Cold Spring Harbor (20 page)

Now she could breathe again. She could gather her wits and wait for Charles’s taxicab to sound its horn in the driveway. And she was ready for whatever little jokes might arise (“Well, but the trouble is I simply don’t feel like a grandmother, Charles; can you help me with that? I don’t even know how a
grand
mother is supposed to
feel
.”)

“Evan said she had an easy time of it,” Charles was saying, “though I don’t suppose it can ever be called ‘easy,’
can it. Giving birth is one kind of suffering no man can ever claim to understand.”

They were riding together into Huntington now on the slick, buoyant seat of the cab, in bright sunshine, and the funny part was that Gloria could have sworn she was still alone at the kitchen table with her medicine. Decorum or not, this was evidently going to be one of those addled days without regard for logical sequence, when small events and transitional periods of time were instantly lost to memory. It would be best not even to ask Charles if he could help her feel like a grandmother now because there was no way of knowing whether she’d made the same request at least once before, in the same words, back in the driveway or somewhere on the road. She would have to pay close attention to every moment from now on, or the whole day might get away from her.

One thing she noticed very clearly, and promised herself to remember, was that a tasteful-looking place called Crossroads Restaurant and Lounge lay less than a block from the hospital entrance. When their duties in the maternity ward were completed this morning, Gloria and Charles could drift as if by chance into the Crossroads Restaurant and Lounge for a few ice-cold martinis and a nice, light lunch.

“Why don’t you sit down here, Gloria,” Charles said in the swarming bewilderment of the hospital lobby. “I’ll go find out where the maternity ward is, but it may take a minute in a place like this.”

They were pressed into an elevator full of Negroes and cripples and fools, all holding hot paper cups of coffee and saying “Good morning” to each other as if it might be the last morning of the world. Then there were several corridors that led in wrong directions, and when they found their way at last into the nook where Rachel lay in a high stiff bed, there stood Curtis Drake.

He took Gloria wholly by surprise, in his dark little gabardine suit. She wanted him to vanish at once but he was here to stay, smiling, pleased with having brought the dozen roses whose nodding heads seemed to enhance the pallor of his daughter’s exhausted face.

“Well, Gloria,” he said. “Isn’t this something? Isn’t this great? And Mr. Shepard; how’re you, sir?”

Rachel was still groggy but extremely talkative, and the first thing she wanted them to know was that Evan had stayed with her all night—he’d been a “lamb”; he’d left the hospital only a little while ago, to get to work. “And have you seen Evan Charles Shepard Junior yet? Oh, he’s a beautiful boy. Go and look at him, okay? Ask one of the girls outside.”

When a sterile-masked nurse held him up for their inspection through the plate glass he looked like any other infant—no better, no worse—with his head wobbling and his lips and gums stretched open in a cry of silence.

Neither Gloria nor Charles came up with anything trenchant to say about him, so they mumbled a few pleasantries and went back to Rachel’s bedside.

“… And we’re never going to neglect him in any way, Daddy,” Rachel was saying, “but we won’t sort of impose ourselves on him either—we’ll never let our problems be
his
problems, if you see what I mean. Well, I know it’s silly to be talking this way when he isn’t even half a day old, but I—”

“I don’t think it’s silly at all, dear,” Curtis assured her. “I think it’s grand.”

Gloria took a look behind the hanging yellow cloth that was meant to insure semiprivacy, and there lay another girl or woman with her legs apart and her knees up so that anyone could see the sanitary napkin at her crotch.

“Oh, and another thing,” Rachel said. “If he’s very, very bright we’ll always encourage him to make the most of his
intelligence, and if he’s sort of slow we’ll never push him into more than he can—”

Something in her daughter’s prattle had been irritating Gloria’s nerves all this time, and now she could tell what it was: Rachel was talking with her molars clenched, either because she was still in pain or because she thought it might help keep her voice down in deference to her roommate behind the hanging cloth, and it made all her sibilants come out funny. Phrases like “most of his intelligence” and “if he’s sort of slow” had a clicking, spitty sound that only Curtis Drake, in all the world, would ever consider grand.

“And we may have to move him around a lot,” Rachel was saying, “because of Evan’s education and career, but we’ll never let him feel he doesn’t have a home. We’ll take our home along with us wherever we go because that’s the kind of home it’ll always be; do you see?”

