The Husband (30 page)

“Always a first time,” she said, shaping it in front of the mirror.

Peter pulled Elizabeth aside and whispered frantically, “She’ll wear it once.”

Elizabeth shrugged her shoulders helplessly. She knew the fit of the trap.

Peter paid for the hat, which Margaret insisted on wearing out into the street so that, in her words, “Some of the kooks will look at me now.”

They were a distance from the store when Peter realized that Elizabeth had not purchased the handbag. The day had cost them over seventy dollars.

Elizabeth walked on ahead with Margaret, which gave Peter an opportunity to talk to Jon alone for the first time.

“Do you think, Dad, that Vietnam will still be on when I’m old enough to go?”

Peter remembered his war, how everyone was certain it would be over before Peter was old enough to be drafted. That was a laugh. Two years in uniform. But the risk had been his, and he hadn’t been sensible enough to believe that death was possible. Death or dismemberment. But Jon?

“Do you think it will still be on?”

The first real question he had ever been asked by his son.

“I don’t know,” said Peter.

They were all tired, and the packages were getting to be a drag, so they took a cab back, a last luxurious fling and, Peter decided, a worthwhile one, because in the nest of the back of the cab the four of them sat, tired, enjoying the glow of a hard day’s effort. Was the day a success? Peter studied the children’s faces. He couldn’t tell. Should he suggest taking only Jon the next time, splitting them up, as he now knew would be inevitable in time? He’d try once more, the two of them together. He’d plan carefully. He’d map an itinerary. He’d work out everything ahead of time.

It was like planning a marketing campaign. It lacked spontaneity. Is that a built-in handicap of visiting days?

The cab let them out. Peter overtipped the driver, hoping Jonathan would notice. Elizabeth hung back on the sidewalk while Peter and the kids, arms loaded, went to the door. It may have been open, but the kids rang the bell. The establishment of formalities had now begun.

Peter had taken a step or two back quite unconsciously, fading out of the picture. As Leluc answered the door (would he ever see Rose again? And why the thought?), the kids turned to half-wave at him, but their attention was now clearly on home, the house, and Leluc, who put his arms around them and conspicuously kissed Margaret on the cheek and shook Jonathan’s hand. Peter had never shaken hands with Jon.

Is Leluc taking them for his own?

Did
you divorce children also?

He joined Elizabeth, and they walked toward the subway. He slowed his pace, then stopped.

“Anything wrong?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he said, suddenly buoyant. “Let’s go for a ride. It’s only seven.”

Peter fished in his pocket for his credit cards, came up with Hertz.

Twenty minutes later they were on their way, across the Queensborough Bridge, Fifty-seventh Street, down Ninth Avenue to the Lincoln Tunnel, and she knew.

“Palisades Amusement Park,” she said.

“Clever.”

“Haven’t been in fifteen years, maybe more.”

“Thought we’d give it a dry run, see what might interest the kids next time.”

She looked at him, relaxed now behind the wheel. Man and boy, she thought, she loved him.

*

As they walked from the parking lot, they passed families with children coming out of the amusement park, the day done. On the way in with them were teen-agers, mostly in twos.

“Feel middle-aged?” he asked her.

She squeezed his hand.

“Hungry?” he asked as they passed the first hot dog stand.

“Yes, but if we’re going to try any of the rides—are we?” He nodded. “Then let’s wait till afterward.”

Practical woman, he thought.

“How about the tunnel of love?” he asked.

“Closed years ago. Old-fashioned.”

When she saw where he was headed, she felt the first twinge of fear. She had suggested it for the children, not herself.

She thought he might ask her first, but he went straight up to the booth and bought two tickets. She looked up at the Ferris wheel, a huge full circle rimmed with lights.

“I thought we were going to explore, to see what the kids might like,” she said.

“That,” he said, “was the excuse.”

She remembered what he had said about necessary risks. But was this risk necessary? The wheel seemed fragile as well as high, so few supports, so much dead weight.

The attendant took their tickets, strapped them into a swinging seat side by side. Nearly half the seats above were filled; half to go. The attendant motioned the operator, who moved them off the ground so that the next couple could get on.

It was an exasperating ten minutes as their seat moved up eight feet at a time. Then they were at the very top of the circle; beneath them the dizzy fairground blinked away.

“Just look at it,” he whispered close to her ear.

