Authors: John D. MacDonald
Time after time they would, in their quiet place, on the khaki blanket spread on the shady grass, go beyond the limits of control, but always one or the other, much more often Joan, would bring them back from that edge of danger to sit rigidly apart until breathing slowed and the high flush faded. And he began to depend on her to take the responsibility. And later drive back to the city with aching loins and feeling of tension.
He grew to depend on her so much that on one Sunday afternoon in May when she was carried beyond her ability to protest or object, he could not turn back. She was virgin, but after a single moan in the initial shock and pain, her passions returned undiminished, and the sun circled in a crazed sky, and the trees in the valley trembled, and the sound of the busy stream running over stones faded into an utter silence.
Afterward, with tears in their eyes, they each demanded to be given the responsibility and the blame. They did not think to blame it on Spring, or the softness of the grassy bank. And then she became very upset and nervous about the possibility of her being impregnated. It did not seem possible to them that such a fierce union could have occurred
without creating a child. He drove her back to the apartment at reckless speed where, using the equipment of one of her apartment mates, she performed the futile and rather degrading ceremony of contraception, knowing full well that it was much too late—while he waited down in the car. They went to a movie that night and all through it she clung tightly to his hand. Once when he looked at her he saw tears on her cheek.
After ten suspenseful days she met him with guilty joy to announce that her period had come precisely on schedule, and then they told each other how lucky they were, and then they began to worry if whether, after they were married, they would be able to have any kids. But, they said, it would be stupid to slip again, knowing that the last day of June, the day set for their wedding, was only a little over a month away. They told each other that they had found out how truly wonderful their marriage would be. And he, with pontifical sophistication, told her that perhaps they had been wise to ascertain their sexual compatibility. This cool statement annoyed her. They agreed that it would be nonsense to take such a risk again.
But they did slip again, of course, as perhaps both of them suspected they would. They slipped three times beside the same stream in the same valley, and when she found he had come prepared for the possibility, she was angry with him and accused him of having no character. It took him a long time to convince her that he did indeed have character, a respectable amount of character, and he had equipped himself in much the same frame of mind as a farmer might have while purchasing a lightning rod for his barn. You didn’t expect lightning to strike. But if it did … Surely, working in an insurance office, she could understand that. And when she was comforted, he indulged in a little self-analysis, wondering if perhaps there wasn’t some Freudian implication in the analogy he had invented. He stopped wondering aloud when he realized his flight of fancy was making her uncomfortable. He had begun to learn that when he voiced some of the oblique flights of fancy that went on in his mind, she would become restless and slightly resentful of him. But this was a most minor flaw, if indeed it could be considered a flaw, in the fair Joan Browning. She was staunch and honest and almost invariably gay. She was affectionate and neat and as personally tidy as a cat. And, best
of all, best of everything, her physical hunger for him was as great as his for her.
So the wedding finally came, and they were married in her home in Watertown, and the most obvious cases of snuffles were on the part of his sister, Marian, and Joan’s father, and two stone-faced maiden aunts of Joan that she claimed to have seen only twice in her life before. Bill Garrett had unloaded his speculative houses and came in a new suit and an almost new Cadillac, and Carl wondered what badly needed piece of equipment the company had been forced to forgo because Bill Garrett felt he needed a Cadillac.
Dr. Browning’s wedding present was five hundred dollars, and the present from Carl’s parents was initialed luggage for both of them.
They got away after the wedding lunch and drove up to Cape Vincent and took the ferry to Kingston and stayed the night there, and then drove the next day to Ottawa and there found a big room in a pension, with a great feather bed and a long view through big windows. And decided to stay two nights rather than one. And ended up staying twelve nights in all, while the marked road maps lay in the bureau drawer, forgotten.
