Short Stories: Five Decades (72 page)

That, of course, was out of the question. He couldn’t afford it. He could be as mad as Peter the Great, or as any lunatic screaming in a padded cell, and he couldn’t pay the first bill of the rawest young practitioner, just past his initial reading of Freud and Jung. Absolutely sane or raving like an ape in a tree, he would still have to conduct classes in Philosophy 22, Philosophy 12, Philosophy 53A, for Students in Pre-Educational Courses. Money. He thought about money and groaned again. Still three payments on the car. Elizabeth’s tuition, due in two weeks. Butter, how many cents a pound? Roast beef once a week, eighty cents a pound, and Charles, his son, and Margaret, the maid, between them devoured four whole ribs each time. Insurance, he calculated in the darkness, in a well-remembered, dreadful nighttime litany, taxes, clothes, dentist, doctor, gifts to his wife’s large family, amusement. Perhaps, he thought, Reeves had called him to tell him about promotion. God knew he was up for it, and Old Man Edwards was almost due to retire, and that would leave some room near the top. Reeves was very friendly with the president. Dinner there once a month. First names and private confidences. Reeves had been in to see the president that afternoon. Cahill knew because Lloyd, in his own department, who had all the gossip of the university at his fingertips, had told him so. Perhaps Reeves had been given the good word and wanted to pass it on. Cahill played luxuriously with the idea of promotion. Twelve, fifteen hundred more a year. No more Philosophy 53A, the dullest course in the curriculum. No eight-o’clock classes. Then the glow passed. Probably, he thought, it’s the other way around. The president had never been any more than polite to him, and it was to be remembered that he had been passed over twice on the promotion lists, for Kennedy and O’Rourke, younger men than he. It wouldn’t be too surprising, all things considered, if they had decided to get rid of him. He was far from being the most popular instructor on the campus. To be absolutely honest, he wouldn’t blame them for firing him. Ever since he’d come back from the war, the job had bored him. Not that there was anything else that he particularly wanted to do. Just sit, perhaps, and stare into an open fire. Drink more whiskey than was good for him. Not pretend to anyone that he knew anything much, or not pretend he thought it was valuable that anyone learn anything much. Dangerous doctrine for professors, assistant professors, instructors, tutors. Probably others had caught on. Come to think of it, the last time he had seen the president at a faculty meeting, the president had been … frosty. That was the word—frosty. Purge by frost. Execution, university style. The polite death among the library shelves. He could almost hear Joe Reeves’ troubled voice on the phone, warning him, trying to break it to him gently, trying to cheer him up with lies about other jobs, in other colleges.

Cahill lay in bed thinking about what it would be like not to have a job. Rent, taxes, roast beef, tuition, clothes. The advantage of marrying a rich wife. Nothing, finally, was crucial. There was always the net of fat relatives to fall back on, like a high-wire artist who slipped in the circus. Edith’s father had worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad and had retired on a pension of a hundred and thirty-five dollars a month. Not much of a net there. Cahill thought of the rich wives he might have married. Rowena … Rowena what? Twenty years ago, in Chicago. Shipping. Father in Lake steamers. How could a man be expected to marry a girl named Rowena? Also, she had weighed a hundred and seventy pounds. No exaggeration. Maybe a hundred and eighty. Amorous as the gilded fly, too. Who wanted a wife like that, Lake steamers or no Lake steamers, especially at that weight? Anyway, that had been his one chance of marrying into wealth. Some people were lucky, of course. They met pretty girls, very nice, whose fathers controlled the Chase National Bank or owned mining empires in Central America. Still, if he had married Rowena—Rowena Grumman, that was it; good God, what a name—he wouldn’t be trembling like this tonight. Seven hundred dollars in the bank, debts three fifty-five, and that was that. One month and then relief. For this relief, very little thanks. He supposed that nine-tenths of the people in the country walked, as he did, on this thin edge of disaster all their lives, smiling, dissembling, not sleeping some nights, hoping their nerve would hold out as they saw the edge crumbling, crumbling. And then the people in China, scouring sidewalks for lost grains of rice, running before the armies with two pans and a blanket on their backs, dying politely, with Oriental good manners, of starvation. Maybe Reeves ought to call them up, too. Perhaps he had an important message for the Chinese as well. Still, all the philosophical identification in the world would not help if the frost set in. Somehow, he thought regretfully, I should have arranged things better. Somewhere, I missed a chance, was too lazy, too stupid, too complacent.

