Revolutionary Road (4 page)

  Then the fight went out of control. It quivered their arms and legs and wrenched their faces into shapes of hatred, it urged them harder and deeper into each other's weakest points, showing them cunning ways around each other's strongholds and quick chances to switch tactics, feint, and strike again. In the space of a gasp for breath it sent their memories racing back over the years for old weapons to rip the scabs off old wounds; it went on and on.

  "Oh, you've never fooled me, Frank, never once. All your precious moral maxims and your 'love' and your mealy-mouthed little—do you think I've
forgotten
the time you hit me in the face because I said I wouldn't forgive you? Oh, I've always known I had to be your conscience and your guts—
and
your punching bag. Just because you've got me safely in a trap you think you—"

"
You
in a trap!
You
in a trap!
Jesus,
don't make me laugh!"

  "Yes, me." She made a claw of her hand and clutched at her collarbone. "Me. Me. Me. Oh, you poor, selfdeluded—
Look
at you!
Look
at you, and tell me how by any
stretch
"—she tossed her head, and the grin of her teeth glistened white in the moonlight—"by any
stretch
of the imagination you can call yourself a man!"

  He swung out one trembling fist for a backhanded blow to her head and she cowered against the fender in an ugly crumple of fear; then instead of hitting her he danced away in a travesty of boxer's footwork and brought the fist down on the roof of the car with all his strength. He hit the car four times that way:
Bong! Bong! Bong! Bong!
—while she stood and watched. When he was finished, the shrill, liquid chant of the peepers was the only sound for miles.

  "God damn you," he said quietly. "God damn you, April."

  "All right. Could we please go home now?"

  With parched, hard-breathing mouths, with wobbling heads and shaking limbs, they settled themselves in the car like very old and tired people. He started the engine and drove carefully away, down to the turn at the base of Revolutionary Hill and on up the winding blacktop grade of Revolutionary Road.

  This was the way they had first come, two years ago, as cordially nodding passengers in the station wagon of Mrs. Helen Givings, the real-estate broker. She had been polite but guarded over the phone—so many city people were apt to come out and waste her time demanding impossible bargains—but from the moment they'd stepped off the train, as she would later tell her husband, she had recognized them as the kind of couple one did take a little trouble with, even in the low-price bracket. "They're
sweet,
" she told her husband. "The girl is
ab
solutely ravishing, and I think the boy must do something very brilliant in town—he's very nice, rather reserved—and really, it
is
so refreshing to deal with people of that sort." Mrs. Givings had understood at once that they wanted something out of the ordinary—a small remodeled barn or carriage house, or an old guest cottage—something with a little charm—and she did hate having to tell them that those things simply weren't available any more. But she implored them not to lose heart; she did know of one little place they might like.

  "Now of course it isn't a very desirable road down at this end," she explained, her glance switching birdlike between the road and their pleased, attentive faces as she made the turn off Route Twelve. "As you see, it's mostly these little cinder-blocky, pickup-trucky places—plumbers, carpenters, little local people of that sort. And then
eventually
"— she aimed the stiff pistol of her index finger straight through the windshield in fair warning, causing a number of metal bracelets to jingle and click against the steering wheel—"
eventually
it leads on up and around to a perfectly dreadful new development called Revolutionary Hill Estates—great hulking split levels, all in the most nauseous pastels and dreadfully expensive too, I can't think why. No, but the place I want to show you has absolutely no connection with that. One of our nice little local builders put it up right after the war, you see, before all the really awful building began. It's really rather a sweet little house and a sweet little setting. Simple, clean lines, good lawns, marvelous for children. It's right around this next curve, and you see the road
is
nicer along in here, isn't it? Now you'll see it— there. See the little white one? Sweet, isn't it? The perky way it sits there on its little slope?"

  "Oh yes," April said as the house emerged through the spindly trunks of second-growth oak and slowly turned toward them, small and wooden, riding high on its naked concrete foundation, its outsized central window staring like a big black mirror. "Yes, I think it's sort of—nice, don't you, darling? Of course it does have the picture window; I guess there's no escaping that."

  "I guess not," Frank said. "Still, I don't suppose one picture window is necessarily going to destroy our personalities."

