Experiment in Springtime Read online

  Experiment in Springtime

  To my husband, Kenneth Millar

  Experiment in Springtime © 1976 The Margaret Millar Charitable Unitrust

  This volume published in 2018 by Syndicate Books

  www.syndicatebooks.com

  Distributed by

  Soho Press, Inc.

  853 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

  Experiment in Springtime eISBN: 9781681990224

  Cover and interior design by Jeff Wong

  Printed in the United States of America

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  1

  In April, Charles almost died. His wife, Martha, nursed him assiduously and with a certain grim efficiency that Charles, in his moments of clarity, found amusing. Even on the point of death, he knew he bored her.

  Perhaps it might have been different if there had been anything heroic about his illness—if he had leaped glamorously off a high building or had plunged into the lake to save a child. But the fact was that he had simply come home from the office with a bad headache and had ac­cepted the two headache tablets given to him by his wife, Martha. It was not, of course, Martha’s fault that he was allergic to so many things and that the headache tablets turned out to be aspirin. Aspirin, as the doctor pointed out and as Charles later had good reason to believe, was sheer poison to him.

  The doctor, a man called MacNeil, seemed very inter­ested in the case and anxious to substantiate his own diag­nosis. Nearly every time he came, he brought with him old medical journals and newspaper clippings in which he read about an old man in Manchester who had died of taking one aspirin and a young boy in Kansas who be­came ill when he touched one. Charles listened vaguely. Manchester and Kansas seemed equally remote. His own world had narrowed to four walls, and there were only two people living in it, himself and Martha. Other people drifted in and out, other sounds penetrated the walls, and the clock ticked away the minutes here as inexorably as in the outer world, but time and space had become more intimately related. Space was this room, and time could be measured by the increasing boredom on Martha’s face.

  Each flicker of her eyelids and movement of her hands, every inflection of her voice, had come to mean something to Charles. The very manner in which she picked up a book to read aloud indicated to him whether she liked the book and whether she wanted to read at that particular moment or not.

  “You don’t have to read to me,” he told her. “Brown could. He doesn’t do much else around the house.”

  “But I want to.”

  “Well, all right, then.”

  He didn’t enjoy being read to any more than she en­joyed reading, but it was too difficult to tell her that out­right. He was forced to observe her more and more closely, and if an inadvertent sigh or gesture gave her away, he would ask her to change books or to leave him alone so he could rest.

  It was a queer reversal of things that it was she, and not himself, who was under observation. He was the patient, she was the nurse. It was Martha who should have been watching him and calculating his reactions. She did watch him, naturally, but with the detached and professional scrutiny of a trained nurse, as if he had, in becoming ill, ceased to have any identity apart from the illness. He was no longer Charles, her husband, but a piece of anonymous broken-down machinery. Machinery could be mended with patience and care; you don’t have to think about it or wonder about it.

  He disliked having her nurse him at all, allowing her to see him helpless day after day, as dependent as a baby. Babies were rather cuter than men of thirty-six, however. You could nurse a baby without despising it.

  Here again, as in the case of reading aloud, it was hard to say anything. He hinted broadly sometimes.

  “Why don’t you take your mother and Laura to a movie this afternoon?”

  “I don’t really care for movies. Besides, Laura sees too many, they give her silly ideas.”

  “All girls sixteen have silly ideas anyway.”

  “I want Laura to be different.”

  Laura was her younger sister but Martha always talked about her as if she were her daughter.

  “Martha.”

  “Yes?”

  “I’d like to have known you when you were sixteen.”

  She seemed surprised. “Why?”

  “I suppose I’d just like to know what you were like.”

  “I wasn’t very interesting.”

  The subject was closed. He could never entice her into talking about the past. She would listen gravely and patiently to his hour-long accounts of his own boyhood, and the times Brown had kept him out of trouble by lying to his mother, his prep-school escapades, his college friends, his mother, his troubles, but she was never tempted to return his confidences. Occasionally he con­sidered the possibility that the past might be too painful for her to discuss, though he realized that this was un­likely. From her mother and sister he had learned enough of her background to know that she was, apart from her prettiness, an ordinary city girl from an ordinary family who had lived in an ordinary house. She went to high school and business college, and he had met her in the office of a friend of his where she was a stenographer. She was twenty-one when he married her five years ago.

  That was all. There was nothing exceptional about Martha except that he loved

  her. Everything that she did do, or didn’t do, had been important to him ever since he

  met her. He could not afford to lie here in bed, inviting her to despise him for his weakness. He must, therefore, prove to her that he was not at all helpless. His body might be temporarily useless but he had his weapons. He could fling words across the room like knives. The machinery might be broken but it must not remain anonymous, and knives could draw attention as well as blood. Especially when you had so much time to choose and sharpen and take aim.

  “Martha, why did you marry me?”

  “Now, Charles. You know the doctor said not to talk too much.”

  “But I want to know. Why did you?”

