Revolutionary Road

  And Shep would agree that it certainly was. His role during these recitals was to sit and stare gravely at the carpet, occasionally shaking his head or flexing his bite, until she cued him to make certain small corroborations. He was glad enough to let her do most of the talking—or rather, he was glad of it in the beginning, throughout the fall and winter of the year. By spring, he had begun to wish she would find other things to talk about.

  And his annoyance grew all but intolerable one Friday evening in May, when she was going over the whole business with some new acquaintances named Brace—the very couple who had recently moved into the Wheelers’ house. The trouble was partly just that: it seemed a betrayal and a sacrilege, somehow, to be telling the story to people who would go home and talk it over in that particular house; and it was partly that the Braces made such a dull audience, nodding and shaking their polite, bridge-playing heads in remorse for people they had never known. But mostly it was that Milly’s voice had taken on a little too much of a voluptuous narrative pleasure. She’s enjoying this, he thought, watching her over the rim of his highball glass as she came to the part about how awful it had been the next day. By God, she’s really getting a kick out of it.

  “…and I mean Shep and I were just about out of our minds by morning,” she was saying. “We didn’t have the faintest idea where Frank was; we kept calling the hospital to see if they’d heard from him; and then we had to go through this horrible thing with the kids of pretending everything was fine. They knew something was the matter, though; you know how kids are. They sensed it. When I was giving them breakfast Jennifer looked at me and said, ‘Milly? Is Mommy going to come and pick us up today, or what?’ And she was sort of smiling, you know? As if she knew it was a silly question but she’d promised her brother she’d ask it? I almost died. I said, ‘Well, dear, I don’t know what your mommy’s plans are, exactly.’ Wasn’t that awful? But I didn’t know what else to say.

  “Then about two o’clock we called the hospital and they said Frank had just left: he’d gone in and signed all the papers, or whatever it is you have to do when somebody dies; and a little later he came driving up here. The minute he came in I said, ‘Frank, is there anything we can do? Because,’ I said, ‘if there’s anything at all we can do, just say so.’

  “He said no, he thought he’d taken care of everything. He said he’d called his brother in Pittsfield—he’s got this much older brother, you see; actually he’s got two of them, but he never used to mention them; I’d forgotten he had any family—and he said the brother and his wife were coming down the next day, to help out with the kids and everything, and the funeral. So I said, ‘All right, but please stay here with us tonight.’ I said, ‘You can’t take the kids back to your house alone.’ He said okay, he would; but he said first he wanted to take them out for a drive somewhere, and break the news to them. And that’s what he did. He went out in the yard and they saw him and came running over, and he said ‘Hi!’ and picked them up and put them in the car and drove away. I really think it was the saddest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. And I’ll never forget what Jennifer said when he brought them back that night. It was past their bedtime and they were both kind of sleepy, and I was helping Jennifer get ready for bed and she said, ‘Milly? You know what?’ She said, ‘My mommy’s in Heaven and we had dinner in a restaurant.’”

  “God!” said Nancy Brace. “But I mean how did things work out finally?” She was a sharp-faced, bespectacled girl who had worked before her marriage as a buyer for one of the top New York specialty shops. She liked her stories neat, with points, and she clearly felt there were too many loose ends in this one. “Did his relatives stay on here a while? And then what?”

  “Oh, no,” Milly explained. “Right after the funeral they took the kids back up to Pittsfield with them, and Frank went along for a few days, to help them make the adjustment; then he moved into the city and started going up there for weekends, and that’s the way things are now. I guess it’s more or less a permanent arrangement. They’re very nice, the brother and his wife—wonderful people, really, and very good with the kids; of course they’re, you know, a lot older and everything.

  “And then I guess we didn’t see anything more of Frank after that until March, or whenever it was, when he came out to see about closing the sale of the house. And of course that’s when you folks met him. He spent a couple of days with us then, and we had a long talk. That was when he told us about finding the note she’d left him. That was when he said that if it hadn’t been for that note he thought he would’ve killed himself that night.”

