Revolutionary Road (31 page)

  The rest of the time they were on the road, going nowhere. He remembered the trip only as a succession of traffic lights and electrical wires and trees, of houses and shopping centers and endless rolling hills under the pale sky, and of Frank either silent or making faint little moans or mumbling this phrase, over and over:

  ". . . and she was so damn nice this morning. Isn't that the damnedest thing? She was so damn 
nice
 this morning . . ."

  Once, and Shep could never remember whether it was early or late in the ride, he said, "She did it to herself, Shep. She killed herself."

  And Shep's mind performed its trick of rolling with the punch: he would think about this one later. "Frank, take it easy," he said. "Don't talk crap. These things happen, that's all."

  "Not this one. This one didn't happen. She wanted to do it last month and it would've been safe then. It would've been safe then and I talked her out of it. I talked her out of it and then we had a fight yesterday and now she—Oh Jesus. Oh Jesus. And she was so damn 
nice
 this morning."

  Shep kept his eyes on the road, grateful that there was plenty to occupy the alert, front part of his mind. Because how would he ever know, now, how much or little truth there was in this? And how would he ever know how much or little it had to do with himself?

. . .

Alone in her darkened living room, much later, Milly sat chewing her handkerchief and feeling like a terrible coward. She'd done pretty well up to a point; she had managed to do a good job of acting with the children and to get them all in bed an hour early, well before Shep's arrival; she had made some sandwiches and set them out in the kitchen, in case anyone got hungry later ("Life goes on," her mother had always said, making sandwiches on the day of a death); she had even found time to call Mrs. Givings, whose reaction to the news was to say "Oh, oh, oh," over and over again; and she'd done her very best to be ready for the ordeal of confronting Frank. She'd been ready to sit up all night with him and—well, read to him from the Bible, or something; ready to hold him and let him weep on her breast; anything.

  But nothing had prepared her for the awful blankness of his eyes when Shep brought him up the kitchen steps. "Oh Frank," she'd said, and started to cry, and run for the living room with her handkerchief in her mouth, and ever since then she'd been completely useless.

  She'd done nothing but sit here and listen to the dim sounds the two of them made in the kitchen (a scraping chair, a clink of bottle on glass, and Shep's voice: "Here, fella. Drink it up, now . . ."), trying to work up the courage to go back. Once Shep had tiptoed in, smelling of whiskey, to consult with her.

  "Oh, sweetie, I'm sorry," she had whispered against his shirt. "I know I'm not being any help, but I 
can't.
 I can't stand the way he 
looks.
"

  "Okay. That's okay, honey. You take it easy; I'll look after him. He's sort of in a state of shock, is all. Jesus, what a thing." He sounded a little drunk. "Jesus, what an awful thing. You know what he told me in the car? He said she did it to herself. You believe that?"

"She 
what
?"

"Gave herself an abortion; or tried to."

  "Oh," she whispered, shuddering. "Oh, how awful. You think she did? But why would she do that?"

  "How the hell do I know? Am I supposed to know everything? I'm just telling you what he 
said,
 for Christ's sake." He rubbed his head with both hands. "Hell, I'm sorry, honey."

  "All right. You better get back. I'll come out and sit with him in a little while, and you can get some rest. We'll take turns."

  "Okay."

  But more than two hours had passed since then, and still she hadn't found the strength to carry out her promise. All she could do was to sit here and dread it. There had been no sounds in the kitchen for a long time now. What were they 
doing
 in there? Just sitting, or what?

  And so in the end it was curiosity as much as courage that helped her to her feet and across the room and down the hall to the brilliant kitchen doorway. She hesitated, taking a deep breath, squinting her eyes in preparation for the glare of the lights, and then she went in.

  Shep's head was in his arms on the kitchen table, an inch away from the untouched plate of sandwiches; he was sound asleep and faintly snoring. Frank wasn't there.