  "Oh, that's
marvelous,
" Mrs. Givings cried, and her laughter enclosed them in a warm shelter of flattery as they rolled up the driveway and climbed out to have a look. She hovered near them, reassuring and protective, while they walked the naked floors of the house in whispering speculation. The place did have possibilities. Their sofa could go here and their big table there; their solid wall of books would take the curse off the picture window; a sparse, skillful arrangement of furniture would counteract the prim suburban look of this too-symmetrical living room. On the other hand, the very symmetry of the place was undeniably appealing—the fact that all its corners made right angles, that each of its floorboards lay straight and true, that its doors hung in perfect balance and closed without scraping in efficient clicks. Enjoying the light heft and feel of these doorknobs, they could fancy themselves at home here. Inspecting the flawless bathroom, they could sense the pleasure of steaming in its ample tub; they could see their children running barefoot down this hallway free of mildew and splinters and cockroaches and grit. It did have possibilities. The gathering disorder of their lives might still be sorted out and made to fit these rooms, among these trees; and what if it did take time? Who could be frightened in as wide and bright, as clean and quiet a house as this?

  Now, as the house swam up close in the darkness with its cheerful blaze of kitchen and carport lights, they tensed their shoulders and set their jaws in attitudes of brute endurance. April went first, swaying blindly through the kitchen, pausing to steady herself against the great refrigerator, and Frank came blinking behind her. Then she touched a wall switch, and the living room exploded into clarity. In the first shock of light it seemed to be floating, all its contents adrift, and even after it held still it had a tentative look. The sofa was here and the big table there, but they might just as well have been reversed; there was the wall of books, obediently competing for dominance with the picture window, but it might as well have been a lending library. The other pieces of furniture had indeed removed the suggestion of primness, but they had failed to replace it with any other quality. Chairs, coffee table, floor lamp and desk, they stood like items arbitrarily grouped for auction. Only one corner of the room showed signs of pleasant human congress—carpet worn, cushions dented, ash trays full—and this was the alcove they had established with reluctance less than six months ago: the province of the television set ("Why not? Don't we really owe it to the kids? Besides, it's silly to go on being snobbish about television . . .").

  Mrs. Lundquist, the baby sitter, had fallen asleep on the sofa and lay hidden beneath its back. Now she rose abruptly into view as she sat up squinting and trying to smile, her false teeth clacking and her hands fumbling at the pins of her loosened white hair.

  "Mommy?" came a high wide-awake voice from the children's room down the hall. It was Jennifer, the six-year-old. "Mommy? Was it a good play?"

  Frank took two wrong turns in driving Mrs. Lundquist home (Mrs. Lundquist, lurching against door and dashboard, tried to cover her fear by smiling fixedly in the darkness; she thought he was drunk), and all the way back, alone, he rode with one hand pressed to his mouth. He was doing his best to reconstruct the quarrel in his mind, but it was hopeless. He couldn't even tell whether he was angry or contrite, whether it was forgiveness he wanted or the power to forgive. His throat was still raw from shouting and his hand still throbbed from hitting the car—he remembered that part well enough—but his only other memory was of the high-shouldered way she had stood in the curtain call, with that false, vulnerable smile, and this made him weak with remorse. Of all the nights to have a fight! He had to hold the wheel tight in both hands because the road lights were blurring and swimming in his eyes.

  The house was dark, and the sight of it as he drove up, a long milky shape in the greater darkness of trees and sky, made him think of death. He padded quickly through the kitchen and living room and went down the hall on careful tiptoe, past the children's room and into the bedroom, where he softly shut the door behind him.

  "April, listen," he whispered. Stripping off his coat, he went to the dim bed and sat slumped on its edge in a classic pose of contrition. "Please listen. I won't touch you. I just want to say I'm—there isn't anything to say except I'm sorry."

  This was going to be a bad one; it was going to be the kind that went on for days. But at least they were here, alone and quiet in their own room, instead of shouting on the highway; at least the thing had passed into its second phase now, the long quiet aftermath that always before, however implausibly, had led to reconciliation. She wouldn't run away from him now, nor was there any chance of his boiling into a rage again; they were both too tired. Early in his marriage these numb periods had seemed even worse than the humiliating noise that set them off: each time he would think, There can't be any dignified way out of it this time. But there always had been a way, dignified or not, discovered through the simple process of apologizing first and then waiting, trying not to think about it too much. By now the feel of this attitude was as familiar as an unbecoming, comfortable old coat. He could wear it with a certain voluptuous ease, for it allowed him a total suspension of will and pride.

