Revolutionary Road

  The attendant, hooking his ring of keys to a clip against his hip pocket, struck off down the corridor of the ward and began sonorously calling out names from the slips he had collected. Looking after him down the mouth of the corridor, which was filled with the sound of many radios tuned to different stations, all you could see was a long expanse of waxed linoleum and the corners of several steel hospital beds.

  After a while the attendant came back, walking neat and white at the head of a small, shabby parade. John Givings brought up the rear, tall and pigeon-toed, buttoning his sweater with one hand and carrying the twill workman’s cap in the other.

  “Well,” he said, greeting his parents. “They letting the prisoners out in the sunshine today? Big deal.” He carefully placed the cap dead-center on his head, and the picture of the public charge was complete. “Let’s go.”

  No one spoke in the car until they were clear of the hospital grounds, past the ranks of long brick ward buildings, past the administration building and the softball diamond, out around the well-tended circle of grass that enclosed the twin white shafts of the State and American flags, and on up the long blacktop road that led to the highway. Mrs. Givings, riding in the back seat (she usually found it more comfortable there when John was in front), tried to gauge his mood by studying the back of his neck. Then she said: “John?”

  “Mm?”

  “We have some good news. You know the Wheelers, that you liked so much? They’ve very kindly asked us to drop by again today, by the way, if you’d like to; that’s one thing; but the really good news is that they’ve decided to stay. They’re not going to Europe after all. Isn’t that lovely?” And with an uneasy smile she watched him slowly turn around to face her over the seat back.

  “What happened?” he said.

  “Well, I’m sure I don’t—how do you mean, what happened, dear? I don’t suppose anything necessarily ‘happened’ I imagine they simply talked it over and changed their minds.”

  “You mean you didn’t even ask? People’re all set to do something as big as that and then they drop the whole idea, and you don’t even ask what the deal is? Why?”

  “Well, John, I suppose because I didn’t feel it was my business to ask. One doesn’t inquire into these things, dear, unless the other person wishes to volunteer the information.” In an effort to still the rising cautionary note in her voice, which was almost certain to antagonize him, she forced the skin of her forehead and mouth to assume the shape of a jolly smile. “Can’t we just be pleased that they’re staying, without inquiring into the why of it? Oh, look at that lovely old red silo. I’ve never noticed that one before, have you? That must be the tallest silo for miles around.”

  “It’s a lovely old silo, Ma,” John said. “And it’s lovely news about the Wheelers, and you’re a lovely person. Isn’t she, Pop? Isn’t she a lovely person?”

  “All right, John,” Howard Givings said. “Let’s steady down, now.”

  Mrs. Givings, whose fingers were grinding and tearing a book of matches into moist shreds, closed her eyes and tried to fortify herself for what would almost certainly be an awkward afternoon.

  Her anxiety was compounded at the Wheelers’ kitchen door. They were home—both cars were there—but the house had a strangely unwelcoming look, as if they weren’t expecting visitors. There was no answer to her very light knock on the glass pane of the door, which gave back a vivid reflection of sky and trees, of her own craning face and the faces of Howard and John behind her. She knocked again, and this time she made a visor of one hand and pressed it to the pane, to see inside. The kitchen was empty (she could see what looked like a glass of iced tea on the table) but just then Frank Wheeler came lunging in from the living room, looking awful—looking as if he were about to scream or to weep or to commit violence. She saw at once that he hadn’t heard her knock and didn’t know she was there: he hadn’t come to answer the door but in desperate escape from the living room, possibly from the house itself. And there wasn’t time for her to step back before he saw her—caught her crouched and peering into his very eyes—which made him start, stop, and arrange his features into a smile that matched her own.

  “Well,” he said, opening the door. “Hi, there. Come on in.”

  Then they were moving sociably into the living room, where April was, and April looked awful too: pale and haggard, twisting her fingers at her waist. “Nice to see you all,” she was saying faintly. “Won’t you sit down? I’m afraid the house is in a terrible mess.”

  “Are we awfully early?” Mrs. Givings asked.

