End of the Tiger (21 page)

Is there anything the little devil doesn’t see?
Ben asked himself.

“Maybe I’ve been getting self-important,” Ben said with
what he hoped was precisely the right amount of lightness.

“Not you, Ben! That’s a vice you’ll never have. I’m glad things are going well, and it’s been nice to have this little talk.”

“I do appreciate the bonus deal, sir,” he said, getting up.

Mallory shrugged as he led him to the door. “Be assured you earned it, Ben. And because it’s unexpected money, spend it foolishly. It will do you and Ginny good. Sometimes I wonder if you young people aren’t
too
reliable.”

He gave Ben a parting touch on the shoulder. Not a pat or a slap, but a barely perceptible touch, a curious gesture of reassurance.

Ben decided not to tell Ginny of the bonus. Had he been told the figure, he would have told her. He spent the entire train ride home trying to guess what it would be. He told himself that it would be a glorious $10,000 that would get him even with the board, with some to spare. But that was ridiculously optimistic. He knew the bonus scale of past years, and he knew corporate earnings, and he finally settled on $3500 as being a conservative and reasonable guess.

That evening he went over his financial accounts and saw that his most intelligent use of the money would be to reduce the bank loan by $1500, pay another $1500 on the insurance loan, and leave $500 in the checking account for emergencies.

Had they not previously made an agreement on the cost of the Christmas gifts they would give each other, Ben, in view of the bonus to come, might have refused to set such a small figure—no more than $5, and no cheating, please. After all, they told each other, Christmas is for the kids. And it isn’t the value of the gift anyway. It’s the act of giving.

Something that left a wound deeper than she had any right to expect happened to Ginny Weldon five days before Christmas. She had yet to find the proper $5 gift for Ben and she had begun to feel dismayed at her lack of success.

She was in a gift-shop area, bent on a specific errand, when she happened to notice in a window a beautiful English croquet set in a fitted hardwood box. She walked by the window, stopped abruptly, and turned back. Ben had admired Stan Sheridan’s layout the summer before. They had played a few times at Sheridan’s at afternoon parties on weekends, and Ben had been quite good at it. Afterward he had paced off their back yard and had told her that if they transplanted a few shrubs, there was plenty of room. He had mentioned getting a set quite a few times, saying it would be fun for them and for the kids. But he had never done anything about it.

Ginny knew that this was the perfect present, in spite of the fact that the season was wrong. It was the unusual sort of thing, the fun thing she always tried to find for him. It would be especially for him, but it would be a present for the whole family too. She was filled with a warm glow of excitement and anticipation, and a delight at having found the perfect thing so accidentally. The mallets, balls, and posts were varnished and striped with bright, pure colors in holiday mood.

Her happy sense of the rightness of the gift carried her into the shop and into the hands of a supercilious little clerk who called her “modom” and handed her a mallet from the set on display inside the store. As she held it, smiling with the thought of Ben’s surprise and pleasure, he told her the set was $124.95.

The blunt figures burst the dream. She handed the mallet back to the clerk, said something about thinking it over, and saw him shrug in a slightly patronizing way as he put the mallet back in the open hardwood case.

She walked out, and it took her a few moments to remember the small errand two blocks away. She squared her shoulders as she walked.
This year five dollars is the limit. Stick to it, girl. You promised. Don’t cheat, because he won’t. And stop feeling so dreary about it. It isn’t that important
.

He had stopped talking about croquet and there was, she knew, a whole list of things he had stopped talking about. As she walked she could see the cumulative weariness of her man, in his face and his posture. And it struck her, a sick blow at the heart, a twist of anguish so intense
she was not prepared for it.
He doesn’t have any fun
, she thought.
He is so good and I love him so much, and he doesn’t have any fun any more. Nobody does
.

The sound, inadvertent, moved up through her throat, half sob and half cry of protest, and in the instant she realized other people were staring at her with startled curiosity, she felt the tickling run of tears on her face. She turned from them and stood facing a wall of decorative tile that was part of a store front—stood a few inches from it.

