A Charmed Life (30 page)

The father would have the right of visitation. He had come into court as the plaintiff, asserting that he had changed his ways, and brought a witness to attest this. But the brevity of her acquaintance with him made it impossible to give any legal weight to her impressions. The courts in this district had known the plaintiff over a period of years. The bench ventured to suggest that the plaintiff might have a motive for pulling the wool (laughter) over Miss Lamb’s eyes.

In any case—the judge’s voice sharpened—here was a man who had been four times married, deserted by one wife and divorced by two on charges of extreme cruelty. One of these wives now appeared before the court to testify to his character as a father—a very contradictory course of conduct, to put it mildly. The practice of bringing character-witnesses was being abused by counsel. The court was capable of forming its own impression of the character of the litigants. It had its own records and the records of the S.P.C.C. to assist it. To bring in a witness who had known one of the parties “about one month” was an insult to the court’s intelligence and would not be condoned if it were ever repeated. The judge glared at Barney.

“Yes, Your Honor,” said Barney, but he seemed quite unperturbed. He even grinned at Dolly, as the judge continued, in a more and more sarcastic vein. At the same time, observed the judge, disagreeably, he understood counsel’s desire to introduce as a witness a young woman of irreproachable character and fine antecedents, who did not, so far as the court knew, possess a police record. To Dolly’s astonishment, both sets of witnesses began to chuckle appreciatively. Yes, the judge went on: so far as the court knew, Dorothea Lamb had never had her license suspended—his gray eye raked the witness—or been arrested for brawling or check-kiting or draft-evasion or assault and battery or drunk and disorderly or vagrancy. “He’s kidding,” the man in the white suit reassured Dolly. “He’s a great bottle- and trencherman himself. Makes allowances for artists and writers. Used to sit in superior court, where these cases come up. Great sense of humor.”

Since all the New Leedsians were giggling delightedly, Dolly forced a wan smile, which she slowly let die when she saw that Sandy was unmoved by the judge’s sallies. He had stopped crying, but his deep-set eyes were fixed in a cold stare and his long thin body was rigid. Dolly touched his arm, and he began to tremble, all over, like a person in a high fever. As soon as the judge stopped talking, Sandy got up and raced out of the courtroom, without a word to anyone. Dolly followed, alarmed, but she lost him in the press of people. Nobody seemed to care what had happened to him; opinion, even among his own witnesses, had turned against him. He ought to have thought twice, she heard them agree, before washing all that dirty linen in public. That was what had turned the judge against him: a case like that got in the papers and gave the community a bad name with outsiders, which in turn affected rentals and real-estate values. All the judges up here liked to see the lawyers make a stipulation and hear abbreviated testimony. Moral indignation echoed through the corridors. “He’s fouled his own nest,” cried the old woman in slacks, as she limped up to congratulate Clover.

They were so
changeable,
Dolly thought distractedly. The courthouse emptied, and nobody would help her look for Sandy. They were closing the building before Barney came to her assistance and found him for her, finally, in the men’s toilet, where he had been throwing up. He was in a dreadful state. All the way back in the jeep, she had to keep stopping, for him to vomit by the roadside. In Digby, he had her get out and buy him a pint in the liquor store, which he drank from in silence as they jogged along.

This grief terrified Dolly. She was afraid to speak to him, because any word from her would seem false under the circumstances, for she was not really sorry that he had lost the children, but only sorry for him—more awed than sorry, if the truth were told. She felt very remote from him and small, like a fly speck, because she could not share whatever it was he was feeling. This sense of distance was increased when he came into her cottage and set the pint down on the table, two-thirds empty. He took her face between his hands and began to kiss her, wearily, as if he did not want to. An awful smell came from him, of vomit and raw whiskey; his tongue was sour in her mouth. Slowly, he took her clothes off and told her to lie down on the studio couch. But then, when he was naked, nothing happened; he could not get up an interest, though she did as he directed. All night, he kept retching in her bathroom and coming back to lie with his damp head in her bosom. She was terribly hungry, but he would not let her make tea and toast, to settle his stomach. “Stay here,” he said, whenever she endeavored to move. “We’ll try again in a minute.” “It doesn’t matter,” Dolly would answer, gently, stroking his sweating head. But he could not get the idea of an obligation to her out of his mind. He fell asleep, still fitfully muttering of “having another try.” Just before dawn, Dolly faced the facts, covered him with a blanket and a comforter, and crept into her own bed.

