Short Stories: Five Decades (71 page)

Just before he dozed off, he thought of the message from Joe Reeves. Important, he thought a little irritably, important—now, what could that be? He twitched a little, uneasily, nearly coming back to wakefulness. Then, with the steady breathing of his wife sounding from the next bed, he dropped off to sleep.

The siren must have been wailing for some time before Cahill woke, because it entered harshly into his dream, and somehow he was back in London, in the cold billet, and the planes were overhead and the guns were going off, and he had the old feeling that neighbors were dying by chance in burning buildings on the street outside his window. He could feel himself moaning softly and shivering under the blankets and hoping he would be alive in the morning, and then he awoke.

He gazed blindly at the dark ceiling, feeling the cold, unreasonable sweat come out on his body. What is it? he thought. What is it? Then he realized that he was at home, in his own bed, and that the war was over. The noise of the siren howled down the quiet street outside—a police car going to investigate a burglary or pick up a drunk—echoing among the untouched homes, behind their undamaged lawns. He shook his head, irritated with himself for his nervousness. He looked across at his wife. She slept, unperturbed, her breath coming evenly, her arms primly down at her sides, her captured hair untossed on the pillow, happily beyond the reach of sirens and the memory of sirens.

He felt tremblingly awake. Every sound now reached him clearly and with individual significance: the wind troubling the curtains in a starched rhythm; the insubstantial creak of the stairs reacting to the obscure strain that years put upon old houses; the distant crashing of a truck’s gears past a faraway street corner, attacking all insomniacs within a radius of a mile; the even intake and exhalation of his wife’s breath, too mild to be called a snore but now as annoying as a suddenly loud clock, holding the hours of the night too strictly to account, reminding the would-be sleeper that every moment of wakefulness now would be answered by weariness tomorrow.

Cahill looked at the low radium gleam of the clock on the bed table. Four-thirty. He fell back onto his pillow heavily. Too late to take a sleeping pill. If he took a pill now, he’d be doped all day; he wouldn’t have time to sleep it off. The ubiquitous problem of modern civilization, he thought: Is it too late for a pill? Too early? Which way will it be worse tomorrow? All over the country, sleepy, nervous hands reaching out for the clock, troubled heads calculating, It will wear off in six hours, but I have to get up in four. Sleep, he thought, the first great natural resource to be exhausted by modern man. The erosion of the nerves, not to be halted by any reclamation project, private or public.

He lay rigid in his bed, conscious now of various dull, unpleasant sensations in his body. His eyelids felt harsh and granular and seemed to scrape his eyeballs when he blinked. He was too warm, but a damp breeze from the window felt cold and uncomfortable on his forehead. The muscles of his right leg felt cramped, and he had a curious sensation that the tendon running up from his ankle had grown too short during the night. His stomach, just under the diaphragm, was moving in little spasms. He put his hand on the spot and felt the sick, erratic fluttering. He could taste the whiskey he had drunk, high and sour in his throat. That damned siren, he thought. I was feeling so well …

Then Cahill remembered the message. It must be something really pressing, he thought, for Joe Reeves to call like that. Cahill couldn’t recall another occasion, in all the time he’d known Joe, when Joe had left that sort of a message for him. Early in his college career, Joe had decided to be urbane, debonair, off-hand, and his manner of treating all matters light-handedly and without urgency had become, if anything, more pronounced with the years. And there was nothing off-handed about leaving a disturbing note like that waiting for a man to pick up at one o’clock in the morning. After all, he saw Joe almost every day, at lunch. You’d think a man could wait until noon the next day. Unless it was a matter of the most drastic importance …

