The Trespassers (14 page)

She rang for drinks. He lit a cigarette, walked the room with it, waited until Dora had brought in the Manhattans and left again. He took his drink to the window, stared out, the lines in his back drawn sharp against his dinner jacket. Vera watched him. Could it be that last night’s impasse had troubled him all the long day, too?

He came toward her at last, where she was standing near the fireplace, took her glass out of. her hand, set it down with his.

“Darling, you’re lovely. Ever since last night I’ve been—”

He took her into his arms, kissed her, with passion and need. Instantly she felt herself transformed. The desirable, the necessary woman, wanted and triumphant because she was wanted. She hadn’t felt this, he hadn’t made her feel this, since they’d come back from Montego Bay. Even when he made love to her, he had not made her feel this intensity of feeling through the brief clamor of sex.

She didn’t understand now, she could not guess what wild voltage was charging through him or why, but an equal charge leaped within her heart and her blood. Something had happened to him, he was on the brink of something strange.

“God, Vee, what do people ever marry for?” It was so suddenly and angrily said, she half doubted its saying. “Marriage
kills
things like this, like the way we feel, it dulls and creeps and bores.”

She made no answer. He began again his walking about the room.

“Sometimes it works out,” she finally said. “Marriage sometimes fulfills people.”

“It didn’t you. Didn’t me and Beth. Doesn’t work out for most people. Certainly not for anyone with a big demanding job of work to do.”

“That makes it harder, I suppose. I think marriage is a tough human assignment. Maybe the toughest.”

“Well, the toughness doesn’t scare me. Don’t think I’m ‘opposed’ to marriage on principle—like some Bohemian left-banker. But—”

His voice cut; he sat down and plunged his face into his hands. She saw his shoulders work up in a spasm of tension. This was all so astonishing, the reason for it so hidden from her. She was lost on the road by which he had traveled to this unexpected place in his feelings. She knew nothing of how he had got there, or why. She waited, silently watching him.

“I’m
for
marriage, because I’m for—well, having children, carrying on the line, and all that. That justifies marriage. But if there weren’t children, there’s no reason for marriage except conventionality.”

“It’s a good reason, having children.”

“Well, maybe that’s why I’m—”

His powerful hands gripped each other, opened, gripped again. Vee knew something more profound than he had ever let her share was edging to the surface. She wished that she could help him, but knew not how or why he needed help. She went over to him, where he sat, sat beside him, and laid her hand on his arm.

“Jas, darling,” she said at last, and wondered at the inexplicable tightness in her own throat. “Is there anything you’re trying to tell me? You know I’ve never, I think really never, dug at you for revelations about yourself, or your own secrets—but if there’s anything hurting you that you
want
to tell—”

He looked at her. Then his voice came, abrupt and harsh.

“Beth and I tried to have a child. We couldn’t manage it. Doctors said she was all right. It’s me that isn’t.”

“No! Oh, I don’t believe it.”

“You can believe it, all right.” His eyes, last night so remote and dead, now bared a deep old pain and said that it was the only insupportable pain. Within her a new emotion flared, expanded. For the very first time she lost all wariness, all sense of sparring to keep her feelings matched for casualness with his own. For the first time, she felt, “God, I love this man.”

“When was this? That the doctors said it, I mean?” The words were very quiet. Then suddenly, “Oh, Jas, oh, darling, what hell for you—”

He took her hand, held it to his face.

“I—so often I’ve wanted to tell you this, Vee. But I—then last night, all through the evening—it had something to do with that God-damned clip—I don’t know what—”

He broke off, looking to her to see if she could follow that obscure connection. She nodded.

“When did the doctors say it?” she asked again.

“About ten years ago. That was about two years after we were married.” Now his voice was dry, unfeeling, as if he were reading some mechanical report. “I didn’t believe it either, any more than you do. I stumbled out of the guy’s office, I remember; a couple of days later I went to another doctor. More tests. He said it too. Then there came all the business of almost suicide; I mean it quite literally. Nights of that; weeks of that. That was just an emotional orgy, but I didn’t know it was then.”

