The Husband (2 page)

Mrs. Ragdale looked very much like her husband—a matched pair.

“I’m sorry your husband is leaving us,” said Peter to Mrs. Ragdale.

“Confidentially,” she said, “I think he is, too.”

Alex stared her down, and she said no more. Peter, helpless at small talk, clapped Alex on the back, a gesture he regretted immediately because it seemed so condescending, and moved away through the crowd.

On the raised platform at the other end of the room, Paul was tapping the mike and ahemming for silence. “Folks,” he said, when most eyes had turned toward him. “There, that’s better now. Can you all hear me? Good. I’d ask you to be seated, but there aren’t any seats.” That got a short laugh from some of the younger employees. “So we’ll keep the speeches down to size. Today,” he said, gesturing at Alex, “we are gathered to pay our respects and to say good-bye, or rather
au revoir
, to the first employee of Dale, Bowne, and Armstrong to reach the retirement age of sixty-five. I am happy that the pension plan will provide our friend and colleague Alex Ragdale and his wife with security for the rest of their days.”

This time there was some temperate cheering.

“I know,” continued Paul, “that it is customary on such occasions to give the departing employee a gold watch. However, I know that Alex Radgale has had a busy business career—twenty-one years of it with this company, I am proud to say—and has not had much time to travel except on company business. Therefore,” and he drew a long envelope out of his inside pocket, “I am pleased to present Alex Ragdale, one of our best-loved employees, with a pair of tickets for a round-the-world cruise which sails from New York harbor a week from Sunday!”

There were
Oooh
s before he finished his sentence, and at the end of it wild cheering, as people parted to let Alex come up to the platform to receive the envelope. Alex’s red face was redder than usual. Were there tears in his eyes?

He shook Paul’s proffered hand, then whispered, “Thank you” into the microphone.

“One moment,” said Paul. “To help Alex keep track of the time while he is on that round-the-world cruise, here also is a gold watch, only in keeping with the times, it runs on an energy cell and you don’t have to wind it.” Alex took the watch with both his hands, afraid of dropping it.

“Read what it says,” shouted someone from the audience.

Alex tried to check the flood of his feeling. He read the engraving on the back to a hushed room. “To Alex Ragdale from his friends and colleagues at Dale, Bowne, and Armstrong on the occasion of his retirement and in appreciation of his services.”

“Go ahead,” said Paul, “say a few words.”

Alex Ragdale handed the watch down to his wife and then grasped the microphone with his hands. Peter could see the perspiration beading on Alex’s forehead.

“I’m not one of the creative people, and while I can hold my own in conversation with a client, I haven’t anything new to say except thank you for your generous gifts and for coming here today and for your good wishes, and I would forgo them—the gifts, I mean—glady if it meant I could continue working with you all. I miss you, and I hope you will invite me to come around and visit when I return.”

He fled from the platform into his wife’s arms. There was loud, continuing applause, and then someone whooped up, “For he’s a jolly good fellow,” and everyone joined in.

Paul’s finger beckoned Peter up onto the platform. Peter swallowed the rest of his drink, handed his glass to somebody, and went up.

“Our creative director, Peter Carmody, wanted to say a few words.”

You lying bastard
, thought Peter.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Peter said, looking about the room at the glazed expressions, “or am I not describing you correctly.” It got a laugh. “I could say that Alex Ragdale is an honorable man. But I played poker with him one day on the train out to Chicago.” Laughter again. “I could say that Alex Ragdale is a virtuous man, but I have seen his right thumb and forefinger close on a secretary’s behind.” Mrs. Ragdale’s laughter led the rest.

It was at this moment, his mind churning to think of what toastmastering nonsense he would say next, that Peter spotted Elizabeth Kilter at the very rear of the room, near the door. She had come, after all. Why? To see his puppet show on behalf of company policy?

“Now that he is going to retire,” continued Peter, “Alex can play golf on weekdays”—someone cheered—“when there’s no lineup at the first tee, except Alex admitted to me years ago that he learned golf only to play it with clients and that the game bores him stiff. He could garden—I’ve seen their lovely garden—but then what would Mrs. Ragdale do if Alex poached on her territory? He could get himself some Sears Roebuck tools and monkey around the house, but after seeing him try to get his office door back on its hinges after the furniture movers left last year, any monkeying he does around his house is likely to make his property values plunge! Seriously—”

It was that word “seriously” that got the big laugh. “Not everyone is suited to living half a life on half pay. When Alex gets back from his round-the-world trip, when he’s had enough of living in a stateroom and hoping the Dramamine keeps working, I think the first Monday back, I think Alex should show up in his old office and get to work and earn the other half of his pay right alongside the rest of us!”

For a moment there was a dreadful quiet in the huge room as people looked to Paul for a cue, then received it from Alex Ragdale, who came back onto the platform, saying, “Bless you,” and Mrs. Ragdale was up there beside him, hugging Peter, and Peter, embarrassed, said into the microphone just, “Enjoy the party,” and left the platform, catching a glimpse of the artery pulsing in Paul’s forehead. Peter worked his way through the pleased crowd to where he had seen Elizabeth standing, but she was no longer there.

Peter wanted to get out into the street as fast as possible, but the coatroom woman—she was older than Alex, wasn’t she?—moved slowly, and by the time he got his coat and gave her a quarter, Paul was at his side.

“How are we going to get out of this one?”

“Maybe we don’t have to.”

“You should have consulted me.”

“I didn’t even consult myself, Paul. It just came.”

Paul, his anger flaring, marched back to the crowded room. Peter headed for the subway which would take him off Manhattan Island, Elizabeth’s island, to a suburb where Rose kept house for him and the children. He hoped the children were still awake. After seeing Alex Ragdale and his wife clutching at straws, he didn’t want to face an evening alone with Rose.