Of course, Reeves might be calling him about something entirely different. Maybe Elizabeth. Reeves had a nephew, name of Richard, and he and Elizabeth had been seeing a good deal of each other recently. Fact was, last Saturday night Cahill had surprised them kissing at the door. Quite a shock. Item: What do you do when you see your seventeen-year-old daughter kissing the nephew of your best friend? Bringing up a daughter was a little like sitting over one of those dud bombs that had been dropped into cellars during the war. A year might go by, two years. Nothing might happen. Or, the world was full of women who had gone bad, and at one time they had all been seventeen and some father’s dewy darling. Ministers’ daughters, admirals’ daughters, daughters of the leaders of society. How could any father know what obscure, shameful invitations of the flesh his daughter was accepting and succumbing to among the college pennants and dimity and framed photographs in the next room? And Elizabeth was no help. She had always been a secretive, self-willed child, going her own way, disdainful of help or advice, not lying, exactly, but never telling any more of the truth than she was forced to. He tried to think of her as someone else’s daughter, in order to get an objective impression of her. Handsomely developed, prematurely womanly, he would have to say, with a promising, challenging look in her eye, a hidden, guarded sensuality, very much like her mother’s. Oh, God, he thought torturedly, I hope the message isn’t about her!

Or Reeves might want to talk to him about Charlie. Cahill considered the question of Charlie. In addition to eating an enormous amount of expensive roast beef when he got the chance, Charlie did very badly in his studies (was it possible that he was fundamentally stupid?) and got into trouble regularly with all authorities. A smooth-tongued truant, a brawler in schoolyards, a mischievous vandal in locker rooms, Charlie had been the occasion, again and again, for long visits of apology on the part of Cahill to parents of broken-nosed children, angry and insulted teachers, even, once, to the police station, when Charlie had broken into the country-club tennis shop and stolen a dozen cans of balls and two lengths of chrome twist. At what moment did the high-spirited schoolboy turn into the juvenile delinquent? Cahill thought of Charlie’s sly, blond, unruly face. Consider your son objectively. What did you see? The insolence of the radio-and-comic-book age. The violence and irresponsibility of the double- and triple-featured generation of movie gangsters and movie sensualists. The restless superficiality of the book haters, who slid into whiskey, divorce courts, bankruptcy, worse, as the years wore on. Cahill had a vision of himself at the age of seventy, supporting his son, paying various blonde women alimony for him, bailing him out of magistrates’ courts, and trying to hush up charges of drunken driving and cop-fighting. Tomorrow, he thought gloomily, I am going to have a serious talk with that young man. Though who knew what good it might do? John Dillinger’s father probably had several talks with his son on the farm back in Indiana, and old Mr. Capone no doubt had the parish priest in to talk sternly to his dark-eyed boy in the crowded home in Brooklyn.

Cahill hoped that Reeves was not going to talk to him about Charlie when they finally met the next day.

