An April Afternoon Read online

  Afternoon in April

  Philip Wylie

  PAPERBACK LIBRARY EDITION

  First Printing; May, 1963

  This Paperback Library Edition is published by arrangement with Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, Inc.

  Copyright, 1938, by Philip Wylie Printed in the United States of America CHAPTER I

  For ten days I had been wondering if she would kiss me. I had fervently hoped so, in spite of knowing that her kiss would hurt as much as the others had and for as long, which would be the length of my life. I had tried to guess her reactions in various possible places, so that I could be best assured of the poignant token, the touch of her lips, Virginia. I'd thought of meeting the steamer, but there would be the thundering baggage, the people, and she might overlook the gesture in her hurry to annex a customs inspector. I'd thought of the station platform-straight privet, and the blue rails that measured the distance between Reedy Cove and New York in minutes--eighty of them.

  But I had decided upon our porch, because the big lilac was in bloom and because there was bustle at the station, also.

  I hadn't admitted to myself that reason for waiting at home to greet her until the car came up the drive. I'd pretended my Ph.D. thesis had prevented the trip to town, and I'd feigned not to hear when John called up the stairs to say it was train time.

  Of course, when I saw her, I knew I needn't have worried. She stood up in the roadster as John slowed it and she was out before it stopped moving. She detached herself, as if she were some bright ornament of the machine-or the reason for its being.

  She was in my arms--and she kissed me four times.

  She said, "Frankie!" She had one of those soft, deep voices that seem to exist in the air after they have been used. At least, such voices give a particular and lingering significance to all they express. She said, "It's grand to see you!"

  I said, "Welcome home, Virginia! How was Europe?"

  "Nasty! Hurry up, John! Look at the lilacs! Oh, Frankie, I'm glad to be here!

  Where's Connie?"

  Connie appeared, then, and kissed her daughter. They didn't look like sisters--but they looked near enough of an age to make their true relationship seem improbable. I thought of that, as I had a great many times before. But mostly I thought of Virginia's kisses. Enthusiastic, friendly--and never to be anything else. Perhaps she was fonder of me than of anyone except Connie and John--her mother and father--but if I ever allowed a hint of what I felt to appear in the return of those treasured kisses--

  I never imagined what would follow that. I couldn't.

  My life is full of such contradictions.

  They went into the house--talking about Paris and the war in Spain and school--

  and I followed, laughing in the right places and thinking about the contradictions.

  I adored Virginia and she was fond of me and I could not speak of it to her. One of many strangenesses. I had every luxury and comfort on earth-except the luxury of knowing who I was and from where I had come. For my twenty-three years, I had a quite comfortable amount of fame, but the fame I coveted most I could never hope to have. I had a fortune the size of which sometimes astonished me, but I would have given all of it-

  -ecstatically--for anyone of at least three things.

  I thought that, and we were in the living room--a vast place with so many windows that it was part of the Sound and the evening. Shadows fell, the tide gathered back the sea, plates chinked in the dining room, we listened to Virginia's adventures, and I marveled remotely at the luck and lucklessness of my life. Possibly it was self-pity and yet--I was happy. In any case, my introspection kept me from seeing what had happened to Virginia until later that evening.

  Self-pity. . . .

  John and Connie Sheffield had adopted me to "round out" their affectionate and stimulating family--Larry and Ivan and--Virginia. I'd been left in a basket in front of a church. Those are baffling antecedents--a basket and a flight of stone steps. The abandoned infant had been ill--infantile paralysis. My right leg dragged a little when they took me, in a new suit of clothes, out to the house on Reedy Cove. I was four. I can still remember what impressed me most: the warmth of the house. Seventy degrees Fahrenheit had been ungermane to the orphanage budget. Virginia was six months old then; Ivan a year younger than I; Larry had just learned to walk.

  I grew up with the name of Sheffield. "Francis" had been Connie's favorite uncle.