ELEVEN

M
ARTHA’S FIRST RESPONSE, WHEN
she woke up one morning in November to find that her breasts were sore, was a canticle of joy.
At last,
she said to herself, with a great leap of her soul. John, next to her, was still asleep; she muted her exultant thoughts for fear they would wake him. It was far too soon to tell him since of course she could not be sure. Yet there could hardly be any doubt. This swelling was one of the recognized signs. She well remembered the terror of waking up in her college bed on bright May mornings to find that her nipples hurt when her nightgown rubbed against them. At that time (she still frowned a little to think of it), she had fought with might and main not to know what was the matter with her. She must have bruised herself, she had kept insisting, during senior play rehearsals, in the fencing scene: she was Hamlet, naturally, and the girl who played Laertes had been clumsy with the foil. You were not pregnant, she had tried to believe, unless you threw up in the mornings. She had not thrown up and she had played Hamlet and graduated, without anyone’s knowing. But she had had to have a dangerous abortion, right after Commencement; the abortionist told her she had waited too long. One’s physiology, she now assured herself, did not change; the soreness could only mean that.

She began to count back, trying to remember when her last period had been. She was tempted to wake John and ask him if he knew. But she did not want to trouble him yet. He would be of two minds, she recognized, about the baby. The money part would worry him, and the responsibility; men thought of those things first. And he would fret because the baby would be encroaching on her time. On the other hand, he knew how much she wanted a child and wanted to see him as a father; he underestimated, she was certain, his own capacity for this role. He was a sort of sport in his family, and he was afraid that a baby of his would turn out like his brothers, whom he had never got along with. Indeed, he told her gravely, the chances were that he would dislike it, since he disliked most people. To Martha, as a woman, all this was nonsense. She was confident that their child would be exceptional. Moreover, what John would see was that the baby would be an incentive. For its sake, they would work harder, earn more money, improve their characters.

She smiled at herself for these thoughts but her conviction remained unaltered. They were foolish, romantic notions, but she and John
were
romantics, both of them; they had to have goals and visions. A baby would take up her time; there was no denying that. But Martha had found that the less time you had the more you were able to do. When she had been doing graduate work and acting at the same time, she had accomplished more—John admitted this—than she ever had before or since. It was like the miracle of the loaves and fishes: she had even managed, somehow, to do some theatrical reviews and to cook too, on the days when the maid did not come. She had been happy and newly married; that was perhaps the reason. But she would be happy with a new baby; so would John, if only because happiness was catching. They both, moreover, responded well to pressure from the outside, which was why, doubtless, it had been a mistake to come to the country. But the baby would make up for that.

To bring in extra money, for her confinement (Martha laughed delightedly at the word), she could do another adaptation. Her
Wild Duck
was still earning royalties; only last week, they had got a check from a stock company that was going to do it in Cambridge. A producer had been after her to do a Strindberg; John had made her say no, because of what he called her own work. But the beauty of adaptations was that you could do them at odd moments.

She could translate, between feedings, when the baby would be asleep. And they could save, if they had a real motive. They could give up those two drinks at six o’clock, which were becoming almost regular. And wine, which they always had for company and even, sometimes, when they were alone. She would not be allowed to drink when she was pregnant anyway. And it was bad for the child when you were nursing. They could save on food too. They could live on milk and apples and salt codfish and the various kinds of dried beans and clams and salt pork and cornmeal; there were dozens of ways of doing them,
cassoulets
and
brandades
and
bacalhaes
and
polentas
and
gnocchi,
besides Indian pudding and chowders and baked beans. She might even make bread, which she had always wanted to do. She was naturally extravagant, but she was sure she had a capacity for sacrifice. During the last two years of the war, when she was married to Miles, she had managed wonderfully with ration coupons.