  "I don't know what happened back there," he said, "but whatever it was, believe me, I—April?" Then his reaching hand discovered that the bed was empty. The long shape he'd been talking to was a wad of thrown-back covers and a pillow; she had torn the bed apart.

  "April?"

  He ran frightened to the empty bathroom and down the hall.

  "Please go away," her voice said. She was rolled up in a blanket on the living-room sofa, where Mrs. Lundquist had lain.

  "Listen a minute. I won't touch you. I just want to say I'm sorry."

  "That's wonderful. Now will you please leave me alone?"

A SHRILL METALLIC WHINE
 cut through the silence of his sleep. He tried to hide from it, huddling deeper into a cool darkness where the mists of an absorbing dream still floated, but it came tearing back again and again until his eyes popped open in the sunshine.

  It was after eleven o'clock, Saturday morning. Both his nostrils were plugged as if with rubber cement, his head ached, and the first fly of the season was crawling up the inside of a clouded whiskey glass that stood on the floor beside a nearly empty bottle. Only after making these discoveries did he begin to remember the events of the night—how he'd sat here drinking until four in the morning, methodically scratching his scalp with both hands, convinced that sleep was out of the question. And only after remembering this did his mind come into focus on an explanation of the noise: it was his own rusty lawnmower, which needed oiling. Somebody was cutting the grass in the back yard, a thing he had promised to do last weekend.

He rolled heavily upright and groped for his bathrobe, moistening the wrinkled roof of his mouth. Then he went and squinted through the brilliant window. It was April herself, stolidly pushing and hauling the old machine, wearing a man's shirt and a pair of loose, flapping slacks, while both children romped behind her with handfuls of cut grass.

  In the bathroom he used enough cold water and toothpaste and Kleenex to revive the working parts of his head; he restored its ability to gather oxygen and regained a certain muscular control over its features. But nothing could be done about his hands. Bloated and pale, they felt as if all their bones had been painlessly removed. A command to clench them into fists would have sent him whimpering to his knees. Looking at them, and particularly at the bittendown nails that never in his life had had a chance to grow, he wanted to beat and bruise them against the edge of the sink. He thought then of his father's hands, and this reminded him that his dream just now, just before the lawnmower and the headache and the sun, had been of a dim and deeply tranquil time long ago. Both his parents had been there, and he'd heard his mother say, "Oh, don't wake him, Earl; let him sleep." He tried his best to remember more of it, and couldn't; but the tenderness of it brought him close to tears for a moment until it faded away.

  They had both been dead for several years now, and it sometimes troubled him that he could remember neither of their faces very well. To his waking memory, without the aid of photographs, his father was a vague bald head with dense eyebrows and a mouth forever fixed in the shape either of disgruntlement or exasperation, his mother a pair of rimless spectacles, a hair net, and a timorous smear of lipstick. He remembered too, of both of them, that they'd always been tired. Middle-aged at the time of his birth and already tired then from having raised two other sons, they had grown steadily more and more tired as long as he'd known them, until finally, tired out, they had died with equal ease, in their sleep, within six months of each other. But there had never been anything tired about his father's hands, and no amount of time and forgetfulness had ever dimmed their image in his mind's eye.