Cahill twisted restlessly in his bed, trying to keep his eyes closed, sullenly inviting sleep. I will think about this tomorrow, he thought. I will think about this tomorrow. But the restful emptiness of mind he sought evaded him. Unpleasantly, he remembered that Joe had good reason to call him. Subconsciously, he realized, he had been waiting for just such a message, and dreading it. For the twentieth time, he wondered if Joe had heard what he, Cahill, had said about him at the Faculty Club two weeks before. He had felt guilty about it ever since, and ashamed of himself. Even giving himself the excuse that he had drunk a little too much had not helped. In a discussion about teaching techniques, the subject of Joe’s popularity with his classes had come up, and Cahill had said cruelly, “Joe Reeves charms his classes into believing they’re learning a great deal about economics when what they’re really learning is how charming Joe Reeves can be.” It was a stupid thing to say, even though it was partly true, and Lloyd and Evarts, who had been listening to him, had chuckled maliciously. Reeves had seemed rather cool for the last two weeks, and Cahill was almost certain that the remark had got back to him, as was almost inevitable in the narrow companionship of a college town. It was too bad. He and Joe Reeves had been close friends for over twenty years, and even though the relationship by now had more the form than the substance of the earlier friendship (how really remain friendly with any man after you are married?), it was silly to risk it for a light and mischievous judgment over a glass of whiskey. And it didn’t even represent what Cahill really felt about Reeves. True, there was a superficiality about Reeves, especially in recent years, that came with his easy success with everyone—university presidents, faculty wives, students—but buried beneath that were the shrewdness, the good sense, the honorable instincts that had attracted Cahill to him in the first place. Jealousy, Cahill thought, ashamed of himself. How can a grown man give himself to it so easily? Probably, Cahill thought, Reeves had heard about the remark the very next morning and had mulled it over for the last two weeks, growing angrier and angrier, until this evening, when he had decided to have a showdown with Cahill about it. And Cahill couldn’t deny having said it, or disguise in any way the envy and criticism that had called it forth, and that would be the end of the friendship. Joe, for all his easy assurance, was terribly touchy, vain, unforgiving. Cahill pondered on what it would be like not to be friendly with Joe. They had gone through college together, travelled through Europe together, lent each other money, books, opinions, neckties, celebrated together, mourned, exulted together. Even now, they and their wives had dinner together once or twice a week and made free of each other’s homes in a carefully preserved informality that was pleasant, if not quite honest, and that kept alive for them a kind of gentle memory of their exciting younger days. And now, for a phrase, for a drop of wanton acid, to lose it all.

Cahill stared bitterly at the ceiling. The tongue, he thought, grows looser and more destructive with the years. Give a talkative man enough listeners and he will bring down stone with his indiscretions.

The curtains scraped in their humble starch at the windows, rasping across his consciousness. Of course, Cahill thought, it is possible that Joe did not hear what I said about him. The message could be about a dozen other things. What things? Joe was so intimately connected with his life, with the people and events of his past, with the problems and promises of the present, that the message might be concerned with his wife, his children, his job, his health, his finances, anything.

Edith moved a little in the next bed, sighing—a forlorn, sleepbound, homeless, unremembered intake of breath—then settled back into that steady almost snore. Cahill looked over at her shadowed face. She slept, resting, secure, masked, giving no information, volunteering no help. Suddenly, he disliked and mistrusted her. Just to be so calmly and happily unconscious at a moment like this, when her husband lay awake, remorseful and torn by doubt, was a kind of willful absence, a tacit infidelity, a form of uncaring callousness.

Cahill considered his wife coldly. Her face looked surprisingly young. Twenty-eight, you might say—thirty. Frivolity, he thought, has preserved her youth. Age needed some assistance from thought and feeling to carve lines into a face, and in Edith’s case age had had to work unaided. Still, she looked pretty, attractive, despite the net and curlers. Why was she so finickingly careful about the way she looked? Not for his sake, that was sure. Another man? How could anyone ever possibly know? Lectures in other towns took him away from home quite often. And then there were the whole long days that were hers to spend unquestioned. Maybe Joe had something to say on this subject—something that couldn’t wait.

