Promises (2 page)

“You know, Mom,” she said firmly, “Henry’s a good man, and you’re very lucky. I’m glad for you. Stop thinking about me. I’ll be fine. I can manage things.”

“Yes, yes, I know you’re strong. But I’m leaving you with the responsibility of Nina. Starting a marriage with a six-year-old child to care for simply doesn’t seem right.”

“It’s quite right. I love her, and Adam doesn’t mind having her at all.”

“Yes, he’s a prince, he really is. But you’re a princess, Margaret, beautiful and good. Sometimes I think you’re too good.”

“Spoken like a mother! Now, do you mind? I’ve still got reading to do and finals coming up around the corner.”

The late-afternoon sun was watery, and the old scraggly lilac was still winter bare. In her chair at the window Margaret looked out at the well-known landscape, letting her troubled and restless mind wander.

She thought how amazing it was that she had been born into this house and that now, Mom having given it to her, she might possibly even die here. It would not be in this room, though, but in the large one across the hall, the one with the massive dark bed and the wardrobe that, when she was a child, had seemed to loom above her like some dark giant.

She thought about her early dreams, the allure of medicine, her vision of herself in an operating theater, or maybe on a hospital ship bringing modern miracles to remote places.

“You can be anything you want to be,” her advisors told her. “You have an aptitude for many things.”

But as she grew older during these last years at college, it became clear that choices would have to be made. Adam was the elder, the one who was now prepared to move from the study hall into the real world. And he had made a truly giant step. A Phi Beta Kappa student in college and now certain to receive his graduate degree with honors, he had already been engaged to work right here in Elmsford at Advanced Data Systems, one of the busiest computer companies in the state. It promised a glowing future. Now, since the state university was more than two hundred miles away, medical school for Margaret became an impossibility.

There could be no question as to this decision—their
decision. They were everything to each other. Everything.

A sudden and frantic agitation possessed her, so that she started up, dropping her book to the floor, and, seizing a sweater, ran clattering down the stairs.

In the yard Jean was pushing Nina on the swing. “I thought you had to study,” she said, surprised.

“I guess I’ve finished everything.”

Jean smiled. She had a way of making up for her anxieties with a smile.

“I always tell people you will read the phone book if there’s nothing else around.”

It was true. Her imagination ran and ran everywhere, up mountains, back in time, down dead ends. Just this morning there had been a funny name in the phone book. Socrates O’Brien. Had an O’Brien perhaps been a sailor with the Mediterranean fleet and met a Greek girl to bring back to America? And was this Socrates their son? Or perhaps these O’Briens were classics scholars and all their children had names like Psyche or Cassandra.…

The swing creaked, back and forth, up and down. It was hypnotic, the creak repeating itself at the same spot on the return. Hypnotic.
Psyche, Cassandra
, it creaked.

On the rise the child’s legs were tilted higher than her head, and her laughter rang, while on the downswing she squealed in mock terror. Brought from Chicago when Jean’s sister died, she had become Jean and Margaret’s child, more accurately, Margaret’s—a rescued child, innocent product of careless sex and an anonymous father.

Nina, Nina
, the ropes creaked.

“What’s the matter, Margaret? You’re a thousand miles away.”

She came to, blinking. “I need some air and exercise. I’ve been in all day.”

“It’s tension. I remember how I was before my wedding. Go on, dear, take a walk.”

The street was pleasant, the old, well-tended houses far apart. Most people had some fruit trees and an ample vegetable garden out back. Almost everybody had a dog who roamed the neighborhood as if it belonged to him. Margaret and Jean had the vegetable garden, a quite splendid one that they worked themselves, but no dog.

I suppose we’ll get one now that Nina’s older. It will be good for her, Margaret thought.

Her mind flitted, fighting reality. She walked with her head down and her cold hands in the sweater’s pockets.

Past the streets with the small-town, nineteenth-century air she came downhill into the city that Elmsford had become. Here was the main library, Gothic and ivied, where Mom had been head librarian. Here was the high school, where Margaret Keller, freshman, had so miraculously caught the attention of Adam Crane, senior. True, they had been aware of each other’s existence long before that, but “being aware” and “catching attention” were very different. And holding their attention until it grew into a wedding dress and a pair of white satin slippers in a box on the top shelf of the closet was different still.

Nostalgia drew her onto the playing field. Here from a small plateau one looked downward toward the river, edged on this side with a clutter of industry, and turbulent from the long spring rains. Across it lay fields of
corn and wheat, stretching for a hundred miles or more and sprinkled sparsely with small groves of trees, like islands on the calm sea.

Elmsford was a comfortable place. It was good to have grown up here, and it would be good to rear one’s children here. Margaret was not a roamer, but a home person, as was Adam, although his mind roamed far. And she stood now, cold in the rising wind, thinking.…

Her high school advisor, Mrs. Hummel, had said last summer, “I hope you aren’t rushing into anything, Margaret. You’ve been preparing for medical school all along, and now you’re giving it up! Do you have to?”

“I’ll compromise. I can teach biology and chemistry here if they’ll have me.”

“Is that really a compromise?”

“I think so. I’ll be teaching future doctors.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Hummel. “Well.”

No doubt she had thought that because she was Mom’s friend, advice from her would be acceptable. But she had been wrong. Margaret’s expression had told her so, and she had added quickly, “I only mean—you have so much promise, Margaret. And you really are so young.”

