Afternoon in April Read online

  His eyes twinkled. "Did you ever play poker? You'd be awful. She's in love.

  That's her business. What is going on in Spain, anyhow?"

  Virginia came in. She was wearing riding clothes. I watched John look at her and felt his realisation that she was a trifle too alert, a shade over-pleasant.

  "Snail's gimpy," John said. "You'll have to ride western on Bog."

  Snail was one of the best jumpers in the State. Bog was a stock horse that could manage her end of a fifteen second calf-roping. The inappropriate names were due to another family custom. When we had all been kids we had decided that we were weary of ponies and horses named flash and Comet and Dynamite. So, through the years, some of the finest and fastest had been known as Molasses, Lead, Tortoise, Low Gear and Wet Powder. Hence "Bog."

  Virginia wasn't disappointed. "Swell. I'll see if I can find my rope. Remember the day in Phoenix when Ivan didn't think he could do it--and then roped a bee hive?"

  John snorted softly. "And I remember a day right here at Reedy Cove when Ennui thought he couldn't jump the lettuce frames--and you were up--and Ennui was right."

  She turned to me. "Shall we pursue this course?"

  "Certainly. "

  Her frown was exaggerated. "How about the time, John, when you had all your salesmen out here and you naturally served Scotch? Or was it tea? And you got into an argument with that man from Canton, Ohio, about jousting? Remember?"

  "No," said John in a categorical tone.

  "So you made a lance out of a curtain pole and a sofa pillow and--if I'm correct--

  you missed the basket on the forsythia bush and hit the pantry wall so hard all Mother's homemade jelly fell from the shelf. Poor old Century! He was never a horse for tilting--"

  "You may recall," said John, "that I got the basket the second time."

  "Vividly," she answered. "Only--it was the eighth."

  We were all giggling when Connie came in.

  She contributed the time Ivan decided he could go skijoring on the beach and was very successful until his horse put out to sea.

  And Virginia ate too much--which--in a way, is worse than not eating at all under such circumstances. She wasn't hungry and she was eating to cover up. That meant she felt the thing to be concealed was very serious. The Sheffields weren't secretive.

  I batted my bacon with my fork and it broke into so many pieces it hardly seemed worth reassembling. Connie read the paper. We didn't talk; that also was an admission of a false note in our recent gaiety.

  Suddenly I sank. Not about myself and not entirely about Virginia. But the sunshine and the garden lost their significance and a vague but apprehensive emotion anchored in the pit of my stomach. It was like the first half-realisation of becoming ill--a thing that is usually undiagnosed and remembered only later. I've had ample opportunity to examine such states--indulged myself in it, maybe. Some people would call them premonition. Others would say I was overwrought because I hadn't slept well. Some would treat it with sulphur and molasses.

  I promenaded my gaze with a vain hopefulness. John was reading and Connie was turning pages in her paper. Virginia was humming ''There's a Lull in My Life." All normal--but it wasn't normal.

  The ingredients of disaster, I thought to myself, are generally innocuous when separated. My mind hopped again to Spain. Nitrogen and oxygen make the air--give us life and blow boats around on the sea. Carbon is what diamonds are--what coal is. Mixed, though, with a shot of hydrogen--they are what is blasting those sherry-colored villages to smithereens.

  Then Connie said, "John!" loudly.

  He said, "Yorks," calmly.

  "Who do you think landed in New York yesterday?"

  "Who?" said John.

  "You'd never guess!" Connie has that tantalising fault, in common with most long-married women, however superior they may be.

  And John guesses, as a rule. "Who? Ali Baba? Lydia Pinkham? Paul Revere?

  Buddha? Siamese Twins? Dominican Friars? Haven't I hit it?"

  "Barney Colby!" She said it as if the person were more familiar than Santa Claus.

  Virginia's voice was blank and badgering. "Oh? Let's see. Is he the man who painted Blue Boy? Or the 1932 hog calling champion?"

  John turned from contemplating his wife. "Barney is the man who would be sitting here if your mother hadn't had good judgment."