The Revolutionary Hill Estates had not been designed to accommodate a tragedy. Even at night, as if on purpose, the development held no looming shadows and no gaunt silhouettes. It was invincibly cheerful, a toyland of white and pastel houses whose bright, uncurtained windows winked blandly through a dappling of green and yellow leaves. Proud floodlights were trained on some of the lawns, on some of the neat front doors and on the hips of some of the berthed, ice-cream colored automobiles.

  A man running down these streets in desperate grief was indecently out of place. Except for the whisk of his shoes on the asphalt and the rush of his own breath, it was so quiet that he could hear the sounds of television in the dozing rooms behind the leaves—a blurred comedian's shout followed by dim, spastic waves of laughter and applause, and then the striking-up of a band. Even when he veered from the pavement, cut across someone's back yard and plunged into the down-sloping woods, intent on a madman's shortcut to Revolutionary Road, even then there was no escape: the house lights beamed and stumbled happily along with him among the twigs that whipped his face, and once when he lost his footing and fell scrabbling down a rocky ravine, he came up with a child's enameled tin beach bucket in his hand.

  As he clambered out onto asphalt again at the base of the Hill he allowed his dizzy, jogging mind to indulge in a cruel delusion: it had all been a nightmare; he would round this next bend and see the lights blazing in his own house; he would run inside and find her at the ironing board, or curled up on the sofa with a magazine ("What's the 
matter,
 Frank? Your 
pants
 are all muddy! Of 
course
 I'm all right . . .").

  But then he saw the house—really saw it—long and milk-white in the moonlight, with black windows, the only darkened house on the road.

  She had been very careful about the blood. Except for a tidy trail of drops leading out to the telephone and back, it had all been confined to the bathroom, and even there it had mostly been flushed away. Two heavy towels, soaked crimson, lay lumped in the tub, close to the drain. "I thought that would be the simplest way to handle it," he could hear her saying. "I thought you could just wrap the towels up in newspaper and put them in the garbage, and then give the tub a good rinsing out. Okay?" On the floor of the linen closet he found the syringe in its pot of cold water; she had probably put it there to hide it from the ambulance crew. "I mean I just thought it would be best to get it out of sight; I didn't want to have to answer a lot of dumb questions."

  And his head continued to ring with the sound of her voice as he set to work. "There; now that's done," it said when he pressed the newspaper bundles deep into the garbage can outside the kitchen door, and when he returned to fall on his knees and scrub at the trail of drops it was still with him. "Try a damp sponge and a little dry detergent, darling—it's there in the cabinet under the sink. That ought to take it up. There, you see? That's fine. I didn't get any on the rug, did I? Oh, good."

  How could she be dead when the house was alive with the sound of her and the sense of her? Even when he had finished the cleaning, when there was nothing to do but walk around and turn on lights and turn them off again, even then her presence was everywhere, as real as the scent of her dresses in the bedroom closet. It was only after he'd spent a long time in the closet, embracing her clothes, that he went back to the living room and found the note she had left for him on the desk. And he barely had time to read it, and to turn the light off again, before he saw the Campbells' Pontiac slowing down for the turn into the driveway. He went quickly back to the bedroom and shut himself inside the closet, among the clothes. From there he heard the car rumble to a stop outside; then the kitchen door opened and there were several faltering footsteps.

  "Frank?" Shep called hoarsely. "Frank? You here?"

  He heard him walking through the rooms, stumbling and cursing as he felt along the walls for light switches; finally he heard him leave, and when the sound of the car had faded away he came out of hiding, carrying his note, and sat in the darkness by the picture window.

  But after that interruption, April's voice no longer spoke to him. He tried for hours to recapture it, whispering words for it to say, going back to the closet time and again and into the drawers of her dressing table and into the kitchen, where he thought the pantry shelves and the racked plates and coffee cups would surely contain the ghost of her, but it was gone.

ACCORDING TO MILLY CAMPBELL,
 who told the story many, many times in the following months, everything worked out as well as could be expected. "I mean," she would always add, and here she would give a little shudder, "I mean, considering it was just about the most horrible thing we've ever been through in our lives. Wasn't it, sweetie?"