The bed now seemed intolerably warm, and Cahill could feel the sweat collecting in the crease of his chest. He threw back the covers. They made a loud, electric crackle and static electricity from the friction jumped in strange blue flashes around him. Edith stirred a little at the noise but did not wake. Cahill glared gloomily at her, listening to her breathe. If she had been home, as she had said she was going to be, that evening, it would have been she who had talked to Reeves. He’d have given her some inkling of what it was he wanted to talk to Cahill about and he’d have been spared this agonizing night of conjecture. Tomorrow, Cahill thought, I’m going to damn well ask her a question or two, too. No, he thought, I’ll be sly. If I seem to be quizzing her, she’ll get suspicious or angry and sulk for days, and there’ll be hell to pay around the house, and I’ll have to give in to her on everything from now to Easter Sunday. I’ll be nonchalant, elaborately offhand—pretend to be reading the paper, mix it up with questions about the kids, surprise her into revelations, if there are any. Then he was ashamed of himself for plotting this way against his wife, sleeping so trustfully and innocently in the next bed. He had an impulse to go over to her and hold her in his arms. He even sat up, tentatively. Then he thought better of it. Edith was terribly grouchy when he woke her in the middle of the night, and could be depended on to make him suffer for it the next day. He stared at her, resenting her. The business of the two beds, now. Until the war, they’d slept in one big old bed, as married people should. You felt really married, two people defending themselves as a unit against the world, if each night you retired into the warm fortress of the marital bed. Two beds brought with them the inevitable warning of division, oneness, loneliness, rejection. And when he’d come back from the war, Edith had said she couldn’t sleep that way any more, she’d got too used to sleeping alone. And, like a fool, he’d consented. The two beds, with the extra mattresses and blankets, had cost nearly three hundred dollars, too. All his terminal-leave pay. Your bonus for fighting the war was that your wife made you sleep alone. Beds fit for heroes to sleep in—singularly.

It was silly to worry about that any more. It was a battle he’d lost, definitely, a long time ago. Each night to its own insomnia. Tonight, he thought—by now a little light-headed and oratorical, even in his thoughts—we take up the problem of the message of Joseph Reeves.

The thing was to systematize it, attack the problem scientifically. Like
Time
magazine: Business, Politics, National Affairs, Science, Religion, Sex. Everything in its neat, crisp department. Two minutes with each one and you’re ready with enough facts and opinions to carry you until the next publication date.

National Affairs. In the twentieth century, Reeves had said at lunch three days before, National Affairs had become a euphemism for butchery. Butchery accomplished, butchery in progress, butchery contemplated. Slaughter in three tenses, with a corresponding rise in the budget. In the last few months, Reeves had become more and more obsessed with the idea of war. At the same lunch, they’d had a gloomy conversation about the possibility that it would break out soon. Reeves, so optimistic about other things, sombrely dug around in newspapers and magazines to find new and disturbing items about the imminence of conflict and the dreadful new tools that might be employed. Cahill had even tried to avoid Reeves recently, because it was a subject he preferred not to reflect on. And his friend’s dark flood of statistics about the range of atomic missiles and the mortal potential of biologic agents was not calculated to improve the delicate lunchtime appetite. Also, Reeves had made an unpleasant survey of the various and all too frequent occasions in history on which whole nations and, in fact, whole civilizations had committed suicide, deducing from that that it was entirely possible, and, indeed, probable, that in the next few years just such a widespread immolation would take place. To preserve his sanity, Cahill thought, resentfully trying to crowd Reeves’ apocalyptic arguments out of his mind, a man must keep himself from speculating on these matters. Impotent and haunted, frozen in the slow, massive tide of events beyond his control, the night waker could only hope to ignore the question, or at least think about it in daylight, when the nerves were steadier. War, he thought angrily and helplessly, war. He remembered the cemeteries of Normandy and the sound shells made going over his head. At this moment, in a dozen places on the crust of the earth, machine guns were flicking and men were joyfully and devotedly putting other men to death and inviting the Americans, the Russians, the Berbers, the Malayans, the Yugoslavs, the Finns, and the Bulgars to join them.

Read a newspaper, listen to a news broadcast, wake for a quarter hour in your own bed some time before dawn, and death came familiarly to hand. When he’d come home in 1945, he’d thought all that was behind him. My limit, he always said—not seriously, but meaning it, too—is one war. But other people, of more influence, seemed to have other limits. It was one thing, at the age of thirty-three, bravely to don the uniform and sail off to a relatively old-fashioned war, in which comprehensible weapons like machine guns and bombs were being used. It was quite another, seven years later, a sedentary forty, to contemplate exposing yourself to the atom and the microbe, feeling, too, all the while, that your well-run home, enclosing your wife and children, might at any moment dissolve in radioactive dust or become the harbor for the germs of plague. He looked over at his wife, comfortably at rest. How, he wondered, does anyone sleep this year?