During those twelve days and nights he began to learn her the way a soldier might learn a strange terrain. He learned her tempos in love and discovered which things most pleased her. She liked great hot steamy baths, and to have her smooth back scrubbed, and to come to bed all pink and humid from her bath and be made love to. After the first few days, when she was more at ease with him, she reverted to her private custom of padding around nude, and teased him when she found he had a funny streak of modesty which prevented his doing so. Whenever she brushed her hair, she had her underlip caught behind her teeth. Sometimes she was as boisterously playful as a puppy, cuffing and pummeling him, then fleeing in mock fright, wanting to be caught, wanting, after being caught, for the playful violence to turn into something else.
All during the drive back to Syracuse she sat close beside him, her shoulder and hip touching him, her hand resting on his thigh. She was content, and she hummed small songs, and her eyes had a look of sleep and love. And, as an index to the efficacy of honeymoon, it was very fine indeed.
He thought of the honeymoon girl, and he thought of the woman in the hospital tonight, seventeen years older, twenty pounds heavier—but the same person. Incredibly the very same person, a girl who thought of herself and reacted to others in the same way as the honeymoon girl. If she was awake she would be looking into the darkness and being afraid. But it was a fear she would not show. Because of that staunchness.
So many things had changed. He wondered how he would have felt on that wedding day if he could have looked ahead and seen how the future would be for those of the wedding party.
His sister, Marian, who had wept, seemed now quite beyond tears. There was no more softness in her. She was in New York now, a crisp and cynical and too aggressive divorcee, a highly paid television consultant in one of the major advertising agencies.
Bill Garrett had lived up to the rather plaintive promise of his almost new Cadillac. During the war he had done cost-plus work at a huge airbase. As soon as the war ended, he went into small home construction and rode the crest of a rich wave, sinking everything from each development into the next one and making each one bigger. In late 1954 he had suffered a mild heart attack, and had immediately sold out for a figure that would enable him to live in Sarasota in comfort for the rest of his life. The latest photograph that Betty had sent showed the pair of them, in color, on his small dock. They looked brown and smiling and healthy. They were barefoot, and Bill was proudly holding what, according to the legend on the back of the photo, was a fourteen-pound snook.
Dr. Browning had diagnosed his own case of cancer of the lower bowel in 1943 while Carl was overseas, and had died nine months later. Walt Browning, who had survived the war, was a brilliant fifty-year-old Navy captain, now lecturing at the Army War College.
Everyone would want to know about Joan, he realized. As soon as he got the good word from Bernie Madden on Tuesday he would get on the phone and let everybody know. Kip and Nancy and all the rest of them.
He sat up and plumped the pillow and stretched out again, trying to find a position in which he could sleep. It was two-thirty by the luminous dial of the bedroom clock. Too late to take a pill. It would make him too dopey tomorrow.
He realized that by thinking of old times and old places he had been carefully preventing himself from thinking of Cindy Cable. But what harm could there be in thinking about Cindy? The poor kid was in a mess. And they were good friends. He wondered if she was also awake. And, if she was asleep, in what position did she sleep? Joan liked to sleep on her left side, with her left hand under the pillow and her right hand resting near her stomach, clasped into a slack fist.
And what did Cindy wear while sleeping? Joan slept nude. He wore pajama tops. Wasn’t there some sort of conversation several months ago? What had Bucky said? Oh, of course. “Cindy is the old-fashioned type. Nightgowns. In the summer they’re made out of cobwebs and in the winter they’re made out of outing flannel. I tell you, you see her in the winter with her hair in braids and that outing flannel tent on her, she looks like she came over in a covered wagon.”
And, remembering it, he seemed to hear a sneer in Bucky’s voice that he had not noticed at the time.
So why not think of Cindy?
And, thinking of her, wondering about her, he slid quite readily into a sleep so deep that when the alarm went off at seven-thirty he felt rested and refreshed.
