The Man Who Loved His Wife (2 page)

At the time of their marriage all of their friends had predicted early disaster. An unlikelier couple could not be imagined. There was a difference of nineteen years in their ages; their tastes were incompatible; every element of character, background, and education was dissimilar. Her friends considered him the stereotype of the self-made man, a show-off who expressed himself by conspicuous spending and loud talk. His
cronies were sure he would never be able to live contentedly with a highbrow who talked about ambivalence, Shostakovich, existentialism, and Martha Graham.

They met in New York at Sardi's restaurant after a play opening. One of Fletcher's associates had invested money in the show. Elaine had come with a young actor who had a minor part. The place was thronged, too many people crowded on the banquettes along the walls. Perhaps it was for the benefit of the graceful girl beside him that Fletcher Strode boomed out startling, boastful statements; perhaps it was not an accident that upset a bowl of marinara sauce over her dress.

His apologies had been overwrought. While waiters dabbed at her with hot water, she had tried to comfort her unhappy neighbor with assurances that the dress was unimportant, inexpensive, and would probably come back from the cleaner's good as new. Fletcher had not asked her to send him the cleaner's bill. This would have been too mean. Instead he had found out that she was a photographer's model, Miss Giordino, traced her address, and sent a new and costly gown. She had refused to accept it. Her dress, she told him on the telephone, had come from a cut-price shop, the spot was almost invisible, and he was too, too generous. They had argued for half an hour, and she had finally agreed to discuss it with him at dinner.

“Is your name really Elaine?”

“Why shouldn't it be?”

“
Elaine, the fair, Elaine the lovable, Elaine, the lily maid of Astolat.
” He had offered this proudly. Tennyson's poems, like Emerson's essays, had been a chore for him in school.

She told him that her mother had been working on illustrations for a children's edition of
The Idylls
when she met Professor Guardino. “It was a pickup. At the Tate. Mother had gone to London to study the pre-Raphaelites and set up her easel before Burne-Jones, and Papa was a refugee from Rome waiting for his American visa. He had thought of translating Blake into Italian and was looking at the lithographs. But he never did. Blake, I mean. He always said Mother took his mind off the project. You see, it was inevitable that they named me Elaine.”

Fletcher had not seen it at all. Her smile and the ivory pallor of her flesh, cheekbones, pointed chin, and her sweet habit of blushing made the names Tate, Burne-Jones, Blake, more important to him than the day's stock market quotations. Fletcher Strode had never before met a girl who could be, at the same time, so refined and so lusty. Three weeks after he spilled the marinara sauce he had asked his wife for a divorce.

On the first date Fletcher had told Elaine that he was married, technically. His wife and daughter lived in an exclusive New Jersey suburb while he kept a bachelor's apartment in New York. Mrs. Strode always explained that her husband was too busy in the city and too restless for commuting and added that his devotion never flagged. The truth was that they loathed each other. He gave her a good allowance and kept up the appearance of marriage to guard himself against designing women. He had been sure that he would never remarry.

Kay Strode had put up a bitter fight. She was content to live without her husband, but not without the legend of devotion. There were tears and arguments, countless meetings with lawyers, exorbitant demands, endless haggling over the will and the insurance. All of this delay had heightened Fletcher's impatience. Twenty-four hours after the divorce papers were signed, he and Elaine were married at the Maryland farm of one of his business friends.

In spite of dire predictions it had been a good marriage; more than this, delight by day, ecstasy at night. Elaine had shown herself to be a female of such fiery talent that her delirious husband had looked back to earlier exploits as mere rehearsals for the endless fulfillment of love. There was never a moment's doubt of her sincerity. No half-contented woman would have responded with such rapture. The difference in their ages had been no bar to her emotions. Adoring, she had let flow upon him her rich stream of feminine skill in making a man feel supreme, the hero, the god, infallible. Nor did the husband suffer because she was his superior in education, a college graduate, a daughter of a professor who had written books in two languages. Instead,
she confessed awe of his business mind, listening like a child while he explained deals and schemes.

Looking back, as he often did nowadays, it all seemed too romantic, unreal in its perfection, but he liked to think about it that way. There had been, of course, small clashes. Every marriage has problems, disagreements, bursts of temper. Elaine could be wayward and childlike with a man who had probably become the image of her dead, adored father. Elderly doting parents had spoiled her somewhat; thwarted, she could become a vengeful imp. But the fights had been brief. There was no malice. Elaine's reproaches, her tricks of revenge, could not be compared with the stinging refinements of the first wife. Kay had criticized endlessly, sneered at Fletcher for showing off, complained that he was vulgar and loud. “Do you think I'm too noisy?” he had once asked, humbly. Elaine had answered that his big voice was appropriate to his big body and lusty nature. Everything about Fletcher Strode had this quality of power; even his graying hair grew thick upon his large head.

In both fun and business he had been noisy; sung bass, led the cheering at games, shouted commands, hurled retorts, yelled with anger, boomed out bawdy jokes, won arguments by sheer vocal authority. Fletcher Strode had shouted his way to the top, confounding competitors and frightening creditors by screaming secrets that others would whisper. Today he saw his past as a jubilant vocal exercise and attributed all of his gains to the supremacy of his voice. This power was gone now, never to be recovered.

To save his life, the doctors had said when they took away his voice. Carcinoma of the larynx, when discovered in time, is one of the most curable of all cancers. Although he had been informed of the effects, he had believed that the operation would affect no more than the vigor of his speech. The rest of his body could live as it always had, in full and pleasing exercise of its demands. The loss of his vocal apparatus would be compensated for by different mechanics of sound production. His voice would be stilled for a time, but when the wound was sufficiently
healed, he would learn to control a different set of muscles and would be able to speak in an altered voice. Examples were quoted to him, statistics read, stories told of patients who had overcome trauma and gone on with their work, enjoyed sports, eaten heartily, and made love to women.