Unwillingly, Cahill remembered the evening, the week before, at the Crowells’, when he’d gone out onto the darkened porch and come upon Joe and Edith sitting close to each other, both of them speaking in low, urgent whispers. They’d seemed embarrassed when they saw Cahill, and Edith had looked startled. And Joe’s rather heavy standard joke about being caught in the act had not served to clear the air. Cahill had been troubled for a moment; then he had dismissed it from his mind. There could be a hundred reasons, all innocent, for Joe and Edith to be talking secretly together. They’d always been friendly, right from the beginning. They kissed each time they met, Cahill suddenly recalled. Why was that? He, Cahill, never kissed Joe’s wife, except ceremonially, on New Year’s Eve and birthdays. The whole modern world, Cahill thought with distaste, kisses too damned much. Sly, without innocence, full of subtle invitation and hidden implication, these public embraces of the married. And, considered coldly, Joe was ripe for experiment. He and his wife didn’t get along at all well. She bored Joe; that was plain enough. He was impatient with her in discussions, and she often gave the impression that she had been crying before guests arrived. And she was one of those women who are always going off on long visits to their families, in the Midwest. No woman who had a happy married life remained that attached to her mother and father. And in those bachelorlike periods God knew what Joe did with himself. Also, Cahill remembered, Joe had not been spectacularly celibate in his youth, and in his speech, at least, gave no indication that he had reformed. Another thing: Edith, Cahill remembered, always laughed at Joe’s jokes. Damaging, Cahill thought, very damaging. She laughed markedly seldom at his. Well, the truth was he wasn’t terribly witty, and a woman might be expected to catch on in eighteen years of marriage. He mourned briefly over the fact that he was not witty, and mourned even more bitterly because now, at the age of forty, he realized it. When he was younger, he had had a higher opinion of himself. Edith had laughed at his jokes then, and so had other people, but now he knew that it was not wit so much as the good humor and vitality of youth that had created an air of cheerfulness about him. That was gone, there was no doubt about that, and it would be unseemly and embarrassing to pretend it wasn’t. I must turn, as gracefully as possible, he thought, into a grave old man. Let people like Joe Reeves, who had the talent, say the bright things. He thought of Reeves, with his arched, actor’s eyebrows and his dry, knowing delivery, at the center of things at parties, surrounded by eagerly listening, easily laughing people. Of course, Cahill thought bleakly, that’s bound to be attractive to women. Also, Reeves wasn’t fat. He had never exercised in all his life, but he was still as thin and straight and young-looking as ever. God has a vicious habit, Cahill thought, of putting all the gifts in one basket. Weighing the matter objectively, a woman would have to be crazy to prefer Cahill to Joe Reeves. Cahill thought of all the stories he’d heard, through the years, of good friends who had switched wives. And of the man he had met during the war who had arrived back from Europe to find his brother and his wife waiting for him on the dock with the brave, honorable, up-to-date news that they were in love with each other and wanted to marry, but not without his permission. What permission would he be able to give Joe Reeves and his sleeping wife, and what permission had they already given themselves?

Hating Edith, Cahill twitched under the rumpled covers and groaned softly. I should have taken the pill when I woke up, regardless of the time, he thought.

It might not be Edith, Cahill thought, violently keeping his eyes shut; it might be about the Mitchell girl. There was no doubt about it, he’d been a fool about that, and trouble waited there inevitably. Dora Mitchell had been in one of his classes the year before and had decided that she was in love with him. She was nineteen years old, with a dark, unstable look to her and a kind of solemn, uncertain beauty that Cahill thought most attractive. They had met several times out of class, by accident. (At least, Cahill had thought it was by accident until Dora had told him that she waited for him outside his classroom and on the steps of the library building.) And then, more times than he wished to remember, Cahill had met her in quiet bars and had taken her on drives to the country and to a small inn for tea, fifteen miles out of town. He had been flattered by her devotion, and some obscure, middle-aged hunger in him had fed on her youth and her ingenuous high estimate of him. He had known enough, of course, never to touch her. In fact, he had never even kissed her. But who, seeing them together in a clandestine corner of the Red Wheel Inn—the animated, unaccustomedly high-spirited man and the tall, adoring girl—would ever believe that? And he knew they’d been observed several times. And, besides that, Dora had once or twice wept and rather hysterically declared she could not go on this way and had even suggested, with the melodrama born of a hundred movies full of Other Women, that she have a heart-to-heart talk with Edith.

Cahill shuddered in his bed. It was all too possible that Dora had gone to Reeves, whom she knew, and unburdened herself to him, sobbing and overflowing with grandiose, youthful passion. Perhaps she had been to see Reeves that very night, and that’s why Reeves had been so anxious to have Cahill call him. Tenderness, Cahill thought, the blind, many-edged weapon for the cutting down of fools. Bitterly, he made himself imagine what it would be like the day his own daughter, Elizabeth, herself only two years younger than Dora, found out (from a malicious sorority sister, a newspaper report, from a process server for divorce proceedings, from Dora herself over ice-cream sodas after a basketball game). Grotesque, he thought, for a few hours of gentle conversation, for an illusory, ephemeral buttressing of the vanity, for the titillating suggestion of sin without the sin itself, to risk so much! Maybe, he thought despairingly, I should go to a psychoanalyst; the urge for self-destruction has overcome me.