  And Shep would agree that it certainly was. His role during these recitals was to sit and stare gravely at the carpet, occasionally shaking his head or flexing his bite, until she cued him to make certain small corroborations. He was glad enough to let her do most of the talking—or rather, he was glad of it in the beginning, throughout the fall and winter of the year. By spring, he had begun to wish she would find other things to talk about.

  And his annoyance grew all but intolerable one Friday evening in May, when she was going over the whole business with some new acquaintances named Brace—the very couple who had recently moved into the Wheelers' house. The trouble was partly just that: it seemed a betrayal and a sacrilege, somehow, to be telling the story to people who would go home and talk it over in that particular house; and it was partly that the Braces made such a dull audience, nodding and shaking their polite, bridge-playing heads in remorse for people they had never known. But mostly it was that Milly's voice had taken on a little too much of a voluptuous narrative pleasure. She's 
enjoying
 this, he thought, watching her over the rim of his highball glass as she came to the part about how awful it had been the next day. By God, she's really getting a kick out of it.

  ". . . and I mean Shep and I were just about out of our minds by morning," she was saying. "We didn't have the faintest idea where Frank was; we kept calling the hospital to see if they'd heard from him; and then we had to go through this horrible thing with the kids of pretending everything was fine. They knew something was the matter, though; you know how kids are. They sensed it. When I was giving them breakfast Jennifer looked at me and said, 'Milly? Is Mommy going to come and pick us up today, or what?' And she was sort of smiling, you know? As if she knew it was a silly question but she'd promised her brother she'd ask it? I almost died. I said, 'Well, dear, I don't know what your mommy's plans are, exactly.' Wasn't that awful? But I didn't know what else to say.

  "Then about two o'clock we called the hospital and they said Frank had just left: he'd gone in and signed all the papers, or whatever it is you have to do when somebody dies; and a little later he came driving up here. The minute he came in I said, 'Frank, is there anything we can do? Because,' I said, 'if there's anything at all we can do, just say so.'

  "He said no, he thought he'd taken care of everything. He said he'd called his brother in Pittsfield—he's got this much older brother, you see; actually he's got two of them, but he never used to mention them; I'd forgotten he 
had
 any family—and he said the brother and his wife were coming down the next day, to help out with the kids and everything, and the funeral. So I said, 'All right, but please stay here with us tonight.' I said, 'You can't take the kids back to your house alone.' He said okay, he would; but he said first he wanted to take them out for a drive somewhere, and break the news to them. And that's what he did. He went out in the yard and they saw him and came running over, and he said 'Hi!' and picked them up and put them in the car and drove away. I really think it was the saddest thing I've ever seen in my life. And I'll never forget what Jennifer said when he brought them back that night. It was past their bedtime and they were both kind of sleepy, and I was helping Jennifer get ready for bed and she said, 'Milly? You know what?' She said, 'My mommy's in Heaven and we had dinner in a restaurant.' "

  "God!" said Nancy Brace. "But I mean how did things work out finally?" She was a sharp-faced, bespectacled girl who had worked before her marriage as a buyer for one of the top New York specialty shops. She liked her stories neat, with points, and she clearly felt there were too many loose ends in this one. "Did his relatives stay on here a while? And then what?"

  "Oh, no," Milly explained. "Right after the funeral they took the kids back up to Pittsfield with them, and Frank went along for a few days, to help them make the adjustment; then he moved into the city and started going up there for weekends, and that's the way things are now. I guess it's more or less a permanent arrangement. They're very nice, the brother and his wife—wonderful people, really, and very good with the kids; of course they're, 
you
 know, a lot older and everything.

  "And then I guess we didn't see anything more of Frank after that until March, or whenever it was, when he came out to see about closing the sale of the house. And of course that's when you folks met him. He spent a couple of days with us then, and we had a long talk. That was when he told us about finding the note she'd left him. That was when he said that if it hadn't been for that note he thought he would've killed himself that night."