  “Early? No, no; we were just—would anyone like a drink? Or some—iced tea, or something?”

  “Oh, nothing at all, thanks. Actually we can only stay a minute; we just dropped by to say hello.”

  The party fell into an odd, uncomfortable grouping: the three Givingses seated in a row; the two Wheelers standing backed up against the bookcase, restlessly shifting toward and then apart from each other as they made conversation. Only now, watching them, was Mrs. Givings able to hazard a guess at the cause of their constraint: they must have been quarreling.

  “Listen,” John said, and all the other talk stopped dead. “What’s the deal, anyway? I mean I hear you people changed your minds. How come?”

  “Well,” Frank said, and chuckled in embarrassment. “Well, not exactly. You might say our minds were sort of—forcibly changed for us.”

  “How come?”

  Frank made a little sidling skip to stand close to his wife, edging behind her. “Well,” he said. “I should’ve thought that was fairly obvious by now.” And Mrs. Givings’s eyes were drawn, for the first time, to notice what April was wearing. Maternity clothes!

  “Oh, April!” she cried. “Why, this is perfectly marvelous!” She wondered what one was expected to do on such occasions: should she get up and—well, kiss her, or something? But April didn’t look like a girl who wanted to be kissed. “Oh, I think this is terribly exciting,” Mrs. Givings went on, and “I can’t tell you how pleased I am,” and “Oh, but I expect you’ll be needing a bigger house, now, won’t you?” and through it all she hoped against hope that John would keep still. But:

  “Hold it a second, Ma,” he said, standing up. “Hold it a second. I don’t get this.” And he fixed on Frank the stare of a prosecuting attorney. “What’s so obvious about it? I mean okay, she’s pregnant; so what? Don’t people have babies in Europe?”

  “Oh John, really,” said Mrs. Givings. “I don’t think we need to—”

  “Ma, will you keep out of this? I’m asking the man a question. If he doesn’t want to give me the answer, I’m assuming he’ll have sense enough to tell me so.”

  “Of course,” Frank said, smiling down at his shoes. “Suppose we just say that people anywhere aren’t very well advised to have babies unless they can afford them. As it happens, the only way we can afford this one is by staying here. It’s a question of money, you see.”

  “Okay.” John nodded in apparent satisfaction, looking from one of the Wheelers to the other. “Okay; that’s a good reason.” They both looked relieved, but Mrs. Givings went tight all over because she knew, from long experience, that something perfectly awful was coming next.

  “Money’s always a good reason,” John said. He began to move around the carpet, hands in his pockets. “But it’s hardly ever the real reason. What’s the real reason? Wife talk you out of it, or what?” And he turned the full force of his dazzling smile on April, who had moved across the room to stab out her cigarette in an ash tray. Her eyes looked briefly up at him and then down again.

  “Huh?” he persisted. “Little woman decide she isn’t quite ready to quit playing house? Nah, nah, that’s not it. I can tell. She looks too tough. Tough and female and adequate as hell. Okay, then; it must’ve been you.” And he swung around to Frank. “What happened?”

  “John, please,” Mrs. Givings said. “You’re being very—” But there was no stopping him now.

  “What happened
? You get cold feet, or what? You decide you like it here after all? You figure it’s more comfy here in the old Hopeless Emptiness after all, or—Wow, that did it! Look at his face! What’s the matter, Wheeler? Am I getting warm?”

  “John, you’re being impossibly rude. Howard, please—”

  “All right, son,” Howard Givings said, getting to his feet. “I think we’d better be—”

  “Boy!” John broke into his braying laugh. “Boy! You know something? I wouldn’t be surprised if you knocked her up on purpose, just so you could spend the rest of your life hiding behind that maternity dress.”

  “Now, look,” said Frank Wheeler, and to Mrs. Givings’s shocked surprise his fists were clenched and he was trembling from head to foot. “I think that’s just about enough outa you. I mean who the hell do you think you are? You come in here and say whatever crazy God damn thing comes into your head, and I think it’s about time somebody told you to keep your God damn—”

  “He’s not well, Frank,” Mrs. Givings managed to say, and then she bit the inside of her lip in consternation.