  "I believe," Connie said, "you're still jealous!"

  He laughed.

  So did Virginia. "Your childhood sweetheart! Why--that's wonderful! Was he waiting in the parlor when Father took you from a second story window on a ladder?"

  Connie turned toward John and said more quietly, "It was almost like that--

  remember?"

  "Oh, well," Virginia said, "he'll have a beard now. Rheumatism. Or was he the gouty type? Probably a pinochle fiend. Sits in his slippers and reads the funnies all day Sunday. Fifty years old--"

  "--forty-seven--"

  "--anyway--he'll have that frozen dish water expression you see on most cabinet members--he's probably got five children who are all a little backward--"

  Connie turned up her nose and tossed the paper so that it landed between Virginia and me. We bent over it.

  Bernard Colby Returns from Dutch Guiana, it said.

  Sought Native "Bone Bending" Secret--Narrowly Escaped Death.

  Underneath that caption was a story and over it a photograph. The story, as Virginia murmured, was the kind ship· news reporters write when there's nobody worth interviewing aboard an incoming liner. And it was fairly purple. Full of phrases like,

  "perilous and little frequented corners of the world" and "where he was made a member of the tribe and inducted to the native mysteries." Because of Connie's defensive edge and John's faint discomfort, Virginia kept the subject alive.

  She gave her attention to the photograph. Mr. Colby resembled the motion picture samples of his prototype--curly hair, grizzled temples, broad shouders, penetrating eyes, hawk nose--everything. Even the crisp moustache. "He looks," she said, "the way a G-man should."

  "Barney was handsome."

  Virginia went on prodding. "Did he rush away into these far corners twenty-two years ago because he lost you?"

  Her mother didn't answer.

  John grinned and stood up. "As a matter of fact, he did." He kissed Connie, a little harder than usual. "I'm off."

  "You're a little off," Virginia said in another antique Sheffield ritual. When he had gone, she regarded her mother with an expression that changed from teasing to sympathy.

  In that change she revealed to me again a shadow of her own moody anxiousness. "You know, Connie, I think you would like to see him."

  Connie started to shake her head, and laughed at herself instead. "I do believe I would."

  "Why not, then?"

  "I don't know." She thought of things twenty-two years in the past. She spoke an edited version of those thoughts. "Barney--was John's best friend. It all hurt--a lot-then."

  "And why have you been keeping this red hot chapter of your life from us?"

  Connie smiled slowly. "Well--when you were little you wouldn't have understood.

  Later--we were out of the habit of recalling it."

  "Or--maybe you never mentioned it because it still stung?"

  ''Both reasons." Connie reached for the paper and looked at the picture. "Funny. I can see Barney all right. But I don't believe I would have--if his name hadn't been there too. I used to worry a lot about having separated John and Barney. I suppose John still regrets it. Maybe I could bring them together--now--"

  "Are you rationalizing, mother?"

  "I'm thirty-nine," she replied. "I have four children--grown." She always had said she had four children. "Gray hairs don't show up much against butter-scotch--but I have my share. Virginia, you've been reading misleading advertisements."

  "Now there's an idea!" Virginia took her crop out of her boot and waved it. "We invite this reckless nomad--" she was quoting the newspaper story --"who
is unmarried and is staying at the Stafford Arms--to see his old sweetheart. We'll powder your hair and draw a few mascara wrinkles--have dim lights-get one of Grandmother's dresses out--and knock him cold. Dream girl to decrepitude--a tragedy in two decades. He'd fall for it.

  Men haven't any perception in such things--"

  "If I may speak with acrimony," I said, "men pretend to be oblivious in order to achieve the feminine level of behavior."

  She ignored that. "Ask him."

  Connie opened her mouth to say she would and changed her mind. "You ask John."

  That wasn't like Connie. It contained an element of fear.

  Fear in a woman whom I had thought to be incapable of it.

  That ended breakfast.

