Revolutionary Road (30 page)

  He was finishing a joke: ". . . so Eleanor drew herself up and said, 'Young man, you're drunk.' The fellow looked at her and he said, 'That's true, Mrs. Roosevelt, I am.' He said, 'But here's the difference, Mrs. Roosevelt: 
I'll
 be all 
right
 in the morning.' "

  Aunt Claire's thick torso doubled over into her lap and April pretended to think it was unbearably funny too, though she hadn't heard the first part and wasn't sure if she would have understood it anyway. But the laughter had scarcely died in the room before he was getting up to leave.

  "You mean you're—you mean you're not even staying for dinner, Daddy?"

  "Sweetie, I'd love to, but I've got these people waiting in Boston and they're going to be very, very angry with your Daddy if he doesn't get up there in a hurry. How about a kiss?"

  And then, hating herself for it, she began acting like a baby. "But you've only stayed about an 
hour.
 And you—you didn't even bring me a present or anything and you—"

  "Oh, 
Ape
-rull," Aunt Claire was saying. "Why do you want to go and spoil a nice visit?"

  But at least he wasn't standing up any more: he had squatted nimbly beside her and put his arm around her. "Sweetie, I'm afraid you're right about the present, and I feel like a dog about it. Listen, though. Tell you what. Let's you and I go out to the car and rummage through my stuff, and maybe we can find something after all. Want to try?"

  Darkness was falling as they left Aunt Claire and walked together down the path, and the silent interior of the car was filled with a thrilling sense of latent power and speed. When he turned on the dashboard lights it was like being in a trim, leathery home of their own. Everything they would ever need for living together was here: comfortable places to sit, a means of travel, a lighter for his cigarettes, a little shelf on which she could spread a napkin for the sandwiches and milk that would comprise their meals on the road; and the front and back seats were big enough for sleeping.

  "Glove compartment?" he was saying. "Nope; nothing in here but a lot of old maps and things. Well, let's try the suitcase." He twisted around and reached into the back seat, where he unfastened the clasps of a big Gladstone. "Let's see, now. Socks; shirts; that's no good. Gee, this is quite a problem. You know something? A man ought never to travel without a fresh supply of bangles and spangles; can't ever tell when he might come across a pretty girl. Oh, look. Wait a second, here's something. Not 
much,
 of course, but something." He drew out a long brown bottle with the picture of a horse and the words "White Horse" on its label. Something very small was attached to its neck by a ribbon, but he concealed it from view until he opened his penknife and cut it free. Then, holding it by the ribbon, he laid it delicately in her hand—a tiny, perfect white horse.

  "There you are, my darling," he said. "And you can keep it forever."

  The fire was out. She prodded the blackened lumps of paper with a stick to make sure they had burned; there was nothing but ashes.

  The children's voices faintly followed her as she carried the wastebasket back across the lawn; only by going inside and closing the door was she able to shut them out. She turned off the radio too, and the house became extraordinarily quiet.

  She put the wastebasket back in its place and sat down at the desk again with a fresh sheet of paper. This time the letter took no time at all to write. There was only one big, important thing to say, and it was best said in a very few words—so few as to allow no possible elaborations or distortions of meaning.

Dear Frank,

Whatever happens please don't blame yourself.

  From old, insidious habit she almost added the words 
I
 
love you,
 but she caught herself in time and made the signature plain: 
April.
 She put it in an envelope, wrote 
Frank
 on the outside, and left it on the exact center of the desk.

  In the kitchen she took down her largest stewing pot, filled it with water and set it on the stove to boil. From storage cartons in the cellar she got out the other necessary pieces of equipment: the tongs that had once been used for sterilizing formula bottles, and the blue drugstore box containing the two parts of the syringe, rubber bulb and long plastic nozzle. She dropped these things in the stewing pot, which was just beginning to steam.

  By the time she'd made the other preparations, putting a supply of fresh towels in the bathroom, writing down the number of the hospital and propping it by the telephone, the water was boiling nicely. It was wobbling the lid of the pot and causing the syringe to nudge and rumble against its sides.

  It was nine-thirty. In another ten minutes she would turn off the heat; then it would take a while for the water to cool. In the meantime there was nothing to do but wait.