Carl Garrett had been transferred from Camden to the Hillton Metal Products Division of Ballinger in June of 1951 when the plant was first opened. A team of specialists from the Industrial Management firm that had designed the plant remained for several months after it was opened. The production areas were long windowless rectangles, and inside them, in the air-conditioned interior with its controlled lighting, systematic and colorful paint scheme, the flow from raw material storage through processing to final assembly, inspection, crating and shipment was severely logical.
The plant was designed to handle a multiplicity and diversity of small metal units and assemblies with economy and flexibility, and a maximum of control, and a minimum of confusion. Inside the production areas the light and the climate was always the same. From the catwalks above the pastel production lines, the production control specialists could look down into the whirring, clacking, chittering, grumbling, buzzing production areas and see, not confusion, but the steady operation of a master plan of elegance and purpose. Hard metals, spinning at ultra-high speeds, bit and peeled and pierced and polished softer metals, while both the heat of cutting and the reek of hot oils were whipped away by the wide-mouthed suck of the air-conditioning system. Women in trim and functional coveralls, in varying shades to denote department and function, tended the semiautomatic equipment, pushed the glittering, roller-bearing racks, fed the conveyors, took the samplings for the statistical control of inspection, fed the hoppers, yelled for stock, screeched for setup, briskly busy with only the automatic half of their minds on the job at hand. Above and around and below the shimmering roar they traded bawdy gossip, formed cliques, bedeviled the weaker ones, all with a continual hip-rolling, oblique-eyed, arrogant awareness of men. All men. The foremen and the visitors and the specialists on the catwalk and the engineers and the stock boys and the factory reps and the repair specialists.
Down on the floor the setup men changed the bite and timing and tolerances of the waiting machines, and other men threaded the automation tapes into the completely automatic equipment.
Behind the catwalk were the glass doors that opened into the rooms where it was all controlled, where girls key-punched the multi-colored cards, where the sorters shuffled and clicked, where the alphabetical and numerical tabulators rattled out the essential lists, where the panel boards clicked and the lights blinked. The tabulation equipment and electronic controls made all of the little decisions. Time to order more of this, and time to stop the run on that, and better make an eight percent overrun on this because the tolerance is close, and time to cut three turret lathes on the A line over to order 66-81-F rather than pile up dead time.
In these rooms the floor noise was slightly muted so that the shrillnesses were taken out, and the sounds seemed deeper, a chuckling and mumbling.
Carl Garrett liked to leave the main offices and walk over to one of the production areas and climb to the catwalk and lean on the rail and look down at the acres of movement and activity, and amuse himself with insane conjecturings. Would it not be nice if, parallel to this building there was another building where the neat shipping cartons were unpacked and the clever fabrications went then through uninspection, disassembly—were torn back down and reformed into the basic rods and sheets and coils and blocks which were then sent back to be run through again? Of course the personnel in this building would know nothing of what transpired in the neighboring building. It would be a closed circuit, endlessly efficient. Or, on the other hand, let them know what was being done. A few, a very few, might wonder what the hell it was all about, but the rest of them would shrug and go ahead with the job and draw their pay and bitch to the shop steward about coffee breaks and work standards and seniority and how come I got moved over onto the damn grinder and they give that Rayzek bitch my place on the bench and when are they going to do something about that John that’s running over so it’s like a lake in there anyhow?
He would look down and look at the Chinese red of the moving parts, and the sea-gray of the housings and hearty buttocks in azure blue, and bleached hair tied in a green bandanna, and come to believe that this was the whole world,
that nothing existed from sea to sea but these fluorescent interiors held at a rigid seventy-one degrees, standing jowl to jowl while the forgotten sun shines down on all the blank roofs.
Maybe it was all part of a monstrous conspiracy. Maybe the electronic controls were lying, and there was utterly no use for the gleaming and intricate and clever products of the production lines. So that, day after day, barges carried the taped and labeled cartons to sea and dumped them beyond the continental shelf.
And would shake his head and go back to his own office and his own staff and wonder which was more unreal, the production areas or his own function.