  Warren Brace cleared the phlegm from his throat and swallowed it. A slow-spoken, pipe-clenching man with thinning hair and incongruously soft, childish lips, he was employed in the city by a firm of management consultants, a kind of work he described as well suited to what he called his analytical turn of mind. “You know?” he said. “This is the kind of thing that really—” He paused, examining the wisp of smoke that curled from his wet pipestem. “Really makes you stop and think.”

  “Well, but how did he seem otherwise?” Nancy Brace inquired. “I mean did he seem to’ve made a—a fairly good adjustment?”

  Milly sighed, tugging down her skirt and curling her feet up into the chair cushion in a single quick, awkward gesture. “Well, he’d lost a lot of weight,” she said, “but I guess he looked well enough, except for that. He said being in analysis was helping him a lot; he talked a little about that. And he talked about his job—he’s got this different kind of job now? I mean he’s still sort of vaguely working for Knox, but it’s under a new setup, or something? I didn’t quite understand that part of it. What’s the name of his new company, sweetie?”

  “Bart Pollock Associates.”

  “Oh yes,” said Warren Brace. “They’re up at Fifty-ninth and Madison. Very interesting new firm, as a matter of fact. Sort of industrial public relations in the electronics field. They started out with the Knox account, and now I believe they’ve got a couple of others. They ought to be really going places in the next few years.”

  “Well,” Milly went on, “anyway, he seemed to be keeping busy. And he seemed—oh, I guess ‘cheerful’ is the wrong word, but that’s sort of what I mean. I really felt his attitude was—well, courageous. Very courageous.”

  On the mumbled pretext of refilling their glasses, Shep made his way out to the kitchen, where he banged and clattered a tray of ice cubes in the sink to drown out her voice. Why did she have to make such a God damn soap opera out of it? If she couldn’t tell it the way it really was, to people who really wanted to listen, why the hell tell it at all? Courageous! Of all the asinine, meaningless…

  And forgetting his guests, or rather coming to the abrupt decision that they could damn well get their own God damn drinks, he poured himself a stiff one and took it out to the darkness of the back yard, letting the door close behind him with a little slam.

  Courageous! What kind of bullshit was that? How could a man be courageous when he wasn’t even alive? Because that was the whole point; that was the way he’d seemed when he came to call that March afternoon: a walking, talking, smiling, lifeless man.

  At first sight, getting out of his car, he had looked pretty much the same as ever except that his jacket hung a little looser on him and he’d taken to wearing it with the top button fastened as well as the middle one, to gather up some of the slack. But after you’d heard his voice—“Hi, Milly; good to see you, Shep”—and felt the light, dry press of his handshake, you began to see how the life had gone out of him.

  He was so damned mild! He sat there arranging the crease of his pants over his knees and brushing little flecks of ash off his lap and holding his drink with his pinkie hooked around underneath the glass, for safety. And he had a new way of laughing: a soft, simpering giggle. You couldn’t picture him really laughing, or really crying, or really sweating or eating or getting drunk or getting excited—or even standing up for himself. For Christ’s sake, he looked like
somebody you could walk up to and take a swing at and knock down, and all he’d do would be to lie there and apologize for getting in your way. So that when he finally did come out with that business about finding the note—“I honestly think I’d have killed myself, if it hadn’t been for that”—it was all you could do to keep from saying, Oh, bullshit! You’re a lying bastard, Wheeler; you’d never have had the nerve.

  And it was even worse than that: he was boring. He must have spent at least an hour talking about his half-assed job, and God only knew how many other hours on his other favorite subject: “my analyst this” “my analyst that”—he had turned into one of these people that want to tell you about their God damned analyst all the time. “And I mean I think we’re really getting down to some basic stuff; things I’ve never really faced before about my relationship with my father…” Christ! And that was what had become of Frank; that was what you’d have to know about, if you wanted to know how things had really worked out.

