Promises (28 page)

“It’s almost as warm as summer out. I thought I’d play tennis with Betsy. Unless you need me?”

“No, darling. Go. I want you to have good times.”

Standing under the shower, Margaret let tears mingle with the spray. How can he, how can he do this to a girl like Megan? Seventeen years old and already sickened with fear on such a bright spring day.

When she opened the window, which was directly above the porch, the two voices were distinctly audible, and Fred’s voice made eavesdropping irresistible. “Try not to hurt her more than you already have.”

And Adam: “I’m not deliberately hurting her. It’s not what I
want
to do, for God’s sake! It’s something that simply happened. Neither of us has been happy for a long time. Why? It’s hard to say.”

Fred’s voice rumbled: “Nothing hard about it. Actually, it’s very simple on your part. You fell in love, didn’t you? Head over heels in love!”

“I don’t relish your sarcastic tone, Fred. Love exists, you know.”

“That depends on what you mean by the word. Some people, if you’ll pardon me, have been known to mistake an itch in the groin for love,” replied Fred, who did not usually speak like that, at least not in Margaret’s hearing.

“Look here, Fred. If you came here to make trouble, you’d better leave right now.”

“If I wanted to make trouble, I could have made it long ago. Have you any idea how many times I’ve caught sight of you and that piece of yours going in and out of her street?”

There was a silence, during which, weak and shaking, Margaret waited for more.

“What the hell brought you over here this early?” Adam demanded. “Did Margaret phone you?”

“No, Megan did.”

“Megan doesn’t know anything about this.”

“She knows more than you think, and what she doesn’t know, she suspects.”

“You may not believe you’re making trouble, Fred, but you are. You’re interfering, and I’m asking you to get out. You’re standing on my porch without an invitation.”

At this a sudden fury rose within Margaret, and she leaned out of the window, calling, “Don’t you dare go, Fred! It’s my porch too. I’m coming right down.”

Throwing on an old sweater and skirt, she appeared on the porch below, in bedroom slippers with hair uncombed and without sunglasses.

“Perhaps we should go inside,” Fred said when he saw her.

“Yes. I know I look like death warmed over. That’s how I feel.”

The disarranged pillows on the sofa were as she had left them last night. Still there on the floor was the newspaper that Adam had dropped when he pronounced the word
divorce.

“Has he told you? He wants a divorce,” she said.

Fred frowned. “He’s told me, but I haven’t been able to take it in.”

Automatically, the two turned toward Adam, who, forced then to make some response, spoke to the air above the others’ heads. “I admit it’s shocking. It seems horrible to you, and I can see why it does. But you’re not in my skin, you see.”

“Skin or not,” Fred said, “you can’t do this.”

“Margaret and I haven’t been ha—”

“You told me. It’s not only a question of you two being ‘happy.’ There are three others who didn’t ask to be born, and certainly not into a broken family.”

“ ‘Broken’! You make it sound as if nobody will ever see or talk to anybody else. I’ll still be their father. I told Margaret that this will make no difference to them. I’m their father!”

“Yes, their father who has left their house and gone to live with his new woman,” Fred said, putting his total contempt into the last two words.

Adam leapt from his chair and strode to the door. Fred was quicker and blocked the only exit.

“No, Adam, you can’t get out of this so easily.”

“Can’t? Who gave you the authority to tell me what I can’t do?”

“Margaret has no one to speak for her. I’ve known you both too long not to be part of this tragedy. Now let’s sit down and talk. Nothing you say will ever leave this room. I don’t think I need tell you that.”

Fred Davis had simply assumed command. Margaret had never seen him taking the stance of authority, certainly not with regard to Adam, who would never have accepted it from him. Now, though, Adam, in spite of his bravado, was ashamed; suddenly she recognized the sullen, flushed expression that he wore after a disappointing session with Jenks or Ramsey.

“You’ve lived your life as an honorable man,” Fred began.

Standing above them, he was the teacher addressing his class or the doctor directing his patient. And Margaret, as she raised her eyes to his eyes, now so uncharacteristically severe and keen, began to feel a gradual relaxation, thinking: I trust you to set Adam right. You will know how.

From the collection of photographs on the table Fred took the triple-framed heads of Megan, Julie, and Dan.

“Look at these,” he said. “No matter how many hours a week you will spend with them after you leave their mother, how will you be able to look into their faces and explain
why
you left their mother? Because you ‘fell in love’? Sounds pretty lame, doesn’t it?”

Adam left Fred’s unanswered question to float in a profound quiet. As to pictures speaking louder than words, Margaret was thinking, there are yet more to be listened to in this room. And at that exact moment Fred held up another.

“If I remember correctly, this is your mother, isn’t it? She was very close to Margaret, that I remember well. What do you think she would have to say about this divorce business of yours?”

At that Adam raised his head, giving a short, ironic laugh. “My mother? She would kill me.”

Fred said dryly, “I’ll bet she would.” For a moment he studied Isabella, the grave eyes, Adam’s eyes, and the serene forehead under the slope of waving hair, before replacing her on the table.

“Maybe people were just different then,” he said softly, as if to himself. After a moment he turned back
to the others and was brisk again. “All right, let’s talk. Let’s begin at the beginning.”

It was a long afternoon. Fred knew where he wanted to go, and he went straight toward his destination, driving Adam, however unwillingly, ahead of him. Years afterward Margaret would still remember the steady progress, the demolition, inch by inch, of every repetitious argument that Adam, growing weaker, was able to raise.

It was after five o’clock before Fred at last concluded. “When all is said and done,” he said, “it comes down to the fact that you need counseling most desperately.”