“No.”

“I couldn’t believe it, I tell you. I’d always assumed that if you were perfectly normal about sex, you were bound to be—” He shrugged, laughed, a ratchety, tight laugh. It was mocking and somehow unpitying, even of himself. “A man can be a hellion in bed and still be sterile. That’s what I hadn’t known. Kind of a bad shock to get it straight from two doctors. So, anyway, I didn’t commit suicide—or am I being redundant?” He looked at his watch. “Hell, we’ll be late for the curtain.”

“Damn the curtain,” Vee said. “Look, darling, haven’t you been to a doctor since then? Couldn’t it change? They’ve learned so much since ten years ago—”

“No. Never. I never will. I’m not going to stir up all that misery again. Vee, it did something to me—”

“I know. I know it.”

“It’s too damnably ugly to bear again. After the suicide business, there followed months, years maybe—every day, about four times, or ten, I’d say, ‘You’re no good, really—you’re not a man, really—every mean little snot on the street can get his wife pregnant and have a son—but not you.’ ”

His work, his success, his thirst for power.

“I’m glad you told me,” she said. “I—”

“Hell with it all. There are lots of ways to live a life. Come on, let’s finish these and get some dinner fast.”

At the theater, she scarcely watched the stage. Her own thoughts claimed her; they had to be sifted out, aligned into some new pattern. For the first time, and for some reason that was cloaked even yet, he had let her see deep into his always secretive heart. And her reaction had been so violent, so sudden a realization that because he was in pain, she loved him. Often she had guessed that he was a tormented man, despite all his triumphs, despite all the varnished-over sheen of success and power. But he had never let her see his unhappiness naked, never given her any clue to the reasons for it. Tonight, without warning, he had torn away his own remote self-sufficiency and let her share his pain. And within her, the hundred small things wrong between them forgotten, rushed this torrent of desire to help, to restore, to ease his suffering.

A frightening and beautiful exhilaration flooded her. For all his faults, for all the egotism and self-centeredness of him, Jasper Crown was the most compelling man she had ever known. Tonight he had turned to her, in pressing need, and a new phase had opened in their relationship. It was dangerous to love a man like this…

She tried to nail her attention to the performance beyond the footlights. But she could not. To love again, to abandon one’s destiny to another’s care—how sweet, how desirable, a boon it would be. Career woman, indeed. No one ever saw underneath surfaces, ever looked for the shaping motive, the driving force that made men and women turn their external lives on the lathe of escape from inner disappointment or failure.

Just as Jasper had
this—
what must be a primitive inadequacy, a basic inferiority—driving him on to an endless, show of strength, so there were buried in her own life the secret whirring dynamos of past bitternesses and shock. Long ago her own brother David…It was odd to think of David now. She closed her eyes and could see him, his head a little bent in the old way, pressing his fingers against his closed eyelids, thumb against the right one, middle finger against the left, and the other fingers gracefully extended away from his face. It was as if he were there, standing between her and the lighted stage. Something had brought him to mind now. She must think back.

Back…back…way back there somewhere, when she was a high-school girl in a starched middy blouse and pleated navy-blue-skirt…there, somewhere, one of her own secret dynamos had begun its quiet and fearful whirring, creating the secret dark energy that was to power her later life, her external success, her independence of anyone’s help or promises.

Promises…pledges…faith in another human being…She slid her arm through Jasper’s where it rested on the chair arm between them.

He looked at her; whispered, “Pretty heavy going, isn’t it?” and turned back to the stage. After a moment she slipped her arm away again and forced her eyes to look, her ears to listen.

Vee lay in her wide bed, alone now that it was two o‘clock and Jasper gone. Even the light on the bedside table was off; she lay on her side, thinking, searching.

Promises…a promise…the defined and certain syllables that were actually spoken or the untongued understanding that was equally a pledge.

Of this was the stuff of human relations created. Of this was the stuff of treaties between nations, laws, affidavits of support, agreements between governments and peoples…the Magna Charta, the Bill of Rights. A promise that there shall be no illegal entry or seizure. A pledge that there shall be due process of law—that one shall have freedom of assembly or of worship.