There was an insistent tugging at the sleeve of her coat and she looked down into the tear-blurred face, the soft, concerned, gentle face of a small round woman in a derelict fur coat.

“You all right, dearie? Anything I can do, dearie?”

“I’m … all right. Thanks.”

“Sometimes they die around Christmastime, dearie, and it’s God’s will. They wouldn’t do it if they could help it, poor things, but when the next Christmas comes around, it’s dreadful hard. Just get through it, dearie, best you can, and next year won’t be so terrible bad as this one. I know.”

And the woman was gone. Ginny got tissue out of her purse and wiped her eyes. In all the ways of pride she pulled herself together. And she went on with Christmas. She could tell herself over and over that it was too like a petulant child to whine about being unable to afford big glossy presents. But the wound had been inflicted, deep enough so that it could not ever heal perfectly.

In the last moments of shopping she found a walnut pipe rack and humidor thing for Ben for which she paid $4.98. In the shop she had been pleased by the way it looked, but when she unwrapped it to gift-wrap it herself, the finish had that shiny look of cheapness. After she had worked on it a long time, cutting the gloss by carefully rubbing it with steel wool, it was much more handsome.

Ben’s present to her was a small antique vase he found in a shop on Second Avenue. She could only guess the amount of stolen time used in finding something so lovely that was within the limit they had set.

The kids had prepared long and discouragingly expensive
lists. Ben and Ginny had budgeted $100 for them, and due to the increased pressure of work because of the end of the year, Ben had been unable to help her but, as he told her later, she had performed a vast miracle of judgment and selection.

The bonus came through on January tenth. It was for $1500. Ben managed, for Ginny’s sake, to conceal his disappointment. He knew it was a bit churlish of him to feel disappointment. There could easily have been no bonus at all. But he had so carefully worked out just how he would disburse the anticipated $3500, and had dwelt upon how much that amount would ease the endless tension——

Ginny, thinking it came as a surprise to him, too, was delighted. And it seemed to dilute some of her growing resentment toward National. He said nothing to decrease her pleasure. He did not tell her that, because it was considered 1965 income, a tiny additional tax nip would be taken out of each monthly check for the rest of the year.

He paid $600 on his $2200 note at the Lawton National Bank, reduced the insurance loan by $400, and left $500 in the checking account for emergencies.

And then began the time of waiting. The winter was exceptionally severe again, the fuel bills high. The reserve shrank to $300. The house thermostat stopped working and had to be replaced. Ladybug had flu for a week and, in spite of Ginny’s precautions, she gave it to Chris, and the prescribed antibiotics were $14 a patient. Ben, returning late from a stormy meeting of the Civic Betterment Committee (men who work for National take an active interest in the affairs of their home communities), took to the deep snowy ditch to avoid a skidding drunk, and the tow-truck fee was $15. The water company, with the approval of all agencies concerned, slapped a special $20 assessment on all users.

These were the small things. A very special guest, a member of the board of directors of National, drops a handsome Danish cocktail glass on the hearth. Once there were a dozen. Now there are seven. So for any special entertaining for more than seven in the future, a new set
must be purchased. Little things. Like being pecked to death by sparrows.

So the little things make you irritable with each other. But it is not only the little things that corrode dispositions. It is the unspoken awareness, always just around a dark corner of the mind, that big things can happen, and do happen, and the process of life is in part the knowledge that they will happen and in being prepared for them. They lived with the knowledge of their defenselessness. In a primitive culture, they would have worn charms to ward off evil, and had they been able to believe in the efficiency of the charms, they would have felt secure.

But in suburbia there are no magic things you can wear suspended from a string hung around your neck. You pray for breathing space, for time to plant your feet.

Love was there, in abundance. But an endless worry about money is an astringent that sucks the juice from love, renders it wan and slow-moving. And penury is, perhaps, more endurable in matching surroundings. It becomes grotesque in a $40,000 house.