To this Adam objected. “I don’t think we do. I’m a private person. I don’t take kindly to the idea of exposing myself to a stranger. This has been very painful to me today. It’s only the sight of Margaret’s grief that has kept me sitting here.”

“It would be easier for you to talk to a stranger than it has been to brook my interference,” Fred argued, “and I’m well aware that it has been interference.”

“No counseling,” Adam repeated.

And quickly, Margaret, fearing an impasse, interjected, “I think if we try, we can manage without any outside help. This—this unhappiness—that Adam has felt began when that woman came here. I can place the time exactly. If she were removed, Adam, if you would promise never to see her again, we could go back to what we were before. I know we could.” And thinking, I am not too proud to plead, for this is my life, our lives, she got up and stood before him, saying with all her heart, “I beg you to try again. I beg you not to leave
me. I love you, Adam. No matter what you’ve done, I love you.”

“Well,” said Fred.

There were tears in Adam’s eyes. “I’ll stay. I’ll stay. And I will not see her again. Take my word.”

Make believe, Margaret said to herself, that you are a war wife as Mom was, and your husband has been overseas. You would surely know that he had not gone for three years without having a woman. You will accept the fact and, for your own peace, put it forever out of your mind.

Unfortunately, though, Randi was neither in Europe nor in Asia, but right here, just fifteen miles away.…

“I only had a glimpse,” said Louise, “but I had the impression that she was dreadfully common. Madeup, overdressed. You know what I mean.”

Pressed by the need to talk to someone and also because Louise was already involved, Margaret had made some very incomplete admissions to her.

“They used to know each other before we were married,” she had explained. “The woman’s a widow and desperate for another husband. Apparently, she thinks Adam has some connections for her, and she’s made a pest of herself.”

Whether Louise believed this tale was doubtful, but she was too primly polite and also much too kind to question it.

“Well, he needs to get rid of her,” she said succinctly. “He needs to tell her flat out not to bother him. I wonder whether he can do it. Under that sometimes lofty way he has, I have always felt there’s a lot of insecurity in Adam.”

Louise, then, was not as naive as she appeared to be. The older you get, Margaret thought, the more often people astonish you with what’s concealed in them. She would never have suspected that the cheery, rather depthless Louise, with her proper notions, had observed anyone that keenly.

Megan, as reticent as Adam himself, was obviously waiting for an explanation. With her arm around her daughter Margaret did her best to make it a plausible one.

“Woman to woman,” she said with an appealing, wistful smile, “I’ll admit I was an absolute fool to make such a fuss. The way I lay there crying that night—it was awful for you to see your mother in such a condition. The whole thing was all innocent, you see, just a business lunch, obligatory, you see. I concocted a whole story out of it, and I made an idiot of myself.”

Whether Megan, like Louise, believed a word of what Margaret said was doubtful too. At any rate, she gave her mother a kiss and a look filled with—what?—thankfulness, pity, or disbelief?—that went to Margaret’s heart.

And when abruptly on an April morning full spring arrived with cool south winds and birdsong, that, too, went to her heart as never before. On such a day in such green-gold splendor, surely a fresh start could be made!

So, almost as if nothing had intervened, the old life resumed. Suddenly there were no more late meetings; Adam took his place at the dinner table every night as he had always done. Saturday again was a home day. Seedlings were set out in the cold frame; together they all painted the rear fence one afternoon; one night
Adam made a Mexican dinner with corn soup and guacamole. When Danny was given the part of Lincoln in the class play, Adam coached him as, dressed with beard and stovepipe hat, he gave the Gettysburg Address.

And Margaret, watching and listening for the slightest signs, became convinced that Adam was really trying. Feeling this, she felt that her own old, cold resentments of recent years were dropping away, as when one takes off a constricting garment and can stretch again. He, after all, was only another victim of the well-known “midlife crisis.”

What really had brought him back from the brink, whether Fred’s exhortations or the photographs of his children or the thought of his mother’s condemnation, Margaret did not know. Perhaps Adam himself did not know. Once or twice she had come close to asking him now how he had ended the affair, but she did not do it. Once or twice he made a vague, brief reference to “weakness,” admitting that a woman is often the stronger of a pair. So then, Mrs. Randi had been the stronger? And Margaret thought with scorn, no stronger than I am.…

Adam had returned to their bed. One night he had simply come and stood hesitating at the door. And she had been so glad! Yet, thinking it better not to make a drama out of what should be perfectly normal, she had just smiled and asked him whether he had had his ice cream yet. For years it had been his habit to have it in the kitchen before going to bed.

“Why not eat it up here in comfort in bed?” she suggested. And so now, in these new days of reconciliation, she began a new custom, bringing his ice cream to the
bed. There, in amity, they sat together in the great old bed. He ate the ice cream, she read her book, they talked awhile, turned out the light, and went to sleep.

He had still not touched her.

And sometimes in that bed or in the car on the way home from school, or even at the table in the middle of the five Cranes’ familiar conversation, she would feel again a wave of apprehension, a tension like that which precedes a thunderstorm and raises the hair on an animal’s back.

“W
hat are you doing to me? And you yourself? I can’t go on like this!” Randi’s voice was hoarse from crying.

In the telephone booth in the stuffy heat Adam shifted his leaning weight from one elbow to the other. These late-afternoon calls exhausted him. Also, the subject was exhausted.

“Randi,” he said patiently, “we’ve got to stop this. I’ve tried to explain.… Maybe in a year or two.… But for now I can’t, I simply can’t. I promised I would give it a try.… It’s too complicated. Darling, I can’t cope anymore today.”

“Cope!” she wailed. “But I have to. Every day, every night I have to. All alone. All alone.”

“Darling, you gave me an ultimatum—”

“I didn’t mean it! I thought I did. I never thought that this is the choice you’d make.”