  My adoption had never been a secret--John and Connie were forthright--and, in a sense, it had brought to me greater love and special attention. My lameness, never quite completely remedied, had further evoked particular sympathies. But the world's most accomplished physicians had restored me to the utmost of their abilities, so that I limped only a little.

  I'd been "bright" in school. My penchant for writing, the compensation, doubtless, for a sedentary youth, had been ardently encouraged. I was nineteen when I wrote

  "Chemin des Dames" and very much amazed to see the verse become a sort of Armistice Day classic. It led to several books of verse and a syndicate job and my ambition to teach English. Then--when Grandma Sheffield had died--closing her lovely blue eyes all too prematurely for us four kids-she had left a will that said there was already plenty for Larry and Ivan and Viginia and so, the bulk of her estate, when all debts were paid, would go--to me. John and Connie were delighted. So were my brothers. So was Virginia. Then--and always. That's the way the Sheffields were. We loved each other, and I belonged to the family. Only--I could never speak to Virginia, because she had forgotten, really, that I was not her brother.

  And there were other things. A letter. My wants.

  Anne called us for dinner. I could remember Anne when her front teeth were crooked and homely. Now she had a plate, and they were perfect. Anne was a retainer--

  and typical of John and Connie. They could have had estates, a town house, a butler.

  They preferred Reedy Cove and the meandering residence which had extended itself with family needs--a nursery, a game room, a studio for Virginia when she studied art. It was a house which could have included a blimp hangar and remained a home. The most recent addition had been a bar. John and Connie were "modern" even in the war years--we had never called them "father" and "mother," for example. Again, the bar. We were allowed to drink because of John's wise code: the only "thou shalt not" is "thou shalt not"--but every privilege carries its own responsibility. I have never seen a better or a more workable philosophy.

  It was a special dinner--for Virginia. She'd been in France for eight months and we'd had debates on what she had missed most and what her favorite things were.

  Tomato soup with whipped cream, corned beef hash, chili sauce, watermelon pickles, creamed onions, apple pie à la mode. Not, perhaps, a dietician's dream, but Virginia's.

  Still, I thought I began to detect a cloud in the brightness of her eyes, or strain in the timbre of her voice, as she exclaimed over each dish.

  "Who thought of corned beef hash?" she asked.

  John grinned and took a bow. His grin always wrinkles his nose and moves muscles beneath the mixture of very black and very white hair on his temples. It's a dual purpose grin. I've seen him use it When his golf ball stopped rolling two hundred and eighty yards from the tee, and again, when news came to him that a couple of radicals had blown a wing out of his factory in Bridgeport. "I thought of corned beef," he answered. "It was the first thing you asked for when they put you on regular food after your appendectomy."

  "And Connie decided on pie à la mode?"

  Her mother nodded. "The taste is hereditary. From me you took blonde hair and imagination. You escaped my willfulness. You caught up again with the desserts. As for your methodical traits--they came from John. Why you like waterm
elon rind pickles, I cannot guess. There's no precedent for it in six generations. A clammy relish--"

  Everyone was smiling. Virginia glanced at me and thereby acknowledged that I had suggested the pickles. Even glances such as that had the power to move me. It was kind of her and very percipient. But I try to balance such emotions by realising that most of the so-called handicapped people in the world are unusually sensitive. By their subtleties they can enslave the generous. Maybe that was what drove the deepest wedge between me and Virginia.

  Pity--and self-pity.

  They are words which most people do not often need to consider in relation to themselves. But in my life, they are constant enemies. Pity from others. Or from me-for me. Anyway, she looked and smiled and I winked.

  "How's Larry?" she asked.

  John grinned and Connie giggled. Larry was seventeen then and in prep school.

  Virginia was nineteen. Her father undertook to describe his young son's general state.

  "Larry is in a quandary. Or, maybe, I should say several. I've had six letters from him in the past ten days."

  "Goodness! " Virginia was laughing. "That's about his usual total annual output, isn't it?"

