Random Winds (52 page)

How Hazel had loved water! Sometimes they’d gone in the winter to walk on the beach; he, hating the cold, had done so for her sake only. But she would tie a babushka under her round chin and laugh at herself. “I look like my own great-grandmother on the farm in Hungary.”

“I hate this house,” Martin said aloud, “and all this water. I’ll never go near water again.”

Friends came to help. How many friends they had! People brought food and offered to take the children. It was astonishing how good people were. And still there was no one to talk to. The words they spoke were mechanical, as were his answers. None of them came near the heart of things.

Back in the city, he thought: Everything is loose, life has come loose. I must tighten it up again. I must. Do things with my children. I’ll take them to the zoo, he resolved, buy books and read together. So his mind ran.

He could sit at his desk across from a tense and frightened patient, listening and replying, but all the while, at the bottom of his mind, were his children: I robbed them of their mother. He was offered reassurance: children forget. But that was certainly not true. Anyway, Enoch was no child. He suffered, Martin suspected, daily, hidden lacerations. His mother’s son. Mine too, Martin thought.

In the elevator, on the street waiting for the light to change, his teeth were clenched and his jaws ached with the tension. Would he be able to manage everything? The office, the looming responsibility of the institute, the house, the children? Yes, of course he would. He would have to. Yet an evening came when, from his chair in the den, he heard them quarreling fiercely over a bag of doughnuts, which their mother would not have allowed them to eat before dinner. He knew he ought to rise and go in to stop the uproar, but he only stirred in the chair and didn’t go.
Let Esther handle it as best she could! It was suddenly too much for him to cope with.

The telephone rang. “Just to remind you,” Leonard Max said, “we’ve got the Devita woman at seven-thirty in the morning.”

Martin had been going regularly to the office and the hospital, working automatically and well. But perhaps he hadn’t really been working all that well? And all at once he knew he wasn’t prepared to operate in the morning. He heard himself saying, “I don’t think I can make it. You’d better get someone to help you.”

“I can get O’Neill, I’m pretty sure,” Leonard said quickly. Too quickly? “Martin, maybe you should take a rest. People have been saying maybe you should.”

“They have?”

“After what you’ve been through, a few weeks abroad would do a lot for you.”

“I couldn’t leave my family to go abroad, you know that.”

“Well, then, how about a rest at home? Sleep late, relax, spend some time with the kids. You could say you’d gone away on vacation and nobody would bother you.”

Falling, falling.

“Yes, I could do that,” Martin said. Leonard Max was hearty. “You’ll be back better than ever.”

“Thanks, Len,” Martin said, hanging up.

He’s thinking that I’ll never be back, I can tell by his voice, so comforting, so cheerful. I’m finished, everything’s ebbed out.

He got up and locked the door, then put a stack of records on the turntable, three hours’ worth of Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms. He pulled the curtains shut, so that the room grew soft and dark. Like the inside of the womb, he thought scathingly, and lay down.

It was surprisingly easy to hide. For a week he feigned the flu. Claire kept telephoning, but he warned her away from his contagion.

At the beginning of the second week, on a raw November
afternoon, be got up on sudden impulse from the chair, where he had listlessly been reading the news—all discouraging, nothing but strife—put on his coat and went out. He had walked blocks down the avenue when a wind came up and it began to sleet, so he turned around and went home. It was not the weather that had driven him, though. It was rather a peculiar sensation that had overwhelmed him. The world was too large, with too many people in a hurry. There was too much empty air. He knew that these feelings were bizarre, and he was frightened.

Now he had an excuse to stay inside for another few days. He had foolishly gone out too soon and was running a fever again. Claire scolded him by telephone with threats of pneumonia. He ought to be ashamed of himself, she said. He promised meekly not to do it again.

But he couldn’t maintain this pretense, couldn’t stay in hiding. He would have to force himself, find something pleasant to do. Yes, that was it, find something happy. Surely there was something colorful and happy left in the world? Christmas shopping, perhaps, before the season got too late and crowded? It was a long time since he had bought anything or even been in a store.

So, with a careful list, he set forth. He would walk downtown. Exercise, that was the thing; the healthy body, the fast walk. Make the heart work and breathe deeply.