  He took a gulp of whiskey, seeing a quick blur of stars and moon through the wet dome of his glass. Then he started back for the house, but he didn’t make it; he had to turn around again and head out to the far border of the lawn and walk around out there in little circles; he was crying.

  It was the smell of spring in the air that did it—earth and flowers—because it was almost exactly a year now since the time of the Laurel Players, and to remember the Laurel Players was to remember April Wheeler’s way of walking across the stage, and her smile, and the sound of her voice (“Wouldn’t you like to be loved by me?”), and in remembering all this there was nothing for Shep Campbell to do but walk around on the grass and cry, a big wretched baby with his fist in his mouth and the warm tears spilling down his knuckles.

  He found it so easy and so pleasant to cry that he didn’t try to stop for a while, until he realized he was forcing his sobs a little, exaggerating their depth with unnecessary shudders. Then, ashamed of himself, he bent over and carefully set his drink on the grass, got out his handkerchief and blew his nose.

  The whole point of crying was to quit before you cornied it up. The whole point of grief itself was to cut it out while it was still honest, while it still meant something. Because the thing was so easily corrupted: let yourself go and you started embellishing your own sobs, or you started telling about the Wheelers with a sad, sentimental smile and saying Frank was courageous, and then what the hell did you have?

  Milly was still talking, still embellishing, when he went back indoors to pass around the fresh highballs. She had reached her summing-up now, leaning earnestly forward with her elbows on her slightly spread, wrinkled knees.

  “No, but I really do think it was an experience that’s brought us closer together,” she was saying. “Shep and me, I mean. Don’t you, sweetie?”

  And both the Braces turned to stare at him in mute reiteration of her question. Did he? Well, didn’t he?

  The only thing to say, of course, was, “Yeah, that’s so; it really has.”

  And the funny part, he suddenly realized, the funny part was that he meant it. Looking at her now in the lamplight, this small, rumpled, foolish woman, he knew he had told the truth. Because God damn it, she was alive, wasn’t she? If he walked over to her chair right now and touched the back of her neck, she would close her eyes and smile, wouldn’t she? Damn right, she would. And when the Braces went home—and with God’s help they would soon be getting the hell on their way—when the Braces went home she would go in and bustle clumsily around the kitchen, washing the dishes and talking a mile a minute (“Oh I like them so much; don’t you?”). Then she would go to bed, and in the morning she’d get up and come humping downstairs again in her torn dressing gown with its smell of sleep and orange juice and cough syrup and stale deodorants, and go on living.

  For Mrs. Givings, too, the time after April’s death followed a pattern of shock, pain, and slow recovery.

  At first she could think of it only in terms of overwhelming personal guilt, and so was unable to discuss it at all, even with Howard. She knew that Howard or anyone else would only insist it had been an accident, that no one could be held responsible, and the last thing she wanted was to be comforted. The memory of that ambulance backing down out of the Wheelers’ drive, at the very moment when she’d come bringing well-rehearsed apologies (“April, about yesterday; you’ve both been wonderful but I’ll never ask you to go through that sort of thing again; Howard and I have agreed now that John’s difficulties are quite beyond our…”), and then of little Mrs. Campbell’s voice on the phone that same afternoon, telling her the news, had filled her with a self-reproach so deep and pure it was almost pleasurable. She was physically sick for a week.

  This, then, was what came of good intentions. Try to love your child, and you helped to bring about another mother’s death.

  “And I know you’ll say there was probably no connection,” she explained to John’s psychiatrist, “but frankly, Doctor, I’m not asking your opinion. I’m simply saying that it’s quite out of the question for us ever to think in terms of bringing him into contact with outside people again. Quite out of the question.”

  “Mm,” the doctor said. “Yes. Well, of course, matters of this sort are entirely up to you and Mr.—ah, Mr. Givings to decide.”