  "Surpasses it. Well--for one thing he told me that he had decided after Harvard to be either a racing driver or a paleontologist. Wanted advice. Then--he was campused for the rest of the term for making book on the Vanderbilt Cup Race this summer--and he wrote about that. The Headmaster was going to throw him out, but he found the bets were somewhat bizarre. The winners had to return after graduation and clean up the fraternity house--so Larry will get his diploma. Moreover--he has fallen in love."

  Virginia looked up quickly. Her lips were apart and she was frowning a little.

  So I knew.

  "--with a motion picture actress. I forget which one. He has never seen her, but he wrote telling me he has seventeen autographed pictures of her and a piece of a handkerchief that she dropped in the lobby of a New York theatre on the opening night of

  'Angel Face.' He said that there was still a clinging perfume on the fragment and that she was wonderful. He is also in love with a girl he has seen--too often, no doubt. Her name, insofar as I know it, is 'Wheezie' Bartell and he has spent a lot of time 'pitching woo' with her--a procedure the nature of which I can only guess. This young lady is five feet three and tips the beam at one hundred and eleven pounds. I didn't know they weighed them in, these days--"

  I was beginning to choke. So was Virginia.

  "Then," Connie continued, "he wrote saying he had been robbed. At the point of a gun. So would we please replace his monthly allowance. He might have been killed. He wrote all that and then ended the letter by saying that the George Washington in him compelled him to confess that he had spent all his money in a place called the 'Oak Towers'--"

  "--presumably on 'Wheezie.' So that is how Larry is. And Ivan?" Virginia inquired, after a pause.

  John looked happy. "He's going to start medicine in the Fall."

  "I'm glad."

  "We all are. Frankie went up to Cambridge last month and talked to him."

  She looked at me again.

  I was pretty proud about Ivan. He'd wanted to be a doctor all his life; he had everything for it--brilliance, personality, tenacity, intuition--but we had been afraid that some wealthy girl or a yacht of international racing proportions might truncate a potentially remarkable career. There were plenty of girls--and Ivan was lazy--or, rather--

  he could easily have become so. Indeed, on the dripping April day when I reached Cambridge, he broke a dinner date with Martha Dow in order to accommodate me, and his greeting was, "I'm glad to see you, boy--and sorry you have that lecture on loafing in your eye. Why the devil shouldn't a man fish for salmon and let somebody else crystallize out the hormones?"

  We'd talked till dawn that night and the next. I was reduced to my last resources.

  Down to saying, "You won't study any more because you're afraid that you can't make good." It was kid stuff, but it worked. He walked around his dormitory room for a long time and finally said quietly, "Do you think that, Frankie?"

  "You're a blowhard," I said. "A flash in the pan. Sure I think that."

  He walked some more. Then he brought himself to the words I'd spent two nights trying to elicit: "You know what you're doing, don't you? You're making me give up a life full of fun. Travel. Dreams. Love, maybe. Everything that about half of me longs for.

  All to make a liar out of you." Then he called me names for a while. After that he said,

  "Listen, you fink. I'll study medicine. I'll stick the Sheffield label where it'll take a century to knock it off. I only ask one thing. When I'm awarded the Nobel Prize, some day--you've got to eat the cablegram announcing it."

  At the time I'm about forty-five, I would guess, my alimentary canal is going to be subjected to the digestion of one medium-sized piece of paper. Because that particular mood in my foster family means business. They all have strong chins- -pere, mere, fils, and fille.

  After dinner Virginia and I took a walk. She knew that I had caught sight of the shadow. And she had always talked to me when her horizons or her foregrounds were blurred. So had Ivan and Larry. John and Connie were our pals, and we trusted them and confided in them. But not absolutely. By very definition, being a parent excludes certain sorts of intimacy--and it should. John and Connie sensed the fact and respected it. My function had been that of an older brother. Among such people that was rare tribute. But in the very identification, I paid my own premium for the honor.

  We walked down through the garden toward the sea--just as we had so many other times. The time Virginia was afraid to show her report card to John. The time she had broken the Wedgewood bowl. The time Johnny Matthews had grabbed her at Bigelow's Hallowe'en party. It was an immemorial custom and now, as so often, fireflies lighted the way to her intended confession and the crickets cheered her on.