A truck, swinging around a corner, almost ran him down so that he jumped back in terror. “Why the hell don’t you look where you’re going?” the driver swore.

A fat man got out of a taxi, fumbling in the pocket of his bulky overcoat, while traffic behind the taxi blared furious horns. And these sounded like swearing too. Everyone was so irritable, so angry!

He thought he would buy a sweater for Claire, but he wasn’t sure of the size, and wasn’t sure whether she would like a plain one or a cardigan with an embroidered collar. He stood a long time looking at the sweaters, knowing he was taking too long and unable to make up his mind. The saleswoman, a dry creature of outrageous hauteur, left him for another customer. “Well, when you’ve decided,” she said. “I really can’t—”

Oh go to hell, he shouted at her silently, full of hatred. It seemed to him that the arrogance of these expensive goods, which she merely handled and would never own, had been transferred to her person. Strange. Very strange. And he left without buying anything.

On the sidewalk in front of the store, he stood and watched the women going in and out. They were like animals on the prowl for meat with their slouching walk and their darting, avaricious eyes. Parasites and predators, he thought contemptuously, spending the hours away while their husbands labored, and half of them not even grateful, he’d guess. Hazel had never been like that.

He was terribly tired. His overcoat weighed him down. Turning toward home, he walked a few blocks north and then east. Everyone seemed to be hastening in the opposite direction, so that he was constantly bumping shoulders and grazing people who were annoyed with him for having done so. He felt out of breath.

A little crowd stood before a pet shop window looking at a display of parakeets in ornate cages that were too cramped. Poor marvelous creatures! Turquiose and jade and topaz, brilliant as any jeweler’s art! A masterwork, each one, with its powerful, tiny heart and net of tiny veins; an imprisoned marvel, meant to ride the bright air. And as so often, tears came. A man leaving the shop looked at him with alarm, but being well-bred, looked immediately away.

He must go home. At the corner he tried to hail a taxi, but they were all occupied, and he began to walk. Faces wavered as he passed. He tried to focus on them, growing queasy with the effort. He began to walk faster. Something was at his back; he was being pursued. Now he was almost running. The thing was coming closer, reaching to grasp the small of his back. And at the same time he knew that there was nothing there, that he was having what the layman might call a nervous breakdown, or at least, the harbinger of one.

When he arrived at the apartment house, he was panting. He thought the doorman, young Donnelly, pink-faced and fresh out of Ireland with the class deference still in
him, looked at him strangely. But all he said was, “Good evening, Dr. Farrell.” The upholstered elevator cage took him to his floor. He was safe, then, in his own apartment, in his own room.

But his heart kept pounding. Perhaps there were symptoms he didn’t recognize? After all, he was not a cardiologist. Heart attack. Taste of salt, of blood under the tongue. The chest squeezed in an iron fist. Swirls of red and yellow lights before the eyes like a Jackson Pollack picture: daubs they were, in spite of fashionable opinions! What if he were dying? He would vomit on the carpet, Hazel’s good rug. Or struggle to the bathroom and fall on cold tile, clutching the smooth porcelain sides of the tub. Pa had died clutching the dining room table.

He lay down on the bed without taking off his overcoat and thought: I’m dying.

“You can’t go on like this,” Claire said. Martin opened his eyes. “I fell asleep. What are you doing here?”

“Enoch called me. He looked in and saw you. He was scared.”

“No need to be. I’m weak from the flu and I fell asleep, that’s all.”

“Dad, you’re not fooling anyone, so don’t waste your breath. Sit up,” she ordered. “Let’s get your coat off. Now lean back.” She moved briskly. “You’re shivering. I’ll get you a brandy.”

He felt, in the face of her authority, like a child. “Claire, Claire, I’m falling apart,” he said suddenly and for the first time was not ashamed.

She took him in her arms. “Dad. Dear, dear. No, we’re not going to let you.”

“There are things you don’t understand.”

“Do you want to tell me about them?”

“I don’t think I can.”

“Don’t then, if you think you’ll be sorry afterward. But,” she said steadily, “you really ought to talk to somebody and get it off your mind.”