  “I can’t read to you if you’re going to keep interrupting me.”

  “I don’t see why you can’t answer a question like that.”

  “Because it isn’t the kind of thing people ask. It’s so—so . . .”

  “Personal?” he said dryly. “That’s the word you want, isn’t it?”

  “No. I meant, isn’t it obvious why people marry?”

  “My dear Martha, could you possibly mean sex?”

  “I don’t want to . . .”

  “Could you possibly expect me to believe that you married me because you wanted to go to bed with me?”

  “Now, Charles. You’re getting upset.” She added ear­nestly, “The trouble is, you think too much.”

  “That’s the trouble, is it?”

  “The doctor said . . .”

  The doctor said a great many things, most of them to Martha alone, downstairs in the drawing room. She found many of his phrases confusing, not because she couldn’t understand them (for Dr. MacNeil took great pains to clarify every statement), but because they reminded her of other things. “Anaphylactic” could easily be the name of a weed killer; “histamine” sounded like a flower, and “allergy” would start her off planning the menus for the week. She couldn’t help her mind wandering. And the more her mind wandered, the more pains MacNeil took to explain everything; so the sessions in the drawing room were sometimes intolerably long. They gave her, more­over, the feeling that she was in a defensive position, and that it was Charles, not MacN
eil, who was at the bottom of all this talking. For MacNeil had begun to ask her as many questions about herself as about Charles, treating the case as a double one. She rather resented this. She had never been ill a day in her life, and she had done as much to make Charles well again as anyone possibly could. He had no right to question her.

  At the end of April MacNeil had said that Charles could sit up in a chair for a little while each day.

  She relayed the news to Charles immediately. “The doctor says you may get up as soon as you’ll make the effort.”

  “Really?” Charles was lying with his eyes closed and his long thin hands crossed on his chest. He looked dead and quite innocent. Purified.

  “He said it would be good for you to get up,” Martha said, unconscious of any exaggeration, “even if you don’t feel like it.”

  “Really? Well, I don’t think I will for a while yet. I’ve never had so much attention before in my life.” He raised himself on one elbow and looked up at her thoughtfully. “You’re practically killing me with kindness, my dear.”

  She flushed slightly. “I do my best.”

  “I know you do, and a very good best it is. I practically died, didn’t I?”

  “Now, Charles. Dr. MacNeil said it was morbid to go on talking about it all the time.” Though MacNeil had said nothing of the sort, still it was the kind of thing he probably would have said if it had occurred to him. “You’re to put it right out of your mind and concentrate on getting well and back to work again.”

  “Oh, no,” he said, with the ironic politeness that ex­asperated her. “I like it here. I’ve grown quite fond of my little deathbed. I like to lie on it and watch you hovering over me like a black angel.”

  “Don’t try to be funny, Charles.”

  “Good Lord! Funny!” He raised one of his hands in protest, and then let it flop feebly back on the bed covers.

  He had lost a great deal of weight during the month. His eyes seemed to have fallen too far back into their sockets. It gave him a sly, calculating expression, as if he had chosen deliberately to withdraw and think little dark secrets.

  She glanced down at him with faint distaste. Some­times, when he was sleeping, or when he was too weak to move his head off the pillow, she felt a deep pity for him. He seemed so bitterly unhappy, as if he had spent his life expecting things that never happened, and waiting for someone who never came.

  But convalescent, Charles was at his worst. He had so much time to think and talk, and he took delight in making strange remarks she couldn’t understand and jokes that to her were pointless. It was all very well to be bitterly unhappy, but it wasn’t fair to take it out on your wife.

  “I have to go downtown,” she said abruptly. “Would you like Mother to come and sit with you?”

  “All right.”

  “I’ll tell her then.” She leaned over and straightened one of his pillows. “Is there anything I can get you before I leave?”

  He took her hand and pressed it against his cheek. His skin felt dry and crisp, like the cast-off skin of a snake. (“He shouldn’t have a fever,” MacNeil had told her. “In fact, it’s very unusual.”)

  “You’re looking very beautiful this afternoon,” Charles said. “Like an elegant young widow. Why do you always wear black?”

  She frowned, suspecting a trap. “I don’t know. Because it’s easy, I guess. I don’t care much about clothes.”

  “I’m glad the reason is not anticipatory.” He rubbed his cheek against her hand. “Martha?”

  “Yes.”

  “Nothing. Nothing at all.”

  He sank back among the pillows and turned his face to the wall with a slow, sad sound that seemed to come involuntarily out of his mouth.

  She had the impression, as she so often had these days, that she had failed him. She had done something, or neglected to do something, vital. Was it such a simple thing as forgetting to kiss him goodbye?

  She bent down and kissed him lightly on the temple.

  “I want to rest,” he said, and rubbed the spot where she’d kissed him.