The stress of enduring an unfair situation makes people seek outlets for their irritability. Ben and Ginny were handy targets for each other. The apologies, in time, became more a matter of protocol than of guilt. And each of them built up a distorted picture of what the other one thought. Ben taught himself to believe Ginny thought him a spineless conformist who dared not complain for fear of upsetting plans so far in the golden future they were meaningless. Ginny grew to believe that Ben considered her spoiled and petulant, unwilling to endure all this for his sake, thinking only of pleasures she was missing. And, in the perversity of all mortals, they made more effort to fit the mistaken conception than to correct it. Some of the warmth went out of the house, and a lot of the closeness went out of the marriage during the cold months, and the children felt it and were troubled by it, and acted in ways unlike themselves without knowing why—knowing only that they more frequently deserved punishment, and taking a curious satisfaction in receiving it.

There was no snow in Columbus, Indiana, on the morning
of the third day of March, and the temperature was in the low twenties, and dropping steadily. It had been above freezing during the night, and there had been a hard driving rain, which had frozen in a cellophane skim over everything the rain had touched.

Martha Weldon had got up early, as was her habit, and had the coffee on before Geraldine Davis came down, smiling, yawning, to the kitchen. Martha was a tall, heavy woman with an air of pious thoughtfulness, an authoritative, rather ponderous presence. Geraldine was also a widow, and she was four years younger than Martha. Geraldine had begun to “help out” at Martha’s house seven years ago. She was a small, lean, tireless woman of good spirits but with a talent for malice. Her life income from her husband’s insurance was too tiny to support her. She made ends meet by helping Martha and two other elderly women. She had the knack of keeping it on the basis of a friendship between equals, so that the necessary matter of slipping money to her had to be done with greatest delicacy.

Martha also had a small income. It had been larger quite a few years ago, and it was fortunate that, as it dwindled, her only living son, Ben, had been able to contribute to her support.

Three years ago one of the women Geraldine helped had died, and the other had gone to Oklahoma to live with a daughter. Geraldine told her problems to Martha. As a result, Martha suggested she give up her miniature apartment and move in with her. There was more than enough room. They would be good company for each other. It seemed an excellent arrangement.

After breakfast on that cool, bright morning Martha sat at the desk in the living room and wrote to Ben and Ginny. She knew that Geraldine knew what she was doing, and she also knew that it would give Geraldine her usual opportunity to make overly casual comments about how long it had been since Martha had seen her grandchildren, and how young people these days lacked consideration, and how you’d think a boy doing as well as Martha kept telling her he was doing, making all that money and all, could afford to send more. Maybe he just
never thought of it. Young people were certainly thoughtless.

It was a few minutes after nine when Martha stepped out the front door to put the letter in the mailbox attached to the post at the head of the porch steps. The board floor of the porch was painted a dark green. She took two heavy steps on the dry wood, and a third step onto the slick, transparent, invisible ice. She struck the edge of the top step with a terrible force, felt her thigh snap, and tumbled in a white roaring spin of pain to the cement sidewalk, down the four shallow steps of the porch, and lay there moaning, rolling her head from side to side. She was half aware that Geraldine had come to her, that Geraldine was in great panic. And when Geraldine made a stupid futile effort to pull at her, as though to drag her into the house, Martha screamed once, with the strength of a young woman, and fainted.

Ginny phoned the office at 12:40 and caught Ben just as he was leaving for lunch. Geraldine had not been very coherent. Martha had had a bad fall, and was in the hospital, and Ben should come at once. He told Ginny he would leave right away. He kept a small travel case with the essentials at the office for emergency business trips. His secretary had not left yet. He had her check flights for him and make a reservation. He could use his air-travel card and reimburse the company. The other men were out to lunch. He left it to her to tell them the situation, and he dictated a hasty memo that made staff assignments of the work he was handling, and told her to reshuffle his appointments as best she could.

When he saw his mother in the hospital that evening, he was deeply shocked at the way she looked, and at the uncontrolled trembling of her hands. He stayed in the house. Mrs. Geraldine Davis made up a bed there for him with what he thought was an unwarranted surliness.