  "Open it!" That was one of his earliest memories: the challenge to loosen one big fist, and his frantic two-handed efforts, never succeeding, to uncoil a single finger from its massively quivering grip, while his father's laughter rang from the kitchen walls. But it wasn't only their strength he envied, it was their sureness and sensitivity—when they held a thing, you could see how it felt—and the aura of mastery they imparted to everything Earl Wheeler used: the creaking pigskin handle of his salesman's briefcase, the hafts of all his woodworking tools, the thrillingly dangerous stock and trigger of his shotgun. The briefcase had been of particular fascination to Frank at the age of five or six; it always stood in the shadows of the front hallway in the evenings, and sometimes after supper he would saunter manfully up to it and pretend it was his own. How fine and smooth, yet how impossibly thick its handle felt! It was heavy (Whew!) yet how lightly it would swing at his father's side in the morning! Later, at ten or twelve, he had become familiar with the carpentry tools as well, but none of his memories of them were pleasant. "No, boy, no!" his father would shout over the scream of the power saw. "You're ruining it! Can't you see you're ruining it? That's no way to handle a tool." The tool, whatever obstinate thing it was, chisel or gouge or brace-and-bit, would be snatched away from the failure of its dismally sweat-stained woodwork and held aloft to be minutely inspected for damage. Then there would be a lecture on the proper care and handling of tools, to be followed by a gracefully expert demonstration (during which the grains of wood clung like gold in the hair of his father's forearm) or more likely by a sigh of manly endurance pressed to the breaking point and the quiet words: "All right. You'd better go on upstairs." Things had always ended that way in the woodworking shop, and even today he could never breathe the yellow smell of sawdust without a sense of humiliation. The shotgun, luckily, had never come to a test. By the time he was old enough to go along on one of his father's increasingly rare hunting trips the chronic discord between them had long precluded any chance of it. It would never have occurred to the old man to suggest such a thing, and what's more—for this was the period of his freight-train dreams—it would never have occurred to Frank to desire the suggestion. Who wanted to sit in a puddle and kill a lot of ducks? Who, for that matter, wanted to be good with hobbyist's tools? And who wanted to be a dopey salesman in the first place, acting like a big deal with a briefcase full of boring catalogues, talking about machines all day to a bunch of dumb executives with cigars?

  Yet even in those days and afterwards, even in the extremities of rebellion on Bethune Street, when his father had become a dreary, querulous old fool nodding to sleep over the
Reader's Digest,
then as now he continued to believe that something unique and splendid had lived in his father's hands. On Earl Wheeler's very deathbed, when he was shrunken and blind and cackling ("Who's that? Frank? Is that Frank?") the dry clasp of his hands had been as positive as ever, and when they lay loose and still on the hospital sheet at last they still looked stronger and better than his son's.

  "Boy, I guess the headshrinkers could really have a ball with me," he liked to say, wryly, among friends. "I mean the whole deal of my relationship with my father alone'd be enough to fill a textbook, not to mention my mother. Jesus, what a little nest of neuroses we must've been." All the same, in moments of troubled solitude like this, he was glad he could muster some vestige of honest affection for his parents. He was grateful that however uneasy the rest of his life had turned out to be, it had once contained enough peace to give him pleasant dreams; and he often suspected, with more than a little righteousness, that this might be what kept him essentially more stable than his wife. Because if the headshrinkers could have a ball with him, God only knew what kind of a time they would have with April.

  In all the scanty stories she told about them, her parents were as alien to his sympathetic understanding as anything in the novels of Evelyn Waugh. Had people like that ever really existed? He could picture them only as flickering caricatures of the twenties, the Playboy and the Flapper, mysteriously rich and careless and cruel, married by a ship's captain in mid-Atlantic and divorced within a year of the birth of their only child.

  "I think my mother must've taken me straight from the hospital to Aunt Mary's," she'd told him. "At any rate I don't think I ever lived with anyone but Aunt Mary until I was five, and then there were a couple of other aunts, or friends of hers or something, before I went to Aunt Claire, in Rye." The rest of the story was that her father had shot himself in a Boston hotel room in 1938, and that her mother had died some years later after long incarceration in a West Coast alcoholic retreat.

  "Jesus," Frank said on first hearing these facts, one irritably hot summer night in the Bethune Street place (though he wasn't quite sure at the time, as he hung and shook his head, whether what he felt was sorrow for the unhappiness of the story or envy because it was so much more dramatic a story than his own). "Well," he said. "I guess your aunt always really seemed like your mother, though, didn't she?"

  But April shrugged, drawing her mouth a little to one side in a way that he'd lately decided he didn't like—her "tough" look. "Which aunt do you mean? I hardly remember Mary, or the others in between, and I always hated Claire."

  "Oh, come on. How can you say you 'always hated' her? I mean maybe it seems that way now, looking back, but over the years she must've given you a certain feeling of—
you
know, love, and security and everything."

  "She didn't, though. The only real fun I ever had was when one of my parents came for a visit. They were the ones I loved."

  "But they hardly ever
came
for visits. I mean you couldn't have had much sense of their
being
your parents, in a deal like that; you didn't even know them. How could you love them?"