  “I know he’s ill,” she went on, and here she had to sniffle back an alarming threat of tears, “I know he’s ill and he’s much to be pitied, but he’s also very destructive, Doctor. Impossibly destructive.”

  “Mm. Yes…”

  After that they confined their weekly visits to the inner waiting room of John’s ward. He didn’t seem to mind. He would ask about the Wheelers from time to time, but of course they told him nothing. By Christmas they had slipped into the habit of allowing two or three weeks to elapse between visits; then they tapered off to once a month.

  Little things make a difference. One sleeting January day, at the shopping center, her eye was caught and held by a small, brown, mixed-breed spaniel puppy in the pet-shop window. Feeling absurd—she had never done anything quite so silly and impulsive in her life—she went in and bought him on the spot and took him home.

  And what a pleasure he was! Oh, he was troublesome too—paper-training and housebreaking and worms and so on; it takes a lot of plain, hard work to make a good pet—but he was worth it.

  “Roll over!” she would say, sitting cross-legged on the carpet in her slipper socks. “Roll over, boy!” Then she would knead his fuzzy little ribs and belly with her fingers while he squirmed on his spine, his four paws waving in the air and his black lips drawn back from his teeth in giggling ecstasy.

  “Oh, you’re such a good little dog! Oh, you’re such a good little wet-nosed sweetie-pie—aren’t you? Aren’t you? Yes you are! Oh, yes you are!” It was the puppy, more than anything or anyone else, that made her winter endurable.

  Business began to pick up with the coming of spring, which never failed to give her a sense of life beginning all over again; but one ordeal remained to be survived: the selling of the Wheelers’ house. Her dread of the inevitable meeting with Frank in the lawyer’s office, at the closing, was so intense that she hardly slept at all the night before. It turned out, though, to be much less awkward than she’d feared. He was cordial and dignified—“Good to see you, Mrs. Givings”—they talked only of business matters, and he left as soon as the papers were signed. Afterwards, it was as if she’d closed a door forever on the whole experience.

  The next two months kept her exhaustingly, deliriously busy: more of the sweet old houses coming on the market, more of the more presentable new ones being built, more and more of the right sort of people coming out from the city—people who wanted and deserved something really nice, and who didn’t care about haggling for bargains. It soon developed into the best real estate spring of her career, and she took a craftsman’s pride in it. The days were long and often very difficult, but that only made the shrunken evenings more exquisitely restful.

  Be
tween playing with the puppy and chatting with Howard, she found any number of simple, constructive little tasks to do around the house.

  “Isn’t this cozy?” she asked one fine May evening as she crouched on spread newspapers to varnish a chair. Howard, bored with the World-Telegram, was sitting with folded hands and looking out the window; the puppy was curled up asleep on his little rug nearby, sated with happiness. “It’s wonderful just to let yourself unwind after a hard day,” she said. “Would you like some more coffee, dear? Or some more cake?”

  “No, thanks. I may have a glass of milk later on.”

  Turning the chair carefully on its spattered papers and seating herself on the floor to reach its underside, she went on talking as her brush trailed back and forth.

  “…I simply can’t tell you how pleased I am about the little Revolutionary Road place, Howard. Remember how dreary it looked all winter? All cold and dark and—well, spooky. Creepy-crawly. And now whenever I drive past it gives me such a lift to see it all perked up and spanking clean again, with lights in the windows. Oh, and they’re delightful young people, the Braces. She’s very sweet and fun to talk to; he’s rather reserved. I think he must do something very brilliant in town. He said to me, ‘Mrs. Givings, I can’t thank you enough. This is just the kind of home we’ve always wanted.’ Wasn’t that a sweet thing to say? And do you know, I was just thinking. I’ve loved that little house for years, and these are the first really suitable people I’ve ever found for it. Really nice, congenial people, I mean.”

  Her husband stirred and shifted the placement of his orthopedic shoes. “Well,” he said, “except for the Wheelers, you mean.”