The dim light of dawn was washing through the curtains now. God, Cahill thought, his hot eyes resentfully taking it in, I am going to be a wreck today. Masochistically, he continued with his list. Politics. There we have a subject, he reflected, to keep a man’s eyes open a night or two. According to Lloyd again, after Reeves had visited the president’s office that afternoon, he had been called into a secret session of the committee of state senators who were down from the capital investigating Communist influence on the campus. Lloyd, who had been active in several questionable organizations for years, and who didn’t trust Reeves, had been none too happy about that. “A company man,” Lloyd had said resentfully, in Cahill’s presence. “He’d sell his best friend for a smile from the stockholders.” Lloyd had peered meaningfully at Cahill when he said it, too, and Cahill was sure that the phrase “his best friend” had not been a random choice of words. Cahill thought of various things that Reeves might have told the committee and twitched uneasily. Back in the years before the war, when Communism was an almost respectable doctrine, Cahill had been on various committees with people he was sure belonged to the Party, and had let his name be used again and again on a flood of well-meaning petitions and statements that, if not promulgated by the Communists, certainly had their endorsement. Once, he and Reeves had even gone to a kind of polite, open Party meeting, at which several people he knew had made amorphous speeches about Communism’s being twentieth-century Americanism, and stuff like that. He had even been invited to join, he remembered, although he couldn’t remember who had actually come up to him and spoken the fateful words. He hadn’t joined, and he’d never gone to another meeting, but what if the committee, armed with informers’ information, demanded of him whether he had ever attended a meeting and if he had ever been asked to join. What would he do? Perjure himself, and say he had never gone, or tell the truth, and leave himself open to the next question. Was Professor Kane there? Did Mr. Ryan, instructor in chemistry, make a speech about the working of the Communist Party? Will you kindly look over this list of names and check off the ones you can swear were present? What do you do in a situation like that? Professor Kane had been there and had made a speech, but Cahill knew that he had quietly resigned from the Party at the time of the Pact and had had no more to do with it. Still, who knew what Kane had told the committee? Kane was a friend of his, and needed the job. And if Cahill told the truth, Kane would be out of his job, disgraced, in a month. And poor Ryan. He’d been suspended on suspicion already, and his wife was sick, and he’d had to pay a lawyer to defend him. And, Communist or no, he’d always seemed to Cahill to be a very decent, shy, undangerous man. Cahill had given Ryan fifty dollars toward his defense, secretly, in cash. It was hard to understand just why. He was opposed to Ryan’s politics, but he liked Ryan and felt sorry for him, and fifty dollars was not much, one way or another. Cahill had told Reeves about the fifty dollars and had even asked Reeves to help, too. Reeves, coldly, saying Ryan had it coming to him, had refused. What if Reeves had been trapped into saying something about the fifty dollars to the committee? What could Cahill tell them when he was questioned? How would he act? Would he be brave, considered, honorable? Just what was honorable in a situation like this? Was there honor in perjury? Or did honor lie in destroying your friends? Or destroying yourself? Did he actually believe that Ryan, for example, was an innocent, idealistic fellow, or did he believe that Ryan, the soft-voiced, scholarly, shyly smiling family man Ryan, was a potential traitor, a patient murderer, a dangerous conspirator against all the values that he, Cahill, held dear? I am too weary, Cahill thought pettishly, to decide this this morning. What if they asked about the meeting? What day was it? What year? Who invited you? The mists of memory shifted thickly around the fact. Whatever you answered was bound to be wrong. And if you said honestly, “I don’t remember,” how would that look on the record and in the newspapers? Like evasion, guilt, worthy only of disbelief and disdain.