“What are you so pigheaded for, Martha?”
“I’m not pigheaded. I don’t need him.” Sharply she added, “They’re my children.”
But Sid went right on, not figuring her anger to be directed in any way at him. “He’s having a success, right? He’s obviously made a little money, isn’t that so? Then now is the time to open up correspondence. Honestly, honey, now is the time to slap him in court—”
“Why don’t we wait? Why don’t we just wait and see what he does, all right?” But when she squeezed his hand, it made it even more obvious that she had trampled once again on his concern for her. “Sid, I appreciate everything you’ve done—”
He stopped her. “Do you?”
There was no further conversation until they reached the playground, where Stephanie Parrino and her two little brothers were playing on the seesaw while their grandmother, Mrs. Baker, watched over them.
“My father sent me a picture,” Cynthia told Stephanie’s grandmother, and then went off with Mark to the swings.
Stephanie’s grandmother had once been the mother-in-law of Billy Parrino, the man who had sat in this very playground and asked Martha to run off to Paris with five children and himself. Billy had finally divorced Bev, and Bev had tried to drown herself in the toilet. She was now on the ninth floor of Billings receiving shock treatment, though all discussion of her condition was carried on as though she were down with a bad cold.
“How is she feeling?” Martha asked.
“Oh not perfect yet, of course, but coming right along,” said Mrs. Baker.
“That’s fine.”
“She’s responding beautifully,” Mrs. Baker said, and they all looked off at the children, rising on swings into the gray rough sky, a sky aching to plunge them directly from November to January. On the apartment-house wall directly behind them, some waggish University student had scrawled:
John Keats
1/2 loves
Easeful Death
The words were enclosed in a heart. It did not strike her (as it might have on a day when there was a little sun in the sky) as witty at all. Keats had been dropped into his grave at the age of twenty-six. Thinking of the death of Keats, she thought of her own: for three years she had been meaning to scrape together enough to take out $10,000 worth of insurance on her life … She suddenly plunged headlong into gloom. Twenty-six.
Mrs. Baker, meanwhile, was saying that every day another kind mother invited Bev’s children for lunch. A friend of Mrs. Baker’s had sent a basket of fruit from Florida directly to the hospital, and though Bev wasn’t quite up to peeling things yet, her mother had brought the oranges home and marked them with nail polish and put them in the refrigerator so Bev could have them when she got out. Tomorrow, Mrs. Baker said, she was taking all the youngsters bright and early down to see Don McNeill’s “Breakfast Club.”
Martha reached out for Sid’s hand. She sat stone still, wondering how much worse off Bev Parrino would be if some doctor up in Billings shot too much juice through her one day and sent her from this impossible life. As they left the little park, silent but for the creaking of the swings, she managed to put down a strange noise that wanted to make itself heard in her throat. Then Markie began to cry that all he had done was push.
Her watch showed twenty-five minutes of holiday remaining; she tried to think of what they could do until five. The kids were moving — had moved — into their late-afternoon crabbiness, and Sid, she knew, was still waiting for her reply to his proposal. Patient, ever-ready, faithful, waiting. Only ten minutes had elapsed since he had thrown his most solid punch of the day. Do you? Do you appreciate me, Martha, your situation — do you see what I can do for you …? And yes, she saw — she had reached out for his hand, and he had been there to give it to her, even if he did not understand for a moment the panic she had found herself enclosed in.
“I didn’t swing! I always push!” Mark was crying. “I want something!”
“You’ll swing next time, Markie—”
“I want a Coca-Cola! I want to go to Hildreth’s! I want—”
For reasons of her own Martha did not want to go to Hildreth’s; but she could not go back to the playground either, to confront Mrs. Baker’s stiff inhuman smile and consider further Beverly Parrino’s condition. So she stood in the middle of Fifty-seventh Street, while Markie screamed and Cynthia joined in with him, and she might have stood there for the full twenty-five minutes she had coming to her had not Sid taken her hand once again and led the three of them to Hildreth’s for a Coke. And fortunately the place was empty; all the students had gone home for the holiday, and the hangers-on — the strays, the outcasts, all the purposeless people she had come to know during the last few years, who could only have put the final depressing touch to her afternoon — were either sleeping or hiding, or, in private and questionable ways, paying homage somewhere to the day.
The four of them sat at one of the booths along the window, Martha and Sid drinking coffee, and the children over their Cokes, stifling and giving in to gaseous burpings. Behind the lunch counter the Negro girl who ladled out the food was preparing an elaborate turkey sandwich for herself; inside the store dreamy dance music came from a radio, and outside a pleasant, gray, Sunday deadness hung over the street. Everything combined to lull Martha backwards — the music, the coffee, the plasticized smell of the booth itself, and of course the street. Aside from Pacific Avenue in Salem, where she had been born and raised, Chicago’s Fifty-seventh Street, was the thoroughfare of her life. Looking at it, blowy and deserted, touched now by dusk, was like seeing the set of a familiar play without seeing the performers or hearing the lines. But in the dark theater of memory all the old scenes could easily be recollected, all the old heroes and heroines. She could remember this one long store-lined, tree-lined, University-lined street, and so very many Marthas. There, plain as day, was Martha Lee Kraft, buying her Modern Library books in Woodworth’s. And there was Martha Kraft taking the I.C. train to the Loop, and having absolutely the most perfect and adult day in Carson’s — a solid hour trying on dark cloche hats, and narrowing her eyes at herself in the mirror when the saleslady wasn’t around. And there was Martha Kraft, saying to herself Why can’t I do anything? and taking her first lover. And Martha Kraft carrying a placard: VOTE FOR HENRY WALLACE. It weaved above her head as she marched clear from Cottage to the Lake, and beside her, carrying his own sign — who was that anyway? Who was that sweet boy with the social consciousness and practically no hips at all? What was his name, the one into whose basement room she moved her guitar and her Greek sandals and her brilliant full skirts and her uncombed extravagant hair? And there was Martha being wooed and won, right in Hildreth’s. Richard M. Reganhart of Cleveland, blue-eyed, dark-haired, fierce, wild, a painter, an ex-G.I. — he had not even to cajole her … And there was one morning when Martha was sitting in a booth opposite him, the two of them eating that skimpy, sufficient lover’s breakfast of juice and coffee and jelly doughnuts, one morning when at the tip of Martha’s uterus, Cynthia Reganhart was the size of a pinhead, when Cynthia (who is presently dredging at the bottom of her glass through a straw) was hardly bigger than nothing at all.
But — all those prayers and tears to the contrary — she was not nothing at all, and everything that had then to begin, began, and everything that had to end, ended. For five months Fifty-seventh Street was hardly seen, it was only walked upon, blindly; and then there was sunny Mexico, and Dick Reganhart was ripping the shirt off his own back — his fried eggs, lately heaved against the white stucco wall, sliding relentlessly toward the floor.