Promises (23 page)

What was happening to them?

“So she really knows, you see. She doesn’t want to know, but she does,” Adam said wearily as he concluded the story.

Randi sighed. “I suppose this is your way of saying that we can’t have that little trip you promised for January.”

“How can I do it now? Besides all this business at
home, things are uncertain at the office, as I’ve been telling you.”

He had not, however, told Randi about Jenks’s tongue-lashing. There was no reason to do so. A man had his pride too. And in addition he had lately been feeling compunction over the burdens he was laying upon Randi.

The effects were evident in more ways than one, in her sometimes plaintive voice, in her sighs which revealed perhaps more than she intended, and in her very posture. At the moment she made a drooping silhouette at the window, where the strong light washed against blue-gray shadow and made dark blurs of her downcast eyes. An Impressionist would emphasize her pallor, he thought irrelevantly, by dressing her in some sort of long, graceful robe: plum-purple, maybe, or wine-red? His mind was wandering.

When the clock struck the half hour, she looked up, exclaiming, “I’d like to throw that damn thing out! It’s like a prison guard when you’re here. ‘Time,’ it calls. ‘You’ve ten minutes left. Five, four, countdown’! I hate the thing.”

“It’s only two-thirty. I can stay till four.”

“Oh, Saturday night, of course. An invitation to a diplomatic dinner at the White House.”

“Randi darling, try not to be bitter. Do you think I really want to have dinner at Gil’s house along with his country-club show-offs? And best of all, oh, best of all, with Fred Davis?”

“The snoop. Your wife’s lover.”

“Don’t say that. Don’t talk about her.”

“Why? Do you still love her enough to be jealous?”

“Randi, please. She has no lover. But I wouldn’t mind if Fred were her lover.”

He sat down on the floor beside Randi’s chair and looked up at her face, pleading, “I wish I could do something to keep you from being so sad.”

A vast sadness permeated everything. A blight lay over home, office, and suddenly now over this place, too, this source of joy. Mankind wants certainty, and there is none, he thought. Even the weather mocks you; outdoors now in the January thaw you can hear the drip of melting snow, but tomorrow the wind may howl again.

“I feel,” he said, “as if I’m in a toboggan racing downhill toward a stone wall, and I must get off before it crashes.”

“It won’t crash if you steer it right. You have to go around the end of the wall.” She stroked his head. “You’re all knotted up again. You can’t keep on like this.” When he did not answer, she kept stroking and talking, gently stroking and gently talking. “You said you wished you could do something to relieve my sadness. Well, you can, and relieve your own at the same time.” She paused. “It’s not as hard as you probably think it is to get a divorce. That’s your real answer, Adam. Bite the bullet.”

Divorce.
The word shocked him. “I haven’t been thinking of divorce,” he said.

“Why not? Don’t you owe anything to yourself? Don’t you have a right to be happy?”

Alarmed, he cried out, “Randi! You’re not thinking of leaving me, are you?” And he sat up straight to seek her eyes.

She leaned forward, kissed his forehead, and whispered,
“God knows, God knows I don’t want to, but—”

“I’ve been saying stupid things,” he said desperately. “It’s a mood, that’s all, and it will pass as it came. Believe me, we’ll be ourselves again. In an hour from now we’ll—”

“No. No, Adam. We can’t stay the way we are. You can’t go on dividing yourself.”

“Why not? In Europe they used to accept—maybe they do yet—the fact that a man can maintain a family and still have a lover. Sometimes the wife even knows about it. And life goes on without wreckage, the children don’t suffer, they have their father and no harm is done. I don’t say it’s the best way, but it’s better than tearing everything apart.”

“That was all right once, Adam. When there was no other way for a woman in my position, she had to accept back-door love. But I want to walk in at the front door. Women have rights today.”

He saw that underneath this indignation lay a powerful anger that she was trying to curb.

“I love you. I want to have a home with you. I want to have a baby. Don’t look surprised. Why shouldn’t I want one? You talk about your children.… When am I going to have mine? When I’m fifty? I’m already thirty-eight years old.”

With a small sob Randi paused, while Adam, dismayed by this outburst, waited for it to resume. He had naturally guessed what she wanted, for it was no more than what most women wanted. But he had also believed that she had accepted the impossibility of getting it.

“I’m sick of hiding, of all these narrow escapes, like
yours in that snowstorm. Or being scared that some busybody will catch us out together in your car. Or needing eyes in the back of my head. Sick of it all. I feel as if I’ve been caught shoplifting or something.”

He saw before him a great divide. It was as if he were standing on a hill observing below him the place in the road where it formed a junction, and he would have to choose which way to take.

There was, however, a fair distance still to go before he would reach that place, and he need make no choice yet. So he spoke very carefully, with his hand on hers, saying almost timidly, “Darling Randi, you knew how it was with me. You said you understood.”

“That was more than two years ago. How could I have known how I would feel living this way? I feel married to you now, and you feel the same toward me. You’ve said it many, many times.”

That was true.

“Must she be a drag on you for the rest of your life?”

Now Randi placed her hand on his so that his one hand was held between two of hers; it seemed to him that the currents of their blood were flowing into each other.

“I’m telling you now, Adam, go home and talk to her. Tell her things have changed between you, as she well knows, and that it makes no sense to stick out the rest of your lives together annoying each other. Tell her she’ll be better off herself. She can make a new start. She’s young enough—how old is she?”

Tell Margaret she’ll be better off! Margaret, of all women, who lived for him and family before everything. Family. His mother. Her mother. Their children.
Even the cousins. He was hardly able to get the word out.

“Thirty-nine.”

“One year older than I am, but years ahead of me in living. Her children are almost grown! Of course, that’s a good thing for you. It’s not as if you were leaving her with babies on her hands, or with children too young to understand and accept the situation.”