She hadn’t realized her eyes were closed. It seemed a very long way down, much farther than from the ground looking up. Peter and herself and the wooden seat and sides obviously must have weighed three hundred pounds or more. Yet it all hung so loosely from the skimpy circular frame. And how many times three hundred, how many other couples had now added weight to the spindly circle of the skeleton wheel? In looking down, she had shifted her weight, and just that slight movement started their seat rocking, wildly it seemed in relation to those few bolts holding it up in the air.

“There doesn’t seem to be much holding us up,” she said. “Are you sure it’s safe?”

She saw his expression and laughed at her own question. How would Peter know if it were safe? Amazing that the whole spidery apparatus would stay upright when massive steel bridges sometimes collapsed in a wind. They would circle faster than any bridge ever swayed, spinning like a wheel, with the individual seats swaying back and forth as well as moving around, she thought, secured by bolts subject to rust or metal fatigue or an attendant’s careless inspection, the failure to adjust a single nut that had come loose.

“I remember reading somewhere,” said Peter, shouting to be heard above the new level of noise, “the first of these contraptions had more than thirty cars carrying forty people in each of them.” He pointed a finger at his fact-filled temple. “Nuts,” he said.

“Why aren’t we moving?” she said.

They could see the lineup of couples now waiting to get on the Ferris wheel; the line wasn’t moving. No one was being put on, though there were still a couple of empty seats.

“We’re probably overweight with passengers,” said Peter, not knowing what he was talking about. “Too many fat people aboard.”

The operator and the attendant seemed to be talking busily, like a pitcher and a catcher at the mound. Why talking? Why were people gesturing upward? What was wrong?

Suddenly the wheel started to move, not slowly as before, when passengers were being put aboard, but in a great lurching motion that sent Peter and Elizabeth sprawling against each other and very nearly flying out of the seat despite the strap across their laps.

Elsewhere on the wheel, girls were screaming from the shock of the lurch. What had happened? Why all the milling around down below?

The wheel lurched a second time, this time worse. The screams from passengers were louder. One could hear, “Let me off! Let me off!” carried on the wind.

A great panic seized Peter.
I want to be living when I die,
he remembered.

Elizabeth’s face had whitened. Why was she looking at him that way? She hadn’t screamed as the other women had, but that expression of ultimate fear on her face… Oh, the foolish chances people take in a life filled with hazard. Was she blaming him for what was happening?

“Brace yourself,” he shouted, “before it happens again.” The nails of her left hand dug into the flesh of his right.

Down below, they could see a car with a red light flashing on its roof moving, insectlike, through the crowds, its siren carrying sound to them up high. The car inched as close as it could to the crowd and two uniformed ants got quickly out, conferred with the operator and the attendant, pointing first at something on the driving mechanism, it seemed, then up at them. How could they be removed? A crane? And if a crane, how?

There must have been a thousand ants now staring up at them, the biggest spectacle of all in the amusement park. “Don’t move the wheel!” someone shouted from somewhere nearby, and a contrary cry was picked up by others suspended on the wheel. “Let us down!”

Was this their last view of the world, Saturday night at Palisades, rides, twenty-five, thirty-five and fifty-cent thrills, hunger pangs for a greasy hot dog, and finish, now?

Would it help to pray?
Peter thought.
If I knew how. If I meant it.

Suddenly a terrible machinery grating came from below. A great hush vented from the staring crowd. The huge wheel swayed. Then it lurched, only a few feet around this time, and stopped, swaying them again. Dear God, what was happening?

From their new angle, Peter’s vision of the ground immediately below was blocked, and he had to lean over the side to see.

“Don’t lean like that!” she said, immediately sorry.

And then the wheel moved, not a lurch as before, but in a smooth pattern, slowly turning them backward toward the ground. The crowd of onlookers applauded wildly.

As Peter and Elizabeth came down to ground level, wanting desperately for the wheel to stop so they could get off, they found themselves being raised again. The Ferris wheel turned. They were not going to be deprived—deprived?—of their ride, as the wheel, now working, circled them over the top again, and again, and again, fear, relief, fear, relief.

“Looks like they’re going to give us the fifty-cent ride anyway,” he said.

It seemed unendurably long until the couples were let off, two by two. Elizabeth and Peter touched their feet to the ground.

Some of the people who had been stuck up there stayed to argue with the attendant. What was the point? Holding Elizabeth’s hand firmly, he pulled her with him through the gaping earthlings, who were disappointed that the apparatus had not come crashing down for their enjoyment.

“Excuse me,” he said as they worked their way through the mob now beginning to disperse. “Excuse me.”

They had a life to lead.