  There wasn't any poetry in the atmosphere that morning. There were no pedantic paragraphs for that Ph.D. Virginia was riding in the sun across the great fields that ran green through the brighter green of salt grass into the Sound. Head high, hair blowing, her feet lost in tapidillos. In Bridgeport, John was thundering through his dictation to shut from his mind the same perturbation which was intruding itself in Connie's grocery list.

  I walked down to the flat rock.

  From where I sat I could see the curved shell of a horseshoe crab slogging through marginal foam, and it made me think of the Time Traveller who had come to the border of that tideless sea where a big and cooling sun stood motionless. Man had vanished before that stasis of degenerate afternoon, life persisted only in fleshy globes that bounced along the beach, and all such passion as Virginia's, such regrets as Connie's, had become obliterate in the wan, universal exhaustion.

  Hoofbeats crossed the turf. Bog saw me and took a six foot sideways jump, not because she was frightened, but just to make sure that Virginia hadn't lost her seat by riding no-account foreign nags. She said, "Bog, you disgust me," and hopped down and tied the gray pony to a cat tail. Bog could have pulled it up by nickering, and she knew it, but she wouldn't have budged for a ton of oats unless Virginia had given the word.

  I said, "Following me?" and fished for my cigarettes.

  "Yeah. I feel better. That Bog is elegant! She can turn on minus inches."

  "Lower your voice when you say that. Connie flattered her take-off the other day and Bog got so cocky that she tossed Connie into some bull briars."

  "That's a poor joke. You're nice, Frankie."

  I didn't say anything.

  "What's that out there?"

  "Where?"

  "That thing moving."

  "Horseshoe crab."

  "Oh. They're ugly--aren't they?"

  "Sure. Ugly. But interesting."

  "I've come to a decision."

  "I know it."

  "If I feel like this--a week from now--" There was a long silence.

  "You're going to--"

  "Well-- see Bill--anyhow."

  CHAPTER IV

  "Our womenfolk," John said, "are a bit haywire."

  I cast. "It's the Spring. Try that log."

  "Having a girl nineteen is a new experience. Ivan in his ukelele phase--I could understand--"

  Something made me think that his mind was on Connie. Then, just south of my White Miller the water unfurled. I was busy for a few minutes and finally dropped a thirteen inch rainbow into my creel. "You married Connie when she was younger than Virginia is now."

  "Do you suppose it was a mistake, Frankie? I mean--did I cheat her out of anything? Should we have waited?"

  That thought gave me a moment of hope. Perhaps it would occur to Virginia.

  Perhaps she would think nineteen was too young. But nobody ever thought that--nobody, at least, with a spirit like hers. The hope wavered, flickered out. John took a trout larger than mine. It was getting dark. A whip-poor-will ran through the single, ghostly phrase of his repertoire. Tree-frogs shrilled. "Are you worried, really, about anything, John?"

  "Just--shadowy things. Things that don't happen and are there, nevertheless."

  "If you don't want to see Colby-why not take an important business trip?"

  I could feel him smiling in the dusk. "I'd like to see him. A lot. We played football together. Shared a .22 before that. Trapped up in Maine together. Roomed at Cambridge--

  you know. All the old stuff. I--well, I suppose if I were candid--I'd say that some part of my narrow-gauge soul doesn't want Connie to see him."

  "That's called jealousy. You're supposed to go to a psychiatrist for it, these days."

  The smile was gone from his voice. He spoke softly. "I love--Connie."

  "And she loves you."

  "She's thirty-nine."

  That was one I couldn't answer. At twenty-three, it was only my abnormal maturity and the deep understanding in the Sheffields which made a conversation such as this possible at all. "Why don't you tell Connie you don't want her to see him?"

  His line sang thinly and settled on the water. He spoke with what was, for him, ascerbity. "I never told Connie to do anything. No matter what my reason might be--I wouldn't give her an order. And for this--I haven't any reason I can define. Just a feeling.