Accept! The day he would carry his things to the car, back out of the garage and down the driveway, would they be on the front porch watching him? Accept!

“Anyway, from all that I read, divorce is much better for children than the atmosphere of a failing marriage.”

“I don’t know,” he mumbled.

“Of course it is. You’ve told me yourself that you’ve been snapping at them. And what about that scene they overheard while they were standing in the hall? Was that good for them?”

“Of course not.”

“Well, then. And it’s not as if you were going to move to Australia and abandon your children. You’ll live right here, fifteen miles away, and see them all the time, anytime. It’ll be much, much better for them in the long run.”

Better for them!

Megan that night, turning away toward the staircase. Her stricken face, with a dreadful knowledge being born. Julie, that wisp of a shadow, following him on every errand, looking to him over the piano keys, asking for his admiration. And Danny, the best catcher in the Little League.…

“Don’t you think your children can sense that you
don’t love their mother? You haven’t loved her for a long time, Adam, if ever. If ever.”

Yes, it was true that he did not love Margaret, not in any way that sends a rush to a man’s heart or makes him count the days and hours before he will see her again. He cared very much for her, though; he wanted nothing to harm her ever. Ever—but that was something else.

He stood up and got his coat, saying dully, “I have to go. I don’t want to go, darling, but I have to.”

“I know.” She straightened his collar and for a moment they clung together in the doorway. “I’m not pressuring you,” she said. “I’m not saying you should go home and do it tonight.”

Wanting to part on a light note, Adam smiled. “Hardly tonight. We’re going to Louise and Gil’s, remember?” And he gave a mock groan.

Randi laughed. “Well, have a good time. Maybe the food will be worth it.” Then she grew serious. “Honey, think over what I’ve said. Get up your spirits and your courage. You can do it.”

“Yes,” he said.

On the way home, in the tumult of his thoughts, an image from some long-ago history class came suddenly to mind: a drawing of a medieval instrument of torture. It had shown a living man spread out and being pulled apart. What was its name? The rack? Yes, that was it. The rack.

During the evening meal there were unexpected lapses into silence. Suddenly the normal talk about schools, sports, local events, or news of the world would come to a halt. And Margaret felt a wave of
consciousness pass over them all, a great, swelling wave, a mutual awareness of change that had occurred or was about to occur. The three youngest would look up at the two eldest, questioning, and as quickly look away. Then either Adam or Margaret would hurriedly take up the interrupted topic as before. Where had Adam’s bright enthusiasm vanished? What had happened to his nature lectures, his Saturday-afternoon putterings with herbs and spices in the kitchen? Even his zeal for music, for Julie’s evening piano practice, had faded; half the time when she played, he fell asleep in his chair.

Nothing had ever been said about the night of Margaret’s outburst. Remembering it with shame, she worried over the impression that she had written with indelible ink on her children’s minds, worried that, of all their myriad accumulated memories, this one would remain forever.

Yet she could argue with herself: I am human and I’m not supposed to be perfect; I was driven, he drove me beyond my endurance. Should I then, she asked herself, say as much to my children? At least to Megan, who studies me sometimes with such a deep, troubled, curious gaze? Perhaps it is wrong to let childish ignorance last too long—as if, she thought wryly, children ever really are ignorant! Perhaps I should relieve whatever troubles Megan has by telling her simply that her father and I are going through a hard time and that these things happen and that they pass.

Yet she said nothing. For surely it would pass. In many ways life was already resuming its usual course. On a day when Margaret had taken her class on a field trip, Julie developed a dangerously abscessed tooth, and
Adam had to be summoned from work. By the time Margaret returned, Julie was home again, lying on the sofa, while he applied compresses and fed her with ice cream. When poor old Zack got sick, both Adam and Margaret took him to the vet, saw him out of this world, went home to break the news to Danny, and gave what comfort they could. When Julie got the second lead in the ninth-grade play, Margaret and Adam sat in the front row, and Adam brought a bouquet of pink rosebuds.

And so, in some ways, life seemed to be trying to get back on its usual course.…

Yet Adam did not sleep. In the wide bed where they lay apart, Margaret was painfully aware of his tension. Without raising her head to peer through the darkness, she believed that she saw him on his back with arms at his sides. She imagined that his fists were clenched. Waking sometimes in the middle of the night and sensing his absence, she would listen for his footsteps in the hall, creaking over the old floors. Back and forth they went, fourteen steps to the turn and fourteen steps back. It was maddening. And now it was she who lay awake until eventually he returned to the bed.

One night she got up and confronted him. “What is it, Adam? Why can’t you sleep?”

“What are you getting excited about? Have you never heard of insomnia?” Then, in the dim hall light, he must have seen her despair. “I disturb you,” he said, “and you need your sleep. Perhaps I should use the downstairs bedroom for a while.”

In another era, when people had household servants, a “hired girl” had slept in a little room at the back of the house. Later, when Margaret’s mother had stayed
with them after her accident, she had used it. Since then, no one had.

Hearts do sink, Margaret thought. There’s a good reason for every cliché. And she replied very quietly, “Yes of course, if you want to.”

Megan was the one who inquired why.

“He isn’t feeling well,” Margaret told her. “He doesn’t want to keep me awake.”

“I see,” said Megan, stone faced.

And where do we go from here? Margaret asked herself. He has left our bed. There was no one, no one at all, no shoulder on which to lean. Besides, she had too much pride, whether stupid and false or not, to lean on anyone. If Nina had been home, perhaps—no, probably—she would have been the exception. But it would be a year this coming summer since she had spoken to Nina. I shall simply have to lean on myself, she thought. In the end that is what we all have to do.