  “Oh, not well my ass. I’m sorry, Mrs. Givings, but I don’t give a damn if he’s well or sick or dead or alive, I just wish he’d keep his God damn opinions in the God damn insane asylum where they belong.”

  During the painful silence that followed this, while Mrs. Givings continued to chew her lip, they all stood grouped in the middle of the room: Howard intently folding a light raincoat over his arm; April staring red-faced at the floor; Frank still trembling and audibly breathing, with a terrible mixture of defiance and humiliation in his eyes. John, whose smile was now serene, was the only one of them who seemed at peace.

  “Big man you got here, April,” he said, winking at her as he fitted the workman’s cap on his head. “Big family man, solid citizen. I feel sorry for you. Still, maybe you deserve each other. Matter of fact, the way you look right now, I’m beginning to feel sorry for him, too. I mean come to think of it, you must give him a pretty bad time, if making babies is the only way he can prove he’s got a pair of balls.”

  “All right, John,” Howard was murmuring. “Let’s get on out to the car now.”

  “April,” Mrs. Givings whispered. “I can’t tell you how sorry I—”

  “Right,” John said, moving away with his father. “Sorry, sorry, sorry. Okay Ma? Have I said ‘Sorry’ enough times? I am sorry, too. Damn; I bet I’m just about the sorriest bastard I know. Course, get right down to it, I don’t have a whole hell of a lot to be glad about, do I?”

  And at least, Mrs. Givings thought, if nothing else could be salvaged from this horrible day, at least he was allowing Howard to lead him away quietly. All she had to do now was to follow them, to find some way of getting across this floor and out of this house, and then it would all be over.

  But John wasn’t finished yet. “Hey, I’m glad of one thing, though,” he said, stopping near the door and turning back, beginning to laugh again, and Mrs. Givings thought she would die as he extended a long yellow-stained index finger and pointed it at the slight mound of April’s pregnancy. “You know what I’m glad of? I’m glad I’m not gonna be that kid.”

  SIX

  THE FIRST THING Frank did when the Givingses were out of the house was to pour himself three fingers of bourbon and drink it down.

  “Okay,” he said, turning on his wife. “Okay, don’t tell me.” The ball of whiskey in his stomach made him cough with a convulsive shudder. “Don’t tell me; let me guess. I made a Disgusting Spectacle of Myself. Right? Oh, and another thing.” He followed her closely through the kitchen and into the living room, glaring in shame and anger and miserable supplication at the smooth back of her head. “Another thing: Everything That Man Said Is True. Right? Isn’t that what you’re going to say?”

  “Apparently I don’t have to. You’re saying it for me.”

  “Oh, but April, don’t you see how wrong that is? Don’t you see how terribly, God-awfully wrong it is, if that’s what you think?”

  She turned around and faced him. “No. Why is it wrong?”

  “Because the man is insane.” He put down his drink on the window sill, to free both hands, and used them to make a gesture of impassioned earnestness, clawing upward and outward from his chest with all ten of his spread fingers and gathering them into quivering fists, which he shook beneath his chin. “The man,” he said again, “is insane. Do you know what the definition of insanity is?”

  “No. Do you?”

  “Yes. It’s the inability to relate to another human being. It’s the inability to love.”

  She began to laugh. Her head went back, the two perfect rows of her teeth sprang forth, and her eyes were brilliantly narrowed as peal after peal of her laughter rang in the room. “The in,” she said; “the in; the inabil; the inability to—”

  She was hysterical. Watching her as she swayed and staggered from the support of one piece of furniture to another and then to the wall and back again, laughing and laughing, he wondered what he ought to do. In the movies, when women got hysterical like this, men slapped them until they stopped; but the men in the movies were always calm enough themselves to make it clear what the slapping was for. He wasn’t. He wasn’t, in fact, able to do anything at all but stand there and watch, foolishly opening and shutting his mouth.