  "Have you thought it through, April? Never undertake to do a thing until you've—"

  But she needed no more advice and no more instruction. She was calm and quiet now with knowing what she had always known, what neither her parents nor Aunt Claire nor Frank nor anyone else had ever had to teach her: that if you wanted to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone.

AT TWO O'CLOCK 
that afternoon, Milly Campbell had just completed her housework. She was resting on the television hassock, addled with the smells of dust and floorwax and with the noise of the children outside (six kids were really too many for one person to handle, even for a couple of days) and she always said afterwards that she had "this very definite sense of foreboding" for at least a minute before hearing the sound that confirmed it.

  It was a sound of emergency—of Fire, Murder, Police— the deep, shockingly loud purr that an automobile siren makes when the driver has just gotten started and has had to slow down for a turn before opening up to full speed. She got to the window in the nick of time to see it, down over the tops of the trees below the lawn: the long shape of an ambulance turning out of Revolutionary Road, catching the sun in a quick, brilliant reflection as it straightened out and pulled away down Route Twelve with its siren mounting higher and higher into a sustained, unbearable shriek that hung in the air long after the ambulance itself had vanished in the distance. It left her chewing her lips with worry.

  "I mean I knew there were plenty of other people on that road," she said afterwards. "It could've been anybody, but I just had this feeling it was April. I started to call her but then I stopped because I knew it would sound silly, and I thought she might be sleeping."

  So she sat uneasily at the telephone until it suddenly burst into ringing. It was Mrs. Givings, making the receiver vibrate painfully against Milly's ear.

  "Do you know what's happened at the Wheelers'? Because I was just going past their place and there was an ambulance coming out of their drive, and I'm terribly alarmed. And now I've been trying to call them and there's no answer . . ."

  "I almost died," Milly explained later. "After she hung up I just sat there feeling sick, and then I did what I always do when something horrible happens. I called Shep."

Slowly rubbing the back of his neck as he stood looking out a window of the Allied Precision Laboratories, Inc., Shep Campbell was lost in a muddled reverie. For a week now, ever since the incredible night at the Log Cabin, he hadn't been of much use to Allied Precision, to Milly or to himself. On the first day, like any lovesick kid, he had called her up from a phone booth and said, "April, when can I see you?" and she'd made it clear, in so many words, that he couldn't see her at all and that he should have known better than to ask. The memory of this had rankled him all that night and the next day—God, what a loutish, unsophisticated clown she must have thought him—and caused him to spend many hours in whispered rehearsal of the cool, mature, understanding things he would say when he called her again. But when he got into the phone booth again he loused everything up. All the carefully practiced lines came out wrong, his voice was shaking like a fool's and he started saying he loved her again, and the whole thing ended with her saying, kindly but firmly: "Look Shep; I really don't want to hang up on you, but I'm afraid I'll have to unless you hang up first."

  He had seen her only once. Yesterday, when she brought her kids over to the house, he had hidden trembling in the bedroom and peeked down through the dimity curtains to watch her getting out of her car—a tired, pregnant woman—and he couldn't see her steadily for the beating of his heart.

  "Phone, Mr. Campbell," one of the girls called, and as he moved to pick it up at his desk he wondered, against all reasonable logic, if it might be April. It wasn't.

  "Hi, baby—what? Listen, now, calm down. 
Who's
 in the hospital? When? Oh Jesus."

  But the remarkable thing was that for the first time all week he felt a sense of competence. His rump dropped lightly to the felt pad of his chair, his legs flexed under it in a kind of squat, and he nestled the phone at his cheek with one hand and held his mechanical pencil poised in the other—a tense, steady paratrooper, ready for action.

  "Calm 
down
 a second," he told her. "Have you called the hospital yet? Honey, that's the 
first
 thing we ought to do, before we start calling Frank. . . . Okay, okay, I know you're all upset. I'll call them and find out, and then I'll call him. Now listen, you take it easy, hear me?" His pencil made a number of resolutely parallel lines on a scratch pad.

"Okay," he said. "And for God's sake don't let on to the kids that anything's wrong—our kids 
or
 their kids. . . . Okay. . . . Okay, right. I'll call you."

  Then he had the hospital on the phone and he was briskly cutting through all the confusion of the switchboard, dismissing the voices that couldn't help him and taking just the right tone of quick, commanding inquiry with those that could.

