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 stu
bbornly 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…”
The rest of the time they were on the road, going nowhere. He remembered the trip only as a succession of traffic lights and electrical wires and trees, of houses and shopping centers and endless rolling hills under the pale sky, and of Frank either silent or making faint little moans or mumbling this phrase, over and over:
“…and she was so damn nice this morning. Isn’t that the damnedest thing? She was so damn nice this morning…”
Once, and Shep could never remember whether it was early or late in the ride, he said, “She did it to herself, Shep. She killed herself.”
And Shep’s mind performed its trick of rolling with the punch: he would think about this one later. “Frank, take it easy,” he said. “Don’t talk crap. These things happen, that’s all.”
“Not this one. This one didn’t happen. She wanted to do it last month and it would’ve been safe then. It would’ve been safe then and I talked her out of it. I talked her out of it and then we had a fight yesterday and now she—Oh Jesus. Oh Jesus. And she was so damn nice this morning.”
Shep kept his eyes on the road, grateful that there was plenty to occupy the alert, front part of his mind. Because how would he ever know, now, how much or little truth there was in this? And how would he ever know how much or little it had to do with himself?
Alone in her darkened living room, much later, Milly sat chewing her handkerchief and feeling like a terrible coward. She’d done pretty well up to a point; she had managed to do a good job of acting with the children and to get them all in bed an hour early, well before Shep’s arrival; she had made some sandwiches and set them out in the kitchen, in case anyone got hungry later (“Life goes on,” her mother had always said, making sandwiches on the day of a death); she had even found time to call Mrs. Givings, whose reaction to the news was to say “Oh, oh, oh,” over and over again; and she’d done her very best to be ready for the ordeal of confronting Frank. She’d been ready to sit up all night with him and—well, read to him from the Bible, or something; ready to hold him and let him weep on her breast; anything.
But nothing had prepared her for the awful blankness of his eyes when Shep brought him up the kitchen steps. “Oh Frank,” she’d said, and started to cry, and run for the living room with her handkerchief in her mouth, and ever since then she’d been completely useless.
She’d done nothing but sit here and listen to the dim sounds the two of them made in the kitchen (a scraping chair, a clink of bottle on glass, and Shep’s voice: “Here, fella. Drink it up, now…”), trying to work up the courage to go back. Once Shep had tiptoed in, smelling of whiskey, to consult with her.
“Oh, sweetie, I’m sorry,” she had whispered against his shirt. “I know I’m not being any help, but I can’t. I can’t stand the way he looks.”
“Okay. That’s okay, honey. You take it easy; I’ll look after him. He’s sort of in a state of shock, is all. Jesus, what a thing.” He sounded a little drunk. “Jesus, what an awful thing. You know what he told me in the car? He said she did it to herself. You believe that?”
“She what?”
“Gave herself an abortion; or tried to.”
“Oh,” she whispered, shuddering. “Oh, how awful. You think she did? But why would she do that?”
“How the hell do I know? Am I supposed to know everything? I’m just telling you what he said, for Christ’s sake.” He rubbed his head with both hands. “Hell, I’m sorry, honey.”
“All right. You better get back. I’ll come out and sit with him in a little while, and you can get some rest. We’ll take turns.”
“Okay.”
But more than two hours had passed since then, and still she hadn’t found the strength to carry out her promise. All she could do was to sit here and dread it. There had been no sounds in the kitchen for a long time now. What were they doing in there? Just sitting, or what?
And so in the end it was curiosity as much as courage that helped her to her feet and across the room and down the hall to the brilliant kitchen doorway. She hesitated, taking a deep breath, squinting her eyes in preparation for the glare of the lights, and then she went in.
Shep’s head was in his arms on the kitchen table, an inch away from the untouched plate of sandwiches; he was sound asleep and faintly snoring. Frank wasn’t there.
