts in an early-morning radio serial. These paid for her rent and her large monthly telephone bill, and since she had never particularly cared about eating and David Wilder Savage took her to dinner four or five times a week, she managed to get along quite well. During the day she made the rounds or slept, and on the evenings when she was forced to be alone she would go to Downey's in the theater district or to Maxie's Bar near the Winter Garden and look for people she knew so that she could sit with them, drink coflFee, and spend the rest of the early-morning hours peering around looking for David Wilder Savage.

Occasionally she would see him come into the place with other people and she would sense a strange, sickening tingling of her nerve ends and would hardly be able to breathe. The conversation of the young actors in her booth would fade away as if she were falling asleep and she would get up and walk past the booth where David Wilder Savage was sitting so that he would notice her. Then he would look pleased and surprised and ask her to join him. It never seemed to occur to him how planned these chance encounters had been, or if he knew, he gave no indication.

She had known him for such a long time now, and yet she could not quite figure him out. She was convinced that he loved her. And still, they had reached a plateau on which she suffered and he seemed quite content. What could she do to break through? She remembered a Chinese proverb she had read: "It takes six years to make a friend and six minutes to lose one." Perhaps this was too cynical. But why hadn't anyone, even the Chinese in their ancient wisdom, made up a proverb to tell how to turn a friendly lover into one who couldn't live without you? Every month when she discovered she was not caught she would give up a little prayer of thanksgiving, and then, because she knew she was quite safe again, she would allow herself to feel the pang of disappointment that was at the back of her mind. Perhaps something drastic would make David take action, something demanding immediate decision, something which would make him take stock of how valuable she was to him. But she knew that a girl had to take care of herself, so she kept on taking precautions not to conceive, not to change the status quo, not to change the even nature of their relationship when all the while