  We sat down on the flat rock. A glacier had cut into it a smooth back and set it facing Long Island Sound. She liked the sea--and I had always loved it as if it were part of myself.

  "Cigarette?" I asked.

  "Thanks. Might make it easier."

  "Mm. Who, Virginia?"

  "His name is Bill. Bill Bush."

  "--and the trouble--?"

  "Married."

  I let the small incoming waves think for me a while.

  ' You were in love once, weren't you, Frankie? I mean. Jeanne--"

  "I thought I was." It was curious. I'd forgotten Jeanne since I'd understood about Virginia. And yet--only two years before, I'd taken Jeanne to this very rock and sworn-the hell with it. While Virginia was in France that first year--I'd realized.

  "I was jealous of Jeanne," she said suddenly.

  "Really? That was nice of you."

  "I hated her. Will you hate Bill?"

  "Maybe you'd better tell me what he's like. If you love him--I'm afraid I'll be very fond of him--and very jealous--too."

  She told me, then. He was dark. So was I, my mind said. He had a moustache--a romantic one. I could grow a moustache. I quit that sort of thing presently. She had met him in Lucerne and he'd followed her back to Paris. Then, her story became ordinary--

  almost banal. Cute little restaurants and the Bois de Boulogne and the Left Bank. I could smell the jaunes burning and see the crimson aperitifs glinting in bistro lights and hear the taxi-horns. Bill Was a broker. But not just a ticker-tape worshipper, she said.

  Whimsical and humorous--she told me all about him and I thought that I would like Bill.

  "His wife--Frankie. She was hurt in an automobile accident. It-she wasn't right in the head afterward. So he can't divorce her. He wouldn't, if he could. It was five years ago." She caught a firefly and put her eye down to her thumbs to watch it illuminate the gentle prison of her palms. Then she tossed it into the evening air. "I love him, I can't help it. What shall I do, Frankie?"

  "That's a tough one, isn't it?"

  She nodded.
>
  She leaned against the rock, listlessly. "He sailed from Bordeaux on the eighteenth of last December. It was a terrible Christmas for me. He's in New York. But I wanted to come home here first and see you. You and Connie and John."

  December. This was May. "Do you think," she asked, "that if I went away with him for maybe a month or something--I'd get over it?"

  "Do you?"

  "No."

  I said, "Neither do I." We waited for something to occur to us but nothing did, so I said,

  "Let's shoot a little bridge with Connie and John. We'll talk tomorrow."

  "Yes. I feel better now--having told you."

  We stood up. I found a stone and tried to chuck it into the Sound but it fell short.

  CHAPTER II

  My room is Spartan. Writers are supposed to live in the midst of clutter--galactic clutter-that is mentally stimulating because only a gifted imagination could interpret it. A writer may choose his scenery as he wishes--stuffed owls, pin-studded maps, old books or cookie jars among his toilsome manuscripts--but scenery there must be. However, I have found that the majority of those writers whom I have met lead immaculate professional lives and a filing cabinet is a more usual prop that a Malay kriss. That night, as I opened my door, I wished that I had not been so neat. Objects capable of diverting my thoughts would have been welcome; the pale walls only turned me back into myself, and· I could not even use the windows, for they looked at the Sound and at Roger's Light periodically cracking the darkness in routine reminder of the sea Virginia .and I had watched together, and of danger, of disaster.

  My coat and tie came off by themselves and a dressing gown replaced them. In the typewriter was a pale half written: ". . . the equivalent in the English language for tmesis, synechtache, handyadis, all unwitting correlatives produced by those Victorians whose early education shows a strong bent toward Latin. . . ."

  Ah-phoo! A Ph.D., no doubt!

  I would stand on the lecture platform. "This morning, gentlemen," I would say, "it is our fascinating purpose to follow in the somewhat errant footsteps of Alfred, Lord Byron." And all the time I would be wondering where she was, what she was doing, if she were happy. What was his name? Bush.