  Warren Brace cleared the phlegm from his throat and swallowed it. A slow-spoken, pipe-clenching man with thinning hair and incongruously soft, childish lips, he was employed in the city by a firm of management consultants, a kind of work he described as well suited to what he called his analytical turn of mind. "You know?" he said. "This is the kind of thing that really—" He paused, examining the wisp of smoke that curled from his wet pipestem. "Really makes you stop and think."

  "Well, but how did he seem otherwise?" Nancy Brace inquired. "I mean did he seem to've made a—a fairly good adjustment?"

  Milly sighed, tugging down her skirt and curling her feet up into the chair cushion in a single quick, awkward gesture. "Well, he'd lost a lot of weight," she said, "but I guess he looked well enough, except for that. He said being in analysis was helping him a lot; he talked a little about that. And he talked about his job—he's got this different kind of job now? I mean he's still sort of vaguely working for Knox, but it's under a new setup, or something? I didn't quite understand that part of it. What's the name of his new company, sweetie?"

  "Bart Pollock Associates."

  "
Oh
 yes," said Warren Brace. "They're up at Fifty-ninth and Madison. Very interesting new firm, as a matter of fact. Sort of industrial public relations in the electronics field. They started out with the Knox account, and now I believe they've got a couple of others. They ought to be really going places in the next few years."

  "Well," Milly went on, "anyway, he seemed to be keeping busy. And he seemed—oh, I guess 'cheerful' is the wrong word, but that's sort of what I mean. I really felt his attitude was—well, courageous. Very courageous."

  On the mumbled pretext of refilling their glasses, Shep made his way out to the kitchen, where he banged and clattered a tray of ice cubes in the sink to drown out her voice. Why did she have to make such a God damn soap opera out of it? If she couldn't tell it the way it really was, to people who really wanted to listen, why the hell tell it at all? Courageous! Of all the asinine, meaningless . . .

  And forgetting his guests, or rather coming to the abrupt decision that they could damn well get their own God damn drinks, he poured himself a stiff one and took it out to the darkness of the back yard, letting the door close behind him with a little slam.

  Courageous! What kind of bullshit was that? How could a man be courageous when he wasn't even alive? Because that was the whole point; that was the way he'd seemed when he came to call that March afternoon: a walking, talking, smiling, lifeless man.

  At first sight, getting out of his car, he had looked pretty much the same as ever except that his jacket hung a little looser on him and he'd taken to wearing it with the top button fastened as well as the middle one, to gather up some of the slack. But after you'd heard his voice—"Hi, Milly; good to see you, Shep"—and felt the light, dry press of his handshake, you began to see how the life had gone out of him.

  He was so damned mild! He sat there arranging the crease of his pants over his knees and brushing little flecks of ash off his lap and holding his drink with his pinkie hooked around underneath the glass, for safety. And he had a new way of laughing: a soft, simpering giggle. You couldn't picture him really laughing, or really crying, or really sweating or eating or getting drunk or getting excited—or even standing up for himself. For Christ's sake, he looked like somebody you could walk up to and take a swing at and knock down, and all he'd do would be to lie there and apologize for getting in your way. So that when he finally did come out with that business about finding the note—"I honestly think I'd have killed myself, if it hadn't been for that"—it was all you could do to keep from saying, Oh, bullshit! You're a lying bastard, Wheeler; you'd never have had the nerve.

  And it was even worse than that: he was boring. He must have spent at least an hour talking about his half-assed job, and God only knew how many other hours on his other favorite subject: "my analyst this"; "my analyst that"—he had turned into one of these people that want to tell you about their God damned analyst all the time. "And I mean I think we're really getting down to some basic stuff; things I've never really faced before about my relationship with my father . . ." Christ! And that was what had become of Frank; that was what you'd have to know about, if you wanted to know how things had really worked out.