“Well, sure, honey,” Curtis said, “but don’t you think you ought to get some rest now? We’ll have plenty of time for talking later on.”

“Oh, yes, plenty of time later on,” Gloria said. “You’ll have plenty of time for talking when her teeth aren’t clenched against her mother, and that’ll be grand indeed. ‘Grand’—oh, what a simpering word that is, and my God, what a simpering little man you are, Curtis. Listen, Rachel—”

“Oh, no. Please,” Rachel said. “Please. Daddy? Charles? Can you just sort of get her out of here? Can you get her out of here now before I—”

“Listen,” Gloria said again. “Do you want to know why you and your brother’ve never had a home?”

“Oh, she
is
crazy, Daddy; she
is
crazy. If you can’t get her out of here I’ll get somebody to call the whaddyacallit, the psycho ward, and they’ll put her in a straitjacket and lock her up. I mean that.”

“You’ve never had a home,” Gloria said, “because your father is a coward and a coward and a coward.”

Curtis had taken one of her upper arms and Charles took the other. They walked her quickly out into the corridor and held her there, not knowing what else to do. She was both weak and powerful as she struggled in their grip, and her voice wouldn’t stop: “… soft little cowardly swine. Oh, swine. Swine …”

“Can I help you?” a very young man inquired. He looked too young to be a doctor but he wore a stethoscope slung around his neck, as very young doctors often do.

“Yes, perhaps you can,” Charles began. “We’re looking for the psych—” and he would have said “the psychiatric facility here” if Curtis hadn’t cut him off.

“No, this’ll be all right. We need an elevator now, is all.”

And from then on Curtis was plainly in charge. It was Curtis who got her into a mercifully uncrowded elevator—“coward; swine”—and he who steered her alone through the rushing employees and the standing wheelchairs and flowers of the lobby. In the dazzling light outside the main entrance he whistled up a cab for her and carefully loaded her into the back seat of it, saying “There, now; there now.” Charles was needed only once, to recite her exact address in Cold Spring Harbor; then it was Curtis who pressed a five-dollar bill into the driver’s hand and said “Just be careful with her, son. This lady’s emotionally disturbed.”

“She’s what, sir?”

“Mentally ill. Got it?”

They went briefly upstairs again to comfort Rachel—“Well, it was sweet of you both to come back,” she said, “but I’m fine. Really, I’ll be fine now”—and afterwards the two of them strolled like friends into the shaded, air-conditioned barroom of the Crossroads Restaurant and Lounge.

“I thought you handled all that admirably, Curtis,” Charles said. “If it had been left to me I might only have made things worse.”

“Well, these—displays of hers can be very upsetting, but I’ve seen her through worse than this. She’ll be very ashamed for a while and then she’ll be well again—or at least as well as she’s ever going to be. Besides—” And Curtis looked thoughtfully into his glass. “Besides, I think our friends in the psychiatric line still have a great deal to learn.”

“Oh, I agree,” Charles said. “Matter of fact, I couldn’t agree more. I’ve had to take the same position with my own—with a member of my own family.”

“Maybe someday I’ll be able to trust the morbid little bastards—and I suppose the war is bound to teach them a few things—but not yet. Not yet. They’re fooling around in the dark, is all.”

“Exactly.”

It wasn’t until they were well into their second drinks, having happily agreed to stay here for lunch, that Charles Shepard said “You know a funny thing, Curtis? I don’t even know what kind of work it is you do. I mean I know you’re a business executive, of course, but I’ve never really—”

“No, ‘executive’ isn’t quite right. I’m more on the level of a staff sergeant, you might say, than a commissioned officer. I work for Philco Radio, is all. Sold in the field for a good many years; then I came over into a job on the sales-management side. I’m one of four assistant sales managers for the area of greater New York.”

“Well, that sounds very—that’s really interesting. A good friend of mine in the army went into the radio business, back in about ’twenty-eight or ’twenty-nine, and I
think
it was Philco he started out with. I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard the name—Joe Raymond?”

“No, I don’t believe I have,” Curtis said. “Still, there’s
been quite a heavy—you know—quite a heavy turnover in sales personnel since ’twenty-nine.”

And Charles said he could easily imagine that must be true.