The Revolutionary Hill Estates had not been designed to accommodate a tragedy. Even at night, as if on purpose, the development held no looming shadows and no gaunt silhouettes. It was invincibly cheerful, a toyland of white and pastel houses whose bright, uncurtained windows winked blandly through a dappling of green and yellow leaves. Proud floodlights were trained on some of the lawns, on some of the neat front doors and on the hips of some of the berthed, ice-cream colored automobiles.
A man running down these streets in desperate grief was indecently out of place. Except for the whisk of his shoes on the asphalt and the rush of his own breath, it was so quiet that he could hear the sounds of television in the dozing rooms behind the leaves—a blurred comedian’s shout followed by dim, spastic waves of laughter and applause, and then the striking-up of a band. Even when he veered from the pavement, cut across someone’s back yard and plunged into the down-sloping woods, intent on a madman’s shortcut to Revolutionary Road, even then there was no escape: the house lights beamed and stumbled happily along with him among the twigs that whipped his face, and once when he lost his footing and fell scrabbling down a rocky ravine, he came up with a child’s enameled tin beach bucket in his hand.
As he clambered out onto asphalt again at the base of the Hill he allowed his dizzy, jogging mind to indulge in a cruel delusion: it had all been a nightmare; he would round this next bend and see the lights blazing in his own house; he would run inside and find her at the ironing board, or curled up on the sofa with a magazine (“What’s the matter, Frank? Your pants are all muddy! Of course I’m all right…”).
But then he saw the house—really saw it—long and milk-white in the moonlight, with black windows, the only darkened house on the road.
She had been very careful about the blood. Except for a tidy trail of drops leading out to the telephone and back, it had all been confined to the bathroom, and even there it had mostly been flushed away. Two heavy towels, soaked crimson, lay lumped in the tub, close to the drain. “I thought that would be the simplest way to handle it,” he could hear her saying. “I thought you could just wrap the towels up in newspaper and put them in the garbage, and then give the tub a good rinsing out. Okay?” On the floor of the linen closet he found the syringe in its pot of cold water; she had probably put it there to hide it from the ambulance crew. “I mean I just thought it would be best to get it out of sight; I didn’t want to have to answer a lot of dumb questions.”
And his head continued to ring with the sound of her voice as he set
to work. “There; now that’s done,” it said when he pressed the newspaper bundles deep into the garbage can outside the kitchen door, and when he returned to fall on his knees and scrub at the trail of drops it was still with him. “Try a damp sponge and a little dry detergent, darling—it’s there in the cabinet under the sink. That ought to take it up. There, you see? That’s fine. I didn’t get any on the rug, did I? Oh, good.”
How could she be dead when the house was alive with the sound of her and the sense of her? Even when he had finished the cleaning, when there was nothing to do but walk around and turn on lights and turn them off again, even then her presence was everywhere, as real as the scent of her dresses in the bedroom closet. It was only after he’d spent a long time in the closet, embracing her clothes, that he went back to the living room and found the note she had left for him on the desk. And he barely had time to read it, and to turn the light off again, before he saw the Campbells’ Pontiac slowing down for the turn into the driveway. He went quickly back to the bedroom and shut himself inside the closet, among the clothes. From there he heard the car rumble to a stop outside; then the kitchen door opened and there were several faltering footsteps.
“Frank?” Shep called hoarsely. “Frank? You here?”
He heard him walking through the rooms, stumbling and cursing as he felt along the walls for light switches; finally he heard him leave, and when the sound of the car had faded away he came out of hiding, carrying his note, and sat in the darkness by the picture window.
But after that interruption, April’s voice no longer spoke to him. He tried for hours to recapture it, whispering words for it to say, going back to the closet time and again and into the drawers of her dressing table and into the kitchen, where he thought the pantry shelves and the racked plates and coffee cups would surely contain the ghost of her, but it was gone.
NINE
ACCORDING TO MILLY CAMPBELL, who told the story many, many times in the following months, everything worked out as well as could be expected. “I mean,” she would always add, and here she would give a little shudder, “I mean, considering it was just about the most horrible thing we’ve ever been through in our lives. Wasn’t it, sweetie?”