Young! She felt old right now, very old. And she longed for Adam with such a yearning, such an ache! If she could only talk to him, not over the telephone, but while she could look into his quiet face! Unlike her he was not given to explosions of emotion, but once he understood her bewilderment, he would reassure her.

Yet he had not reassured her.… When, after he had rather vaguely suggested delay, she had asked him
whether there was anything that he had not told her, he had merely, with equal vagueness, denied it.

“Nothing except that the exams are tough, and I’m tired out. Anyway, what’s a couple of weeks’ postponement?”

She had felt an
atmosphere
, as when the lights go out during a storm and the familiar house, with its corners and closed doors, becomes abruptly dangerous and strange.

Was he tired of
her
? Could he have found somebody else? It happened. But to them? To Adam and Margaret?

She had to ask him. And she began to walk, almost run, toward home and the telephone. Her heart was sick in her chest, now hammering, now fluttering, as she sped back up the slope. She had to stop for breath, to lean against an old stone wall.

But she knew she could not possibly ask him. She would simply have to wait for whatever might come next. It was a question of pride: a woman did not beg. At least, this woman didn’t. No doubt hers was an old-fashioned concept, quite outmoded since men and women were now supposed to be the same. Yet they were not the same.
Equal
, yes, but not
alike.

Now another thought came: He had remembered her birthday last week. He had sent flowers, the
Collected Poems
of Auden and a box of chocolates. She was always lamenting that she was a “chocoholic,” and he was always telling her that with a figure like hers, she could afford to be.

You’re looking for trouble, Margaret. You’re seeing things that are not there.

Almost at her feet a chipmunk, emerging from hibernation,
went racing beside the wall. And watching his erratic, zigzag flight, she wondered about the tiny brain, what its motivation to reverse direction might have been, and what the tiny eye might have noticed that she, standing right there, had not seen.

Zig. Zag. Things seen by some, not seen by others.

Slowly now, she turned into the street. Her mother, who was religious, liked to say, “God doesn’t give anybody more trouble than he can bear.” Perhaps so, but from the little that Margaret had yet seen of living, she doubted it.

If Adam ever leaves me, she thought again, I shall die, no matter what Mom thinks. Or no, I shan’t die, but I shall want to. I shall go on living and wanting to be dead, which is worse than being dead.

W
henever he saw Randi, or thought for an instant that he was seeing her, on the campus or on the street in town, everything in him, heart and breath, responded. She was never out of his mind; sitting in the lecture hall or studying in his room, he was aware without looking at a clock of the hour when she would telephone or come to his door. Sometimes he would catch strangers smiling at him tentatively, as if they were trying to place him, and then he would realize that he himself had been walking along with a smile on his face.

Adam had not ever imagined that a man could be possessed as he was now. There was no way that this possession could be compared with anything he had ever felt for Margaret.

Randi was small, with the curves of a plump little woman, although she was not plump at all; the curves were simply her structure. And soft: her clothes had ruffled touches, flowered scarves and lace; her voice was soft. All the enticements and allures that you found
in the books and the manuals were hers. She had, too, a quality that could be called “demure”—if that were not an absurd adjective to apply to a person whose laughter and chatter were so beguiling—a something secretive in her public manner that
was
demure. Still, men knew otherwise. Often he had caught them looking at her and had read their thoughts, had seen their envy of him when he walked away with her arm in his.

She worked at an office in town and lived in a small, neat apartment near the campus. She was somebody’s cousin—he hardly remembered whose—and was usually seen at the best parties with the best men at the schools of medicine, law, and engineering. Still, no one had ever claimed her as his own; she had kept herself quite free until she had met Adam.

He had first taken real notice of her in the front row at the Drama Society’s musical in which he played a small part. When the group took its bows at the conclusion, he was aware of her eyes upon him. He did not even know her name; he had had in the past only a hurried impression of her, but he had not forgotten it. When, at a repeat performance a few nights following, he saw her again, and their eyes met again, he sought her out.

She said she had enjoyed the music. “I grew up in my grandfather’s house. He played in a band, and he knew music. That’s how I learned the little I know. But I have no talent at all and probably not even a good ear.”

Adam, who knew rather a good deal about music, thought her modesty appealing.

“Would you like to walk over to my place and listen to some records?”

“I’d like to walk over and talk to you,” he said.

The infatuation had been immediate and intense for both. When it had been going on for well over half a year, she said suddenly one day, “They tell me you have a girl back home.”

With a sense of approaching disaster he replied, “Who tells you?”

“People. Somebody always knows somebody who knows something.”

They were having a Sunday-morning breakfast in her kitchenette. He would remember the moment exactly, her pink robe and the sunlight turning her hair into a black satin cap. There was a little twist on her lips, caused either by anger or by a precursor of tears.

“What is her name?”

“Margaret,” he answered, very low.

“Is it true that you’re supposed to be married in the summer?”

“I was,” he murmured.

“So you’ve broken it off?”

“Not yet.”

“What are you waiting for?”

In his agitation he rose from the chair, so that she had to look up at him with her question; her eyes were filled with accusation. He felt chastened, and rightly so.

“It’s—it’s very difficult.” And he knew that his words were awkward and foolish.

Difficult! Margaret’s broad forehead framed by the short, carved curls of a stone cherub. Curve of her white-lidded round, gray eyes. A calmness. Astonishment, disbelief, and suffering—such suffering!—when he should begin: “Margaret, I have to tell you—”

“Why did you hide it from me?” Randi demanded.

“I shouldn’t have. I guess it was, well, that there
wasn’t any real need to talk about it, since I planned—plan—to end it.”