“… So how was she when she got home?” Rachel asked her brother that afternoon. “She still out of her mind?”

“Well, I don’t know. I mean I really don’t know, Rachel, because I didn’t see her. She knocked on my door and told me the baby was born, is all; then I got the bike and came right over here. She was in her room when I left, I think.”

“Oh. Well, she might stay in her room for days and days now, trying to make us all feel bad because
she
feels bad. Daddy said she needs the shame of these things as much as she needs the explosions, only he called them ‘displays.’ He said it’s a cycle he’s known about since even before they were married. Oh, but look: let’s not talk about this stuff any more, okay? I’m sorry I even told you what happened. So listen: why don’t you go and have a look at your nephew. Just ask any of the girls out there. See if you don’t think he’s the image of his father.”

“Well, good,” Phil said. “I’ll have a look.”

Gloria kept entirely to herself for the next two weeks. From small remnants found in the kitchen every morning—a stain of milk or egg or meat on the linoleum counter—it was clear that she came downstairs to feed herself at night, but her bedroom had become her fortress and tabernacle, and except for an occasional creaking of floorboards it never emitted a sound.

“Oh, I know I could probably go in there and talk to
her,” Rachel explained to her husband after the first week, “but I don’t really feel like doing that. I don’t want to.”

And Evan’s mumbled view, as he opened his newspaper, was that sometimes it was best to leave well enough alone.

“And then I keep wanting to call Daddy for advice on this, but that’s pointless because I know he’ll just say there’s nothing anyone can do.”

“Right,” Evan said, rattling the paper firmly into reading position. “And besides, if you want to go around calling her crazy, you might as well let her be crazy.”

Privately, Evan felt he couldn’t be expected to pay much attention to any gloomy domestic crisis here when the real interests of his heart were miles away.

“Daddy?” Kathleen said during one of their Saturday rides together. “Mom says she and you are good friends again.”

“Well, what’s the matter with that, sweetheart? Whoever said divorced people can’t be good friends?” And it was profoundly pleasing, as he reached from the steering wheel and tousled her hair, to know that only a few hours from now he would have her mother in his arms.

Phil Drake’s fields of interest were divided now too. Ever since the night of Aaron’s party he’d found himself on easy, jolly terms with the kitchen staff and the waitresses at Costello’s. He didn’t even have to eat at home any more because succulent suppers were prepared for him at work, with the manager’s tacit approval (“Gotta put a little weight on this boy, right? Case we ever need him to defend our country?”).

Shortly before dark one evening, as he walked glowing with food and camaraderie from the service door, he saw
Mrs. Talmage’s limousine pull into the far end of his lot. Ralph drove as slowly past the few parked cars as if he were conducting a sight-seeing tour, and his two smiling passengers were Flash Ferris and a much smaller, younger boy.

“Just checking up on you, Drake,” Ferris called as the limousine came to a stop. “Wanted to make sure you’re hard at work here.”

“Well, good,” Phil said, fitting his cap carefully into place. “Glad you came by.”

“This is Rod Walcott. He’ll be starting in at Deerfield too.”

“Hiya, Rod.”

“Hi.”

The boy was about twelve, barely of boarding-school age but squaring his shoulders and visibly trying to look older in Flash’s company.

“Deerfield sent out this letter to all the new boys,” Flash explained, “so we could get together if we wanted, and Rod’s the only other one from this part of the Island. And I mean he’s little, but you oughta see him on his bike: this kid can really travel.”

“Good.”

“Not much business here tonight,” Flash observed.

“Well, it generally doesn’t pick up until after dark; that’s when I have to start hustling, if I want to make a buck.”

“I see. Well; hope you make a whole lot of bucks.”

Phil gave his flashlight a little end-over-end flip in the air and caught it neatly in his palm, as tennis players sometimes do with their racquets.

“So how about the Marine Corps, Flash?” he asked. “You still planning to try for it next winter?”

Flash blinked and ducked his head bashfully, seeming to shrink a little under Rod Walcott’s incredulous stare; then he said he hadn’t decided yet. He might do that, and he might not. He was thinking it over.

And just before the limousine drew away Ralph turned in the driver’s seat to give Phil a slow, sardonic nod and a wink, making clear that he hadn’t missed a nuance of the conversation. No weakness in the world, apparently, would ever be lost on Ralph.