She could do all the laundry herself, instead of taking the sheets and towels and shirts to the laundress. She would make more soups, and they could collect oysters regularly, the way the Coes did. She would sew all the baby’s clothes herself. And perhaps she could hemstitch some handkerchiefs for John, as part of his Christmas present. She could even, she supposed, take up knitting, though she hated women who knitted. Could she learn to make chic sweaters and sell them to a luxury market?

Martha shook her head ruefully. She was too enthusiastic: all her ideas tended to become “follies.” She would have to curb this tendency or John would think her irresponsible. She remembered one Christmas, when she was married to Miles: she had got the pomander ball craze and had made four dozen pomanders out of oranges and cloves and sweet spices. They were supposed to be an economy; she was going to give them as presents. But Miles thought they were silly and they had all stayed in a drawer, tied up in silk ribbons, till they finally got burned up in the fire. She had not changed a bit. Given the slightest prompting, her mind began to indulge itself in woman’s page fancies. She loved domestic chores: the smell of furniture polish, the damp, hot scorch of fresh ironing. And she hated having her time hoarded and rationalized for her, because of her little bit of talent. She did not want to become what she called a
machine à écrire.
Drowsily, defiant, she laid down her terms. She did not propose to feed the child out of horrid jars of baby food; she would make beef teas and custards and purée vegetables herself, no matter how long it took. She had done these things for Barrett, when she was his stepmother. That was the only virtue of being married to Miles: the servants were always leaving, so that she had been able to housekeep without his interference.

Now she could do it again. As these words passed through her mind, John stirred. His slender arm disentangled itself from the bedclothes; he peered sleepily at his watch. Remorse immediately crushed Martha. How selfish she was! What she had really been thinking was that now she would not have to finish her play. The baby was a reprieve. A gloomy look darkened her eyes. John would not let himself see how distasteful the play was to her. Actually, it was almost finished, but she had started rewriting it in order to stave off the moment when she would have to show it to him. Then he would know—what she herself had feared for two months—that she was merely pretending to write a play. But he was not interested in the truth, she had been saying to herself rebelliously, when she heard him go off whistling after he had settled her in her writing room: he was satisfied when he had her penned up in the little white room, going through the motions of writing. No wonder she looked on a baby as an escape into reality.

But perhaps he was right, she hastened now to emend. Perhaps these qualms and doubts were only the natural by-products of artistic production. Perhaps she could really bring it off, thanks to him and his freshly sharpened pencils waiting for her in a glass on her desk, like a bouquet, every morning. Being pregnant, which already deepened her love for him, might make her try harder. There was said to be a euphoria of pregnancy, which might be beneficial to her writing. Yes, she said to herself, firmly: we will have the baby, and I will finish the play too. That will satisfy everybody.

“Hello, darling,” she murmured, leaning forward to receive his kiss. All at once, her eyes widened; she swallowed and glanced aside. “What’s the matter?” he said anxiously, seeing the shadow cross her face. “Nothing,” said Martha, slowly climbing out of bed. “What would you like for breakfast?” In the kitchen, she examined the calendar, put water on for coffee, and then took her clothes into the bathroom, bolting the door. She was trying to remember when the Coes’ play-reading had been. On a Friday, she felt certain, and she had started menstruating on a Monday. But was it the Monday before or the Monday after? “When did you go to Boston?” she started to call out, but checked herself in time. It was strange that she could not remember positively and yet not strange, for, having no fear of pregnancy, she no longer kept track of her periods. She started to count on her fingers, ticking off this week, last week, the week before, but she found she could not count straight. Sweat stood out on her pale forehead. She tried to get at the date another way. She had had the curse, she remembered, one day when they had a picnic with Dolly, and John had warned her not to go swimming because she would get cramps. The water had been icy, so that it must have been late in October. Dolly had had the curse too. If John would only go out, she could call Dolly and ask when she had had it; Dolly was the sort of girl who kept track. But Dolly, of course, had no telephone. Warren’s mother’s death, she recalled abruptly. That would date it. She could call Jane after breakfast and find out for sure.