The club was not the Pyramid Club, although this too flourished for a few brief months, a vicarious sort of gambling thrill that replaced the real thrill of weekday dates with servicemen on leave, the real soaring pleasure of reading about the assault on Tarawa, the whole overstaged, overdramatic, overpoetic production that had been a world at war. The club was a better club, the common mortar of which was guilt: the age of the analyst had arrived. It became fashionable quite suddenly to discuss things like ego and id, repressed hostility, Oedipus, Electra, and Orestes. The Snake Pit was an instant smash, and audiences all over America cheered Olivia de Haviland as she writhed in the torments of insanity, feeling God knew what relief at her discomfort — better you than me, Olivia — and finally gave her the New York Film Critics’ Award. The top motion-picture awards that year, however, were divided among three pictures that were expressive of this new wave of subtler penetration, this psychological exploration of the self: the first, a brilliantly evocative film interpretation of Hamlet; the second, a story that probed the emotions of a deaf mute; and the third, a rare study of men searching for gold in the Sierra Madre Mountains. Yes, the clocks had all stopped at fifty minutes before the hour, and a couch was no longer a piece of living-room furniture. The skirts were longer, and the cars were brighter, and all the people were deeper, God, how much deeper they all were! They probed constantly, wanting to know more about themselves and each other, digging, continually asking questions in search of a new identity to fit into this unremembered landscape. In New York City, some restless kids formed a street gang.
And then, because people were able to talk about their guilt instead of really feeling it, the reins began to loosen a little bit. It would be a long time before women began to show those good legs again, but the skirt was already inching imperceptibly higher on the calf. A play by Tennessee Williams involving some fairly macabre types was greeted with enthusiastic acclaim, and a new actor named Marlon Brando electrified New York with his portrait of an animal. Russia began talking about exploding her own nuclear devices, and the pointing finger of the world began to turn in another direction. The readjustment kick was on the way out. The guilt, ingrained as deep as the soul, a guilt that would linger and grow, was temporarily put aside as the war was recalled once again, not with patriotic fervor now, not with the screaming heroics of Bataan with Robert Taylor sitting behind his lonely machine gun as the camouflaged Japanese crept through the mist, fade-out, the end, nor with the wild capers of Errol Flynn cavorting behind German lines in the company of downed Allied flyers, not with any of that boiling-point celluloid magic designed to send the young to the recruiting office and the old to the local bank for a war bond, not with any of that, but with a serene contemplation, an attitude of “You know, we weren’t really so wild in those war days; those war days brought out in us the things that were finest.” In a Broadway roster that included such bits of froth as High Button Shoes and Make Mine Manhattan and Look, Ma, I’m Dancin’, there were two solid hits called Mister Roberts and Command Decision, both of which — in the new tradition of psychological depth and meaningful action — portrayed the inner machinery of men at war, rather than the external trappings like Stuka bombers and night patrols. In Hollywood, a giant movie called All the King’s Men was being made ready for release. It would explain demagoguery to Americans everywhere. In New York, the Giants followed the lead of the Brooklyn Dodgers and signed a Negro ballplayer named Monte Irvin.
The period of mourning was almost over. A nation that nominated to the presidency for the second time Thomas E. Dewey, a man with a mustache, was certainly a nation flirting with the frivolous, a country that could now remember with warm nostalgia a time of sacrifice and common endeavor. The biggest song hit of the day was “Nature Boy,” which proclaimed to the world at large that “the greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.” The big bands were on their way out. Glenn Miller had been killed during the war, and he belonged to the past. The greats of the thirties, Basie and Krupa and Dorsey and Spivak and Goodman, were fading sounds on a new musical scene, which placed the emphasis on vocalists and arranged jazz. The discordant sounds of Stan Kenton and Dizzy Gillespie were as new to the ear as were the slickly bright colors of the automobiles to the eye. A nation without memory needed new sights and new sounds and new heroes. Americans, perhaps unknowingly, were in the midst of a strange renaissance. There were changes in the country, and they seemed evolutionary, but perhaps they were as revolutionary as those that had swept over Russia in 1917.
In the midst of these changes, Amanda Bridges knew a change all her own, physical, spiritual, mental.
There were perhaps two things that occupied most of her waking thoughts before November. These were her sister Penny’s illness and the new house in Talmadge. She would arise each morning with Penny in her mind, and each morning she would write a letter to Sandstone, which Penny never answered. And then she would set about doing the thousands of things that any new house, even when it was an old house, needed done. In November, she felt completely changed, almost as if she had been reborn, almost as if a new person had emerged from the office with its clapboard shingles, a new woman. She felt rounder and softer and more female and curiously more sexy, but also a little more shy, and contradictorily a little more noticeable, but productive and real, and closer to God, and closer to Matthew, and closer to the new house and the town of Talmadge, the roots of Talmadge, a little awkward, a little more cautious, a little more recklessly flirtatious. The news did all these things to Amanda so that she was rendered completely unaware of the bigger changes happening around her, she was concerned only with the miracle of change in herself.
In November of 1948, Amanda discovered she was pregnant.
Matthew thought it was incredible.
He was not so much pleased by the news as he was astounded. He knew, of course, that there were certain natural functions that, if not carefully supervised, could very easily lead to this sort of thing, but it was not the simplicity of Amanda’s conception that amazed him. It was, rather, the fact that someone like his wife could suddenly become a potential mother. He didn’t know if he enjoyed thinking of her as a mother. He didn’t even know if he enjoyed thinking of her as a wife. Birth and motherhood implied mysteries he could never hope to fathom. He had never enjoyed suspense stories, and he felt, that he was mysterious enough for both of them and certainly didn’t need anyone shuffling around the house with the great secret of the universe in her belly. There was one secret in the old Talmadge house already, and one secret was enough.
The secret gave him immeasurable pleasure. It was a secret he had never divulged to Amanda. No matter what he shared with her, no matter how close he felt to her, the nights they exchanged kisses and dreams, the days when their marriage fell into the expected hiatus of the ordinary and they shared something less than passion but somehow more intimate, he would never tell Amanda what had almost happened to her on Christmas Eve five years ago. He knew he would never tell her this, and he realized their relationship was built on the solid foundation of — not a lie, certainly not a lie — but a truth withheld. Nor was he being facetious. He felt this withheld truth was a solid foundation. This was not specious reasoning, so far as Matthew was concerned. He felt that marriage was a totally illogical invention, anyway, and he thought it was far more honest to build a marriage around a withheld truth than it was to build it around anything like faith or trust, which were lies in themselves.