  "I did, that's all." And she began picking up and putting away again, in her jewelry box, the souvenirs she had spread before him on the bed: snapshots of herself at various ages, on various lawns, standing with one or the other parent; a miniature painting of her mother's pretty head; a yellowed, leather-framed photograph showing both parents, tall and elegantly dressed beside a palm tree, with the inscription
Cannes, 1925;
her mother's wedding ring; an ancient brooch containing a lock of her maternal grandmother's hair; a tiny white plastic horse, the size of a watch charm, which had a net value of two or three cents and had been saved for years because "my father gave it to me."

  "Oh, all right, sure," he conceded. "Maybe they did seem romantic and everything; they probably seemed very dazzling and glamorous and all that. The point is, I don't mean that. I mean love."

  "So do I. I did love them." Her grave silence following this statement, as she fastened the clasp of the jewelry box, was so prolonged that he thought she had finished with the subject. He decided he was finished with it anyway, at least for the time being. It was too hot a night to have an argument. But it turned out that she was only thinking it over, preparing her next words with great care to make sure they would say exactly what she meant. When she began to speak at last she looked so much like the little girl in the photographs that he was ashamed of himself. "I loved their clothes," she said. "I loved the way they talked. I loved to hear them tell about their lives."

  And there was nothing for him to do but take her in his arms, full of pity for the meagerness of her treasure and full of a reverent, silent promise, soon to be broken, that he would never again disparage it.

  A small stain of drying milk and cereal on the table was all that remained of the children's breakfast; the rest of the kitchen gleamed to an industrial perfection of cleanliness. He planned, as soon as he'd had some coffee, to get dressed and go out and take the lawnmower away from her, by force if necessary, in order to restore as much balance to the morning as possible. But he was still in his bathrobe, unshaven and fumbling at the knobs of the electric stove, when Mrs. Givings's station wagon came crackling up the driveway. For a second he thought of hiding, but it was too late. She had already seen him through the screen door, and April, trudging along the far border of the back yard, had already escaped her with a wave across the wide expanse of grass and gone on mowing. He was caught. He had to open the door and stand there in an attitude of welcome. Why did this woman keep bothering them all the time?

  "I can't stay a minute!" she cried, staggering toward him under the weight of a damp cardboard box full of earth and wobbling vegetation. "I just wanted to bring over this sedum for the rocky place at the foot of your drive. My, don't you look comfy."

  He bent into an ungainly pose, trying to hold the door open with one trailing foot while he took the box from her arms. "Well," he said, smiling very close to her tense, powdery face. Mrs. Givings's cosmetics seemed always to have been applied in a frenzy of haste, of impatience to get the whole silly business over and done with, and she was constantly in motion, a trim, leather-skinned woman in her fifties whose eyes expressed a religious belief in the importance of keeping busy. Even when she stood still there was kinetic energy in the set of her shoulders and the hang of her loose, angrily buttoned-up clothes; when sitting was inevitable she always chose straight chairs and used them sparingly, and it was hard to imagine her ever lying down. Nor was it easy to picture her face asleep, free from the tension of its false smiles, its little bursts of social laughter and its talk.

  "I really think this is just what's called for down there, don't you?" she was saying. "Have you worked with this type of sedum before? You'll find it's the most marvelous ground cover, even in this acid soil."

  "Well," he said again. "That's fine. Thanks a lot, Mrs. Givings." Nearly two years ago she had asked them to call her Helen, a name his tongue seemed all but unable to pronounce. Usually he solved the problem by calling her nothing, covering the lack with friendly nods and smiles, and she had taken to calling him nothing either. Now, as her small eyes seemed to take in for the first time the fact that his wife was cutting the grass while he lounged around the kitchen in a bathrobe, they stood smiling at each other with uncommon brilliance. He let the screen clap shut behind him and adjusted his grip on the box, which wobbled in his arms and sent a fine stream of sand down his naked ankle.

  "What should we—you know, do with it?" he asked her. "I mean,
you
know, to make it grow and everything."

  "Well, nothing really. All it wants is just a tiny dollop of water the first few days, and then you'll find it absolutely thrives. It's rather like the European houseleek, you see, except of course that has the lovely pink flower and this has the yellow."