Of promises and pledges—lives were made, marriages begun or ended, happiness held or shattered. In a persistent and vague turmoil, Vee’s thoughts swirled and sought something that seemed important and necessary to her.

Once her whole life hinged on a promise…but that was David, that’s why his image had crossed her mind tonight. David whom she had loved.

In the secret library of her mind was one book she never touched. It stood as a companion volume to the hazy pages of
My Childhood,
but its special story dealt only with her last year at high school. Over its piercing pages, there was still no soft haze of forgetting; better to leave it there, untouched, forgotten. And with it, the memory of that terrible day…

Tonight, though, something within her was forcing her. For the first time in years, she slowly opened its forbidding covers…

She was sixteen and the only desire of her heart was to be like the other girls and go away to college. Like the Gale twins, preparing to go to Vassar, and Smitty, prattling about Ann Arbor, and Jo, oh, best of all, Jo, who was going to Cornell.

Last Christmas she and Jo had hitchhiked up to Ithaca, and from that minute on, nothing else mattered. She had to go to Cornell, too,
had
to; she could imagine how it would be, swinging across the campus to classes, studying hard, going out for the teams, getting asked to tea-dances at one of the big houses. Ithaca was so beautiful, the wind blowing free and clear down the gorges, the chimes ringing out the quarterhours.

Her mother understood, but from the first moment Pop said no. Training school was good enough; all this going away to college was aping the rich, and he would not permit it. She begged, she argued, she cried, but it remained no.

If she had
any
money, she would go, anyway, no matter what he said. Maybe she could do something, work, win a scholarship. The next day she talked to Mr. Derry, the principal. The second semester of her senior year was just starting. He told her then of the state scholarships. They were based only on a student’s Regents marks throughout the whole of high school. They paid a hundred dollars a year for four years. Perhaps—if she really was so bent on going—perhaps she could take one or two Regents examinations over, to better her grade. It was quite legal.

If she could win a scholarship—maybe then, with a hundred a year, she could persuade Pop to give in, to give her a little more…only ten dollars a week from him, and what she could earn Summers—she had it all figured out.

“Could I take them
all
over, Mr. Derry?”

“You’re not thinking of doing all that, Vera, are you?” Mr. Derry said, and there was a sort of look on his face, as if he liked her.

“Oh, I’d do anything to get away to college, anything.” Her voice thickened suddenly and she felt ashamed and embarrassed.

She was going to take ten Regents over when June came around, and of course her three seniors besides. Mr. Derry arranged a study table for her—she had to cram all those old subjects back into her head, and keep up with her senior work, too. Each day she left school, left the girls behind with their chattering and loafing around and walking down to Papayanka’s for nut sundaes—each day she went home and started in at the pile of freshman and sophomore and junior books stacked up on her desk.

But she didn’t care how hard it was.

She didn’t tell either Pop or Mamma—time enough for that later, when she had won it. She told nobody, not even the girls.

One Sunday David and Grace brought the two kids out. Vera didn’t feel close or easy with Grace, she was always complaining about the high cost of everything, though David was really rich now. He was a lawyer and made twelve thousand a year.

He didn’t visit often; Vee bet he stayed away because he was sick of quarreling with Pop about the Versailles Treaty and the League. David just couldn’t stand up to him when Pop got going good and proper about what he believed. David would try talking back awhile; then he would just sit listlessly, listening; he would bend his head a bit and close his eyes, pressing his thumb over one eye and his middle finger over the other, his other fingers flaring away from his face. It was a trick he had; it always made him look tired and a little sad.

That day, she waited until Grace was in the kitchen with Mom, and then she told David what she was doing. It all tumbled out crazily how she felt about getting away. David hadn’t gone away to college either.

“Please, please understand, David, please talk to Pop about Cornell, make him feel it, make him see I have to go—he can afford it.”

Then David nodded.

“You get your scholarship, Vee, and earn what you can summers and things, and I’ll make up the rest of it.”