  ". . . undergoing emergency what? . . . Well, but I mean treatment for 
what?
 . . . Oh. You mean she had a miscarriage. Well, look: can you tell me how she is? . . . I see. And do you know how long that'll be? . . . Doctor what?" His pencil jumped and wiggled as he wrote down the name. "Okay. One more thing: has anyone notified her husband yet? . . . Okay. Thanks."

  Hunching still lower over the phone, he put through a call to Knox Business Machines in New York.

  "Mr. Frank Wheeler, please. . . . He's where? . . . Well, get him 
out
 of conference, then. This is an emergency." And only then, while he waited, did his guts begin to tighten with anxiety.

  Then Frank was on the phone, saying "Oh my God" in a shocked, insubstantial voice.

  "No, wait, listen, Frank: take it easy, boy. Far as I know she's all right. That's absolutely all they'd tell me. Now listen. Grab the first train you can to Stamford, I'll meet you there and we'll be at the hospital in five minutes. . . . Right. I'm checking out of here right now. Okay, Frank."

  Out in the parking lot, running at full tilt for his car and pulling on his flapping jacket as he ran, Shep felt his exhilaration returning with the fresh air that whistled in his ears. It was the old combat feeling, the sense of doing exactly the right thing, quickly and well, when all the other elements of the situation were out of control.

  At the station, waiting for the train, he used the time to call Milly again (she had calmed down) and to call the hospital (there was no news); then he walked up and down the platform in the afternoon sun, jingling coins in his pocket and saying, under his breath, "Come 
on;
 come 
on.
" This incongruously peaceful lull was like the war too—hurry up and wait. But suddenly the train was on him, shuddering the platform, and Frank was a frantic figure clinging to its side, dropping off and nearly falling on his face and then sprinting toward Shep with wild eyes and a flying necktie.

  "Okay, Frank—" They were running side by side to the parking lot even before the train had stopped. "Car's right here."

  "Is she—are they still—?"

  "Same as when I called you."

  They didn't talk on the short, slow ride through traffic to the hospital, and Shep wasn't sure his voice would have worked if he'd tried to use it. The way Frank's eyes looked, and the way he huddled and trembled in the seat beside him, had filled him with fear. He knew now that all his opportunities for action would soon be over; when he had steered up this final hill to this ugly brown building, he would pass into an area of total helplessness.

  As they bolted through the whispering doors marked Visitors' Entrance, as they paused to husk and stutter at an information desk and then struck off down the corridor with the intense, swift heel-and-toe of competitors in a walking race, Shep's mind went mercifully out of focus in the way that it had always done, sooner or later, in combat: a dim, protective inner voice said, This isn't really happening; don't believe any of this.

  "Mrs. who? Mrs. Wheeler?" said a plump freckled nurse near the end of the corridor, blinking over the rim of her sterile mask. "You mean the emergency? Well I don't 
know,
 offhand. I'm afraid I can't—" she glanced uneasily at a closed door over which a red light shone, and Frank made a lunge for it. She skittered in his path as if to stop him by force, if necessary, but Shep grabbed his arm and held him back.

  "Can't he go in? He's her husband."

  "No, he certainly can't," she said, her eyes growing wide with a sense of responsibility. But at last she agreed, reluctantly, to go inside herself and speak to the doctor. A minute later he came out, a slight, embarrassed-looking man in a wrinkled surgical gown.

  "Which is Mr. Wheeler?" he asked, and then he took Frank by the arm and led him away for a private talk.

  Shep, respectfully keeping his distance, allowed the inner voice to assure him that she couldn't possibly be dying. People didn't die this way, at the end of a drowsing corridor like this in the middle of the afternoon. Why, hell, if she was dying that janitor wouldn't be pushing his mop so peacefully across the linoleum, and he certainly wouldn't be humming, nor would they let the radio play so loud in the ward a few doors away. If April Wheeler was dying they certainly wouldn't have this bulletin board here on the wall, with its mimeographed announcement of a staff dance ("Fun! Refreshments!") and they wouldn't have these wicker chairs arranged this way, with this table and this neat display of magazines. What the hell did they expect you to do? Sit down and cross your legs and flip through a copy of 
Life
 while somebody died? Of course not. This was a place where babies were born or where simple, run-of-the-mill miscarriages were cleaned up in a jiffy; it was a place where you waited and worried until you'd made sure everything was all right, and then you walked out and had a drink and went home.