  He took a gulp of whiskey, seeing a quick blur of stars and moon through the wet dome of his glass. Then he started back for the house, but he didn't make it; he had to turn around again and head out to the far border of the lawn and walk around out there in little circles; he was crying.

  It was the smell of spring in the air that did it—earth and flowers—because it was almost exactly a year now since the time of the Laurel Players, and to remember the Laurel Players was to remember April Wheeler's way of walking across the stage, and her smile, and the sound of her voice (
"Wouldn't you like to be loved by me?"
 ), and in remembering all this there was nothing for Shep Campbell to do but walk around on the grass and cry, a big wretched baby with his fist in his mouth and the warm tears spilling down his knuckles.

  He found it so easy and so pleasant to cry that he didn't try to stop for a while, until he realized he was forcing his sobs a little, exaggerating their depth with unnecessary shudders. Then, ashamed of himself, he bent over and carefully set his drink on the grass, got out his handkerchief and blew his nose.

  The whole point of crying was to quit before you cornied it up. The whole point of grief itself was to cut it out while it was still honest, while it still meant something. Because the thing was so easily corrupted: let yourself go and you started embellishing your own sobs, or you started telling about the Wheelers with a sad, sentimental smile and saying Frank was courageous, and then what the hell did you have?

  Milly was still talking, still embellishing, when he went back indoors to pass around the fresh highballs. She had reached her summing-up now, leaning earnestly forward with her elbows on her slightly spread, wrinkled knees.

  "No, but I really do think it was an experience that's brought us closer together," she was saying. "Shep and me, I mean. Don't you, sweetie?"

  And both the Braces turned to stare at him in mute reiteration of her question. Did he? Well, didn't he?

  The only thing to say, of course, was, "Yeah, that's so; it really has."

  And the funny part, he suddenly realized, the funny part was that he meant it. Looking at her now in the lamplight, this small, rumpled, foolish woman, he knew he had told the truth. Because God damn it, she was alive, wasn't she? If he walked over to her chair right now and touched the back of her neck, she would close her eyes and smile, wouldn't she? Damn right, she would. And when the Braces went home—and with God's help they would soon be getting the hell on their way—when the Braces went home she would go in and bustle clumsily around the kitchen, washing the dishes and talking a mile a minute ("Oh I like them 
so
 much; don't you?"). Then she would go to bed, and in the morning she'd get up and come humping downstairs again in her torn dressing gown with its smell of sleep and orange juice and cough syrup and stale deodorants, and go on living.

For Mrs. Givings, too, the time after April's death followed a pattern of shock, pain, and slow recovery.

  At first she could think of it only in terms of overwhelming personal guilt, and so was unable to discuss it at all, even with Howard. She knew that Howard or anyone else would only insist it had been an accident, that no one could be held responsible, and the last thing she wanted was to be comforted. The memory of that ambulance backing down out of the Wheelers' drive, at the very moment when she'd come bringing well-rehearsed apologies ("April, about yesterday; you've both been wonderful but I'll never ask you to go through that sort of thing again; Howard and I have agreed now that John's difficulties are quite beyond our . . ."), and then of little Mrs. Campbell's voice on the phone that same afternoon, telling her the news, had filled her with a self-reproach so deep and pure it was almost pleasurable. She was physically sick for a week.

  This, then, was what came of good intentions. Try to love your child, and you helped to bring about another mother's death.

  "And I know you'll say there was probably no connection," she explained to John's psychiatrist, "but frankly, Doctor, I'm not asking your opinion. I'm simply saying that it's quite out of the question for us ever to think in terms of bringing him into contact with outside people again. Quite out of the question."

  "Mm," the doctor said. "Yes. Well, of course, matters of this sort are entirely up to you and Mr.—ah, Mr. Givings to decide."

  "I know he's ill," she went on, and here she had to sniffle back an alarming threat of tears, "I know he's ill and he's much to be pitied, but he's also very destructive, Doctor. Impossibly destructive."