Off your mind! As if you were excising a tumor! That
would be easier. A tumor can at least be seen, not like this amorphous, secret pressure in the head where, so they say, almost any unsuspected thing can lurk: desires to rob a bank, rape a neighbor’s wife or assassinate the president, God only knows what.

He began, “You don’t know why Hazel—”

Something in his daughter’s expression—oh, he had from the beginning been so sensitive to the slightest nuance of her expression—something said to him that she might know.

“I’ve a pretty good idea. She found out about you and Mary.”

Martin sighed. He put his hands on his knees, turned them over to regard the heartline on the palm and the whorls on the fingertips, then back to the cuticle. No pair of hands in the world like any other pair, no life like any other life.

“It was in California. We met a man I’d known during the war.”

Claire said softly, “If I were a man I would fall in love with Mary, too, I think. Maybe you should just have stayed there after the war. Ned thinks you should have.”

“Ned does? He’s very young.”

The room was still. No sound came from the apartment It was as though the household had suspended its life in wait for Martin. And suddenly anxiety came uttering back like bird wings in the air, like those poor, caged creatures he had been looking at that afternoon.

“Ah, Hazel!” he cried. “I destroyed her anyway! Didn’t I?”

“No,” Claire said. “She did it herself. You are the only one who can destroy yourself. Other people can’t, unless you let them.”

“You believe that?”

“I do.”

“I hear your mother talking.”

“Well, she’s got a lot of strength. And Hazel didn’t, no fault of hers, God help her.”

Years ago when he was an intern and that nurse—Nora,
was it?—had killed herself, he remembered thinking how he’d hate to be in that man’s shoes.

“You make it all sound very simple,” he said.

“I don’t mean to. Listen to me. Listen. You’ve been stumbling along with a load of guilt enough to break your back. But you were good to Hazel! You gave her good years! She was totally content till the very end.”

“If I could undo it,” Martin began.

“Well, you can’t. You know what your trouble is? You think you ought to be a saint and you’re only a man.”

“You think so?”

“I know so. Everything in your life has to be perfect, and it can’t be.”

Martin laughed. It flashed through his mind that he hadn’t laughed in months. “You’ve analyzed me pretty cleverly, I think. I hope you’ll do as well with Ned.”

“Does that mean you’ve decided to approve?”

“No, it just means I’ve decided not to fight it.”

“Because you know you’d lose.”

“Not only that. I want you to be happy, Claire. As long as you’re bent on doing it, I don’t want you to start off with bad feelings, that’s all.”

She gave him a look of purest gratitude. “Thanks, Dad. I’ll bring him here, then.”

“Have you brought him to your mother’s?”

“For a short visit. Naturally, Mother was correct but cold as ice.”

“The pain’s too deep, too old. And Claire, on my part I want to say—”

“You want to say you don’t want to see Ned’s mother. You won’t have to, I promise.”

They sat for a while without speaking.

“I wish it could be different—joyous and warm,” Martin murmured.

“It’s all right, Dad. For me things don’t always have to be perfect.”

He felt something soft and calming in his chest: strength, pouring in some occult way from this child of his back into him. It was a fine tingling, a rising of hope, anticipation.
Whatever it was, it was a benison. And just as he had known when he had been falling into sickness, now just as surely he recognized the first faint start of healing.

The door opened and three heads appeared around its edge.

“Come in,” Claire called. “Don’t be afraid. Dad’s feeling much better. He’s going to be all right.”

The new apartment was complete a month or more before the wedding and Ned had officially moved in. Most of the time, Claire stayed there with him, too. She was perfectly aware that Jessie knew. They simply didn’t talk about it.

With a certain amount of reverse snobbism, or perhaps only to be different from her mother, Claire had always liked to say that she cared not a whit for things. Yet now, because these particular things were really her own, she liked to walk around touching them or just to look at them in the light that poured from the afternoon sky when the curtains were drawn back. Many of these new possessions were actually old: her grandfather’s leather set of Thackeray and Trollope, brought from Europe long before the century had turned and handed over with appropriate ceremony by her father; the blue-and-white quilt made by Grandmother Farrell that Aunt Alice had generously parted with for Claire; a lacquered Chinese chest that Jessie had been saving for a client, but had given to her when she saw that of all the objects in the shop, it was the single one that Claire really wanted.