Chapter Two

Peter Carmody opened the door of his home, set down his bulging briefcase, and surveyed his domain. The two children were lying ass-up on the carpet, watching television, and didn’t turn to greet him.

Were they ignoring him, or had they simply not heard him come in?

He opened the door again and this time let it slam. Twelve-year-old Margaret whipped over and in a second was on her feet running toward his outstretched arms. Ah, he thought, she hadn’t heard me the first time.

Jonathan, a blasé thirteen, turned more slowly so that his eye would not lose sight of the television screen until the very last second. By that time Margaret was swarming all over her father, taking his hat, holding onto his arm as if it were the limb of a backyard tree.

“Hi,” said Jonathan.

“Not yet,” said Peter. “I haven’t had a drink.”

In an instant Jonathan and Margaret were both at the alcove bar, their hands moving perilously among the glassware, vying with each other for the martini mixings. The homecoming ritual had begun.

Peter was pleased. Waiters and wives, he thought, regretting the thought almost immediately, are paid to serve you. When children do it spontaneously…

It hadn’t been spontaneous. He had had to give the signal.

“Before I succumb to the decibels,” he said, “would one of you silence that box?”

Margaret left the martini mixing to Jonathan and turned off the TV set. “We were watching the news, like you said we could.”

That hadn’t been the news he had caught out of the corner of his eye.

“And after the news?”

“A program,” said Margaret, playing it safe.

“And then?”

“Another program.”

“I’m sure they were highly educational.”

Both children laughed. Peter joined in. What the hell, he had long ago lost the television battle.

“If the news intrigues you,” he said to them both, “read a newspaper.”

Jonathan was pouring the martini off the ice. “Newspapers are a bore,” he said.

That was an echo, not a thought originating with Jonathan, a thought remembered. The newspaper strike a year ago had convinced Peter how much of each day he had let drift away, running his eyes up and down columns, across lines, reading news and items that were not news in the hope that they would make his subway ride pass quickly and then discovering, when newspapers were not available, that he did not miss them, that somehow one heard about the important news anyway. He tried a book, a book he did not need to read for business, and surprisingly it had interested him the way books once had when he was twelve or thirteen. He had finished the book on the ride home that evening and felt an embarrassing sense of accomplishment—
I read a book!
—as if it were some sort of achievement, the resumption, after a hiatus, of an old pleasure.

He wondered why those bobbing heads on the subway, when there was a strike and the regular papers were not available, why did they go like lemmings for newspapers brought in from other cities, or the second-rate fly-by-nights, and behind these substitute screens of newsprint, scanning, scanning, before they were quickly or ultimately bored? Why did
they
not try a book? He noticed, with surprise again, that three or four, no, six, actually were reading books. For a moment he felt a bond, as if they were all members of a club, outlanders among the newsprint. Of course he had overblown the experience, the sense of triumph. He actually had a fantasy about millions of middle-class men suddenly discovering on their shelves at home the unread books, the books read by their wives or children or by themselves when they were younger, rediscovering the pleasure of getting lost in a book, as each surely must have done as a boy.

“Did you hear what I said?” asked Jonathan.

Peter, not knowing how long his mind had been distracted, or in fact what Jonathan had said that started him off this way, said, “Of course.”

Just then the swinging doors from the kitchen opened, and Rose came through to greet him. Her face was still beautiful in a public sense, a perfect oval topped by auburn hair, a nose that couldn’t be faulted, a fine mouth. It was the eyes really that troubled him as the years went on, their restless lack of ease, their defensiveness. Was it a tenderness they protected—Rose had been tender in the early years—or a vacuity? Rose’s surface was fine, perhaps brilliant, her clothes carefully chosen—she had even picked perfectly the chic, colorful apron she now wore while preparing dinner—her makeup barely visible as makeup, a ready public smile. But her eyes, the visible body openings, looked beautiful only when they were closed. Open, you saw the floundering within, the lack of purpose, of interior style, of personality one could wear when naked.

“How did things go at the office?” she asked out of habit, and Peter remembered suddenly that the book he had read during the newspaper strike was an English novel called
The Go-Between
. He had brought it home to Rose that night, finishing it on the train, and had told her what pleasure it had given him, and she had said, as he expected, that she would read it at once, that night in bed before going to sleep. As he recalled now, she had read less than a chapter and had never opened the book again.

He hadn’t reminded her. Was that a fault? A recognition of reality?

“Isn’t this the night what’s-his-name got his farewell party?” asked Rose, remembering the special reason for Peter’s late arrival home.

“Alex Ragdale,” said Peter.

“Yes, of course,” said Rose, her accent at its most controlled, a faint hint of carefully cultivated British English that always disappeared within several sentences but caught up again and again during the course of an evening, except in moments of tension, when Rose spoke like her mother.

“Weren’t you supposed to make a speech?”

Yes, he would have liked to tell the whole of it, the prelude with Paul, Alex’s terror of dropping off the cliff of retirement, what Paul had said, especially what he had said—one wanted to tell one’s wife stories of minor courage—but Rose had already declared herself on retirement when the company plan was introduced: retirement was a good thing, devoutly to be worked for.

“I made a short speech and came straight home,” Peter said.

She had skipped her ritual kiss on the side of his face, the point she had aimed for when she came through the swinging doors from the kitchen. “Good,” she said. “It would have been awful if you got here after Jack and Amanda arrived.”

He had completely forgotten.
Guests for dinner. Oh well, the Baxters would make four. Four was better than two; it might keep an argument with Rose from flaring. Over what? Over anything.