During the mute period after the operation, he had been eager and positive that he would soon acquire a new voice. A breezy, self-confident man entered his hospital room to tell him, hoarsely, that many of those who had suffered the same operation had been able to return to work within a few weeks. This man, who had lost his voice box several years earlier, promised that with patience and practice, Fletcher would be able to speak as well as he did.
Hell, I'll do a lot better,
Fletcher told himself. Thinking of the success he had achieved in business, the money he had made, the obstacles overcome, he knew himself the better man. He was both contemptuous of and amused by those sympathetic friends who, visiting him at the hospital, shouted at him or whispered, using their lips extravagantly as though he were deaf.

I'll show them.

After he left the hospital, optimism collapsed. There were too many changes. Smell and taste returned slowly and were never as keen as they had been. He had to breathe through a hole in his neck, a wound that could never be allowed to close now that his windpipe had been removed, there was no connection between the mouth or nose with the lungs. He had to cough, sneeze, and blow his nose through this opening. There would be no more swimming for him, nor could he step into the shower carelessly. His loud and boisterous laughter was silenced forever. Every action required adjustment. Encounters with old friends left him morbid. Strangers appalled him. Going out became a nightmare.

When the voice therapist had been introduced, Fletcher had welcomed an angel. For months this hideously cheerful woman tried to teach him to belch aesthetically, but from the first day, he so loathed the processes of learning to lock in his breath and speak through the esophagus that he became fixed with the idea
that he would never conquer stubborn muscles. Never before had his body failed him. Form and competence had been readily acquired in every sport he had bothered to learn. But the voice exercises were not sport. Repetition bored him. For years in business he had been able to leave petty detail to employees. Patience was not one of Fletcher Strode's virtues. Wearisome practice drove him to despair. Unable to progress at a satisfying pace, he often lost his temper. Fury and frustration robbed him of what little voice he had acquired. When he forgot himself and tried to shout in the old, authoritative manner, he could utter nothing but a string of unintelligible sounds.

“Don't listen to yourself,” his teacher said. How could he help it? His ears had not been cut off. It was far worse when he used an electronic device. To his oversensitive ear the tones were like those cute TV characters whose echo-chamber voices extol floor wax, pancake mix, and pet food. With or without the machine, he heard too acutely. Offensive tones echoed in his mental ear until he felt that he would go mad. One day, he smashed the instrument and discharged the therapist (with an unforgivable letter about her ability, her clothes, and complexion).

The man who had visited him at the hospital, the breezy fellow whose soft, hoarse voice he had sworn to surpass, suggested group therapy. Fletcher and Elaine attended several classes. Advanced students happily conversed, recited poetry, sang huskily. Elaine went about saying that she was thrilled by the indomitable spirit of people who had won the battle against disability. But Fletcher, who had to join a beginners' group, could not bear his classmates' squawks and hoots and efforts to sound human. This, too, was abandoned. He said he could do better alone. Elaine worked with him, using the therapist's manual. At times Fletcher was hopeful and industrious, practiced, noted improvement, but one bad session, one unconquerable sound, and he would quit for days.

Several new electronic devices were purchased, each hopefully, each a magic machine which would give him a clear, smooth voice. The latest invention, the costliest, was little better
than the others. At home he never used them, but would never go out alone without the crutch. In time he became better able to communicate, but never without self-consciousness. Lesser men, those who had not made fortunes, learned with patience and humility; economic necessity drove them to speech. Fletcher had no such incentive. He had made himself secure, could give in to impatience and bad temper. His ego had been permanently maimed; there was no cure for lost pride.

New symptoms developed: spasms, excess mucus, dryness of the mouth, temporary paralysis. He was certain that the cancer had returned. This time I will die, he thought, not unhappily. But the surgeon showed him X-ray plates with a benefactor's smile. Nothing more, he said, than neurosis and prescribed psychiatry.

Fletcher was horrified. The wife of one of his business friends, a rich man who could give a woman anything her heart desired, alternated between the analyst's couch and the booby hatch. No headshrinker could give him back a lost voice, for God's sake. He retreated farther into himself, fled when visitors came to the apartment, and in public places let Elaine speak for him. She ordered meals in restaurants, cashed checks, performed every chore that demanded speech with strangers. Through his lawyer and broker, both old friends, he sold out the last of his business interests and arranged investments that would permit him to live on his income.

They moved to Los Angeles because it was far away and reputed to have a good climate. An unseasonable heat wave . . . in February! . . . destroyed that illusion. Blistering desert winds dried the air so that crust formed on the stoma which had to be kept open so that air could be drawn into the damaged trachea. Every breath became painful. The specialist recommended by his New York doctor suggested that he live near the ocean. Elaine found a house upon a hill in Pacific Palisades where fog kept the air cooler and moister than in the city. He let her furnish it as she liked and spend what she pleased, but would allow no visitors. Nothing mattered to him except the concealment of disability.

For a time Elaine was carried away by the excitement of decorating a house and reviving a garden. Inevitably boredom set in. Elaine was completely of this world, gregarious, used to city excitements, a whirl of activity and friendships, passionate involvements. She had hoped to draw Fletcher into her world. “You can't become an island,” she told him.

“A what?”

“An island unto yourself.”

“What's that mean?”

“
No man is an island entire of itself; even man is a piece of the continent, a part of the maine; if a clod to be washed away by the seas, Europe is less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or thine own were—
”

“Oh, poetry,” he interrupted.

“It's famous,” she told him loftily.