  Finally she sank into a chair, still laughing, and he waited for what he guessed would be a transition from laughter to weeping—that was what usually happened in the movies—but instead her subsiding was oddly normal, more like a recovery from a funny joke than from hysteria.

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh, Frank, you really are a wonderful talker. If black could be made into white by talking, you’d be the man for the job. So now I’m crazy because I don’t love you—right? Is that the point?”

  “No. Wrong. You’re not crazy, and you do love me; that’s the point.”

  She got to her feet and backed away from him, her eyes flashing. “But I don’t,” she said. “In fact I loathe the sight of you. In fact if you come any closer, if you touch me or anything I think I’ll scream.”

  Then he did touch her, saying, “Oh baby, lis—” and she did scream.

  It was plainly a false scream, done while she looked coldly into his eyes, but it was high, shrill, and loud enough to shake the house. When the noise of it was over he said:

  “God damn you. God damn all your snotty, hateful little—Come here, God damn it—”

  She switched nimbly past him and pulled a straight chair around to block his path; he grabbed it and slung it against the wall and one of its legs broke off.

  “And what’re you going to do now?” she taunted him. “Are you going to hit me? To show how much you love me?”

  “No.” All at once he felt massively strong. “Oh, no. Don’t worry. I couldn’t be bothered. You’re not worth the trouble it’d take to hit you. You’re not worth the powder it’d take to blow you up. You’re an empty—” He was aware, as his voice filled out, of a sense of luxurious freedom because the children weren’t here. Nobody was here, and nobody was coming; they had this whole reverberating house to themselves. “You’re an empty, hollow fucking shell of a woman…” It was the first opportunity for a wide-open, all-out fight they’d had in months, and he made the most of it, stalking and circling her as he shouted, trembling and gasping for breath. “What the hell are you living in my house for, if you hate me so much? Huh? Will you answer me that? What the hell are you carrying my child for?” Like John Givings, he pointed at her belly. “Why the hell didn’t you get rid of it, when you had the chance? Because listen. Listen: I got news for you.” The great pressure that began to be eased inside him now, as he slowly and quietly intoned his next words, made it seem that this was a cleaner breakthrough into truth than any he had ever made before: “I wish to God you’d done it.”

  It was the perfect exit line. He lunged past her and out of the room, down the swaying, tilting hall and into the bedroom, where he kicked the door shut behind h
im, sat bouncingly on the bed and drove his right fist into the palm of his left hand. Wow!

  What a thing to say! But wasn’t it true? Didn’t he wish she’d done it? “Yes,” he whispered aloud. “Yes, I do. I do. I do.” He was breathing fast and heavily through his mouth, and his heart was going like a drum; after a while he closed his dry lips and swallowed, so that the only sound in the room was the rasp of air going in and out of his nose. Then this subsided, very gradually, as his blood slowed down, and his eyes began to take in some of the things around him: the window, whose glass and curtains were ablaze with the colors of the setting sun; the bright, scented jars and bottles on April’s dressing table; her white nightgown hanging from a hook inside the open closet, and her shoes lined up neatly along the closet floor: three-inch heels, ballet shoes, soiled blue bedroom slippers.

  Everything was quiet now; he was beginning to wish he hadn’t shut himself in here. For one thing, he wanted another drink. Then he heard the kitchen door being closed and the screen being clapped behind it, and the old panic rose up: she was leaving him.

  He was up and running soundlessly back through the house, intent on catching her and saying something—anything—before she got the car started; but she wasn’t in the car, or anywhere near it. She was nowhere. She had disappeared. He ran all the way around the outside of the house, looking for her, his loose cheeks jogging, and he had started mindlessly to run around it again when he caught sight of her up in the woods. She was climbing unsteadily up the hill, looking very small among the rocks and trees. He sprinted out across the lawn, took the low stone wall in a leap and went stumbling up through the brush, after her, wondering if she really had gone crazy this time. What the hell was she wandering around up there for? Would she, when he caught up with her and took hold of her arm and turned her around, would she have the vacant, smiling stare of lunacy?

  “Don’t come any closer,” she called.

  “April, listen, I—”