  She drew in her breath. The air in the room smelled musty though the windows were open and the curtains suspiring in and out with the breeze. Outside, she could see the courtyard; it was too early in the year to have the fountain turned on, but the tulips were in bloom. This spring they had turned out exactly as she wanted them. They were all the same height and color and the same distance apart. They looked very neat and respectable. Charles called them smug, but of course he didn’t appre­ciate flowers.

  She looked back toward the bed. The contrast between the tulips and the hump under the covers that was Charles made her strangely uneasy. It was as if this spring promised or threatened to be different from all the others she had shared with Charles.

  He moved slightly and she became aware that she’d been standing at the door for a long time without speak­ing. She never knew what construction he would put on a little pause or slight incident, so she turned hurriedly and went out. All the way down the hall she expected to hear him call her back and ask her to explain:

  “Why were you standing there?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What were you thinking about?”

  “About tulips.”

  “You wouldn’t stand there and just think about tulips.”

  “Well, about spring, too.”

  “And me?”

  “And you. I was thinking, supposing you died.”

  Well, supposing he did. It would be terrible, naturally; he was still too young to die. On the other hand, some­body was dying every second, and it wasn’t as if Charles enjoyed life very much. For that matter she didn’t enjoy it very much herself, but she didn’t expect a great deal from it, and Charles did. On the occasions when he was in high spirits there always seemed to be an hysterical edge in his laugh and his voice, as if he were terrified by what lay beyond the moment of happiness and could ward it off only by a noisy insistence that it was not there.

  In the hall downstairs she pressed the call bell, and a minute later Brown came in from the kitchen, straight­ening his hair. He was a tall, weedy, middle-aged man in a wrinkled suit. He had worked for Charles’s mother for years before her death, as a kind of male house­keeper. It was typical of Charles that he should talk about living beyond his income and at the same time insist on keeping Brown. Brown’s duties were both vague and light. If he felt like watering the lawn he watered the lawn, and managed to look very righteous about it in the bargain. He took orders from her pleasantly enough, but she could never be sure that the orders would be carried out. Brown was a very light-hearted man.

  She saw that his eyes were red and he was trying to stifle a yawn, and she knew he’d been lying down on the cook’s couch again.

  They had four servants, and yet not one of them be­haved as a servant should. They all seemed to know that she and Charles didn’t get along very well, and like children taking advantage of the dissension between their parents, they were continually stepping out of bounds.

  Once she had gone to the trouble of defining their jobs and making a list for each one:

  Lily: Make beds (8 a.m.—8:30 a.m.)

  Dust upstairs and downstairs (8:30 a.m.—9:15 a.m.)

  Scrub verandas (9:15 a.m.—10 a.m.)

  It worked nicely on paper, but it happened that at 9:15 a.m. Lily had a toothache, so that Forbes, who at 9:15 a.m. should have been washing the car, did the verandas instead, while Brown washed the car instead of helping Mrs. Putnam in the kitchen. She burned the lists without telling Charles, who would undoubtedly have considered it very funny.

  In spite of the fact that she herself was very orderly, she was unable to impose any kind of order on the household. Everything went wrong. Wherever she looked there would be a bit of fluff on the rug or an ashtray that needed washing, a tap that dripped or a pict
ure hanging crooked. If she planned an elaborate ten o’clock Sunday morning breakfast, English style, Charles would suddenly decide to work and leave the house early, her mother would sleep in, Laura would be on another diet, and she would be left alone at the table surrounded by toasted crumpets and kippers while the smell of steaming kidneys per­meated the house and made her quite ill. If she sat there long enough she became violently Anglophobe and thought it was no wonder the English were so skinny and had rheumatism all the time. This feeling was easily transferred to Brown, who was in a vague way English and therefore on the side of the kidneys.

  “Is the car ready?” she said, unable to keep the irritation out of her voice because the memory of the kidney-smell was so vivid to her, and because she just now recalled that

  the cook’s couch had a brand-new slipcover on it. She wondered if Brown took his shoes off when he lay down. Probably not.

  He was watching her warily, ready to ingratiate him­self in case she noticed anything.

  “The steps and banister need dusting,” she said.

  “Well, Lily was going to do it but she . . .”

  “I think we have enough servants in this place to see that things are tidy.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Pearson.”

  “I told you last week.”

  “Well, it slipped my mind, Mrs. Pearson.” He yawned again, keeping his mouth closed and contorting his face so that he seemed for a moment to be in acute anguish.

  “Do you take your shoes off when you lie down on the couch?” Once the question was out she felt humiliated, as if Brown had somehow got the better of her by forcing her to ask it.

  He made the situation worse by replying, “No, Mrs. Pearson. I just hang my feet over the edge.”

  She felt utterly defeated and without dignity. Feet were something so intimate and private she didn’t discuss them or even think about them. She would as soon have been seen without any clothes at all as without proper shoes and stockings. Yet here she was, talking about not just feet, but what was far more revolting, Brown’s feet. She couldn’t stop herself from picturing them—long and bony and grey at the back of the heel, with coarse black hair on the big toe—dirty, personal, obscene feet . . .