  Experimentally, he sat down in one of the wicker chairs. One of the magazines was 
U. S. Camera,
 and he toyed with a temptation to pick it up and look through it for photographs of women in the nude; but instead he sprang to his feet again and walked a few steps one way and a few steps another. The trouble was that he had to go to the bathroom. The pain in his bladder was abrupt and keen, and he wondered how long it would take him to find his way to a toilet and back.

  But the doctor had gone back inside now and Frank was standing there alone, rubbing his temple with the heel of his hand. "Jesus, Shep, I couldn't even 
understand
 half the things he told me. He said the fetus was out before they got her here. He said they had to operate to take out the whaddyacallit, the placenta, and they did, only now she's still bleeding. He said she lost a lot of blood even before the ambulance came, and now they're trying to stop it, and he said a whole lot of things I didn't get, about capillaries, and he said she's unconscious. Jesus."

  "How about sitting down a minute, Frank?"

  "That's what he said too. What the hell do I want to sit down for?"

  So they continued to stand, listening to the janitor's low humming and to the rhythmic thud of his mop against the wall, and to the occasional rubber-heeled thump and rustle of a nurse walking by. Once Frank's eyes came into focus long enough for him to accept a cigarette, which Shep offered in a little excess of friendliness and courtesy— "Cigarette, fella? Atta boy. Here, I got the match—" and then, encouraged by the good cheer in his own voice, he said: "Tell you what, Frank. I'll go get us a cup of coffee."

  "No."

  "No, that's all right. I won't be a minute." And he escaped down the hall and around the corner and down another hall until he found the mens' room, where he stood trembling and very nearly whimpering as the pressure on his bladder was slowly relieved. Afterwards he went out in the hall again and asked directions until he found the canteen, which was hundreds of yards away at the other end of the building and was called the Hospitality Shop. He hurried through its toys and cupcakes and magazines to order two containers of coffee; then, holding the hot paper cups gingerly to keep from scalding his fingers, he started back to the emergency area. But he was lost. All the corridors looked alike, and he got all the way to the end of one of them before discovering he was going in the wrong direction. It took him a long time to find his way back, and he would always remember that this was what he was doing— mincing down hallways carrying two containers of coffee, wearing a silly, inquiring smile—this was what he was doing when April Wheeler died.

  He knew it had happened as soon as he'd turned the last corner, into the long hall with the red-lighted door at the end. Frank had disappeared; that whole part of the hall was empty. He was still fifty yards away when he saw the door open and a number of nurses come spilling out and hurrying efficiently off in all directions; behind them, slowly, came not one but three or four doctors, two of them supporting Frank like polite, solicitous waiters helping a drunk out of a saloon.

  Shep looked frantically around for a place to put the coffee down; squatting, he set both containers on the floor against the wall and then broke into a run, and then he was in the midst of the doctors, aware of them only as a mass of white clothing and bobbing pink faces and a discord of voices:

  ". . . terrible shock, of course . . ."

  ". . . hemorrhaging was much too severe to . . ."

  ". . . here, look, try to sit down and . . ."

  ". . . capillaries . . ."

  ". . . actually she held on for a remarkably . . ."

  ". . . no, look, sit down and . . ."

  ". . . these things happen, there's really . . ."

  They were trying to make Frank sit down in one of the wicker chairs, which squeaked and skidded under their efforts, but he remained stubbornly on his feet, silent and expressionless, breathing rapidly, his head wobbling a little with each breath as he stared at nothing.

  The sequence of events after that would remain forever uncertain in Shep's memory. Hours must have passed because it was night before they got home, and they must have covered many miles because he was driving the whole time, but he had no real idea of where they traveled. Once, in some town, he stopped at a package store and bought a pint of bourbon, which he tore open while the engine idled at the curb. He handed it to Frank—"Here, fella—" and watched him suck at its mouth with lips as loose as a baby's. Somewhere else—or was it the same place?—he went to a roadside phone booth and called Milly, and when she said "Oh God! No!" he told her to for Christ's sake shut up before the children heard her. He had to stay on the phone until she'd pulled herself together, keeping an eye on Frank's unmoving head in the car outside. "Now, listen," he told her. "I can't bring him home until the kids are asleep; what you've got to do is get them in bed as soon as you can, and for God's sake try to act natural. Then I'll bring him home to our place for the night. I mean we sure as hell can't let him go home to 
his
 house . . ."