  Hell of thing to go on. But it's a feeling I can't rid myself of. I look back over the days thinking about the idea--what is it--coming events cast their shadows before. Connie's been restless. Culminated in seeing that picture in the paper. Restless for months.

  Noticed?"

  I missed a nice rise. "Not really. She's energetic, John. In looking back, on that, a person with a predisposing worry might construe it as restlessness."

  "Predisposing worry. Maybe it's that. But--She wanted to go abroad in April. Did the house over instead--and wasn't satisfied by that. Remember how she agitated for Bermuda last Winter? I tried to get her to go alone--tried to get you to take her. Well--all you saw when we three were there together was surface stuff. She used to say things to me that I ignored--then."

  "What sort of things?"

  He changed his stance and the stream gurgled around his waders. "Oh--that she was getting old. Wondered if she had been true to her real self in her life. Asked me if I was jealous of her. Said that sometimes she had feelings which made her understand why middle-aged women went dancing with gigolos. Things like that. Nonsense--if you will.

  But there was a quality of faint wish in them--dissatisfaction."

  It was much darker now. The almost-new moon had ceased being a pale decoration and its light was replacing the aftershine of the sun. I walked a few steps to draw nearer to John and stones turned beneath my feet, sending up sounds oddly modified by the water. "Just what are you afraid of, John? Suppose Colby does stir up a few old sentiments? Suppose Connie does flirt with him a bit? Suppose the whole new meeting is a fizzle? You and she had had an extraordinarily smooth and sympathetic life together. Can't you stand the prospect of unpleasantness--a rough spot? You know damn well you can. I think you're tired. There's nothing in this situation to cause alarm."

  "Suppose I lost her?"

  He said it slowly. But my reaction was quick. I laughed. I laughed heartily.

  Because that supposition had revealed a childish spot in John's beautifully reserved mind.

  He was tired and he had worried himself into a silly frame of mind. I presume that his integration had been damaged by the fact that Barney Colby had been a tabu--

  unconsciously made--between them. If they had talked about him at all through those years, John would not have been so unfocused by the prospect of a reappearance of the man in person.

  So that, I thought, is why he wanted to go trout fishing! Relieved, I expressed myself fully and in detail. Presently I had him laughing, too. We laughed a good deal, and perhaps we frightened the fish, because they stopped rising.

  "I was worried over Virginia, as well," John said. "I guess I heaped all my anxieties together."

  About that, I said nothing.

  "She told me--this afternoon."

  Another man might have used such a statement as a trick to pry out Virginia's secret. But not John. I knew
that she had told her trouble to him and I was very happy. It lifted a fraction of my burden, and it meant that in a situation where I was prejudiced beyond advising, a much calmer and more detached counsel would be available. I said,

  "I'm glad."

  "Yes. What do you think?"

  "Isn't this a place where what I think--or you--doesn't matter? A place where. one has to shut up and sit tight and let whatever Virginia is, and whatever she has been taught, work together to solve a problem of her--her instincts?"

  "That's true." He took time out to light his pipe before he said, "What is she?"

  My answer was pretty flat. "Connie's energy and personality. Your--do you mind if I say--spirituality? Plus a modern label."

  He pondered that. "And the label is what she has been taught. What's that? You're closer to college--school--youth--"

  "Not to kid herself."

  That statement, as a credo, sounded inadequate even to me. John reflected on it.

  "The trouble," he finally said, "in believing a thing like that as the center of yourself is that it's impossible. Of course, we've gotten to be scientists about everything. We accept only what we call facts. But the facts change. Einsteins--are forever making liars out of Euclids. You're kidding yourself when you say you won't kid yourself. You laugh at the things you thought were solemn truths a few years ago. You deprecate the people you admired. You show the world one facet of yourself and you're pretty likely to grow to regard that single facet as the whole works. You do things for what we might call

  'obvious reason number one'--and a day or a week or a year later you realise that you really did those things for 'unacknowledged reason number two.' That's the way people are. They can't 'not kid' themselves--if they're going to be deliberate about it. The harder they try--the worse they'll fudge the effort.