Contrary Pleasure Page 2

  When he thought that way, he could see the little indications of the decay. Streaks rusted down from the air conditioning units. Balled napkins hurrying along, enclosing mustard. A big window labeled with paint that had run. This stuff would not last bravely, with dignity. There was no stubborn persistence in it. It too quickly acknowledged defeat. There were no lost causes for it.

  Ten miles from the city he turned right, a gentle diagonal right down an incline to the octagonal yellow of the stop sign, and then turned left again, through the tunnel under the highway he had just left, leaving it to hurry on westward while he turned south along the winding two-lane farm road that had led to the village square.

  Off to his right as he neared the village was a new suburban development that had grown up in the past few years, was still growing. It had its own shops, primary school, playgrounds, park, social clubs. The houses had been put up in wholesale lots, with three and sometimes four variations of the basic design. This variation, plus the alterations in color, plus variations in plantings, plus subtle changes in the way the houses were placed on their lots, partially destroyed the flavor of sameness.

  Once he had read in the newspaper, with a certain amount of wonderment, that each house in Amity Park contained: electric stove, refrigerator, washer, dryer, dishwasher, and disposal; attic room that could be finished off at owner’s option; tile shower; breezeway; radiant-panel heat; concrete slab foundation with utility room; television corner; heatolater fireplace. And, knowing that, he would drive by, as on this June evening, by the streets with their new names—Three Brooks Lane, Dell Road, Grindstone Road, Persimmon Lane—and see the sprinklers turning and the bikes racing and the bent backs over the new plantings and the cars being washed and diapers drying—and it would suddenly look most odd and fearful. As though all these people had come from some alien place beyond the sun and through their very pronounced and exaggerated conformity sought to deceive us who were born here. The street scenes were too suburban, the young wives too consciously harassed and pretty, the young husbands too solemn and jolly, the children entirely too childlike. Where did they come from? Certainly not from the city. They had never lived anywhere else on this planet. Only here, at Amity Park, the alien eyes cold and waitful, aware of the times that were coming.

  One day in the hallway at the office one of the young men in Accounting had come up to him and said, a bit too brashly because of his shyness, “Moved out your way last week, Mr. Delevan. Out to Amity Park. Ellen said it would be a lot better for the kids.” Delevan said what was expected of him and then remembered that the man’s name was Fister, and it pleased him to be able to use the man’s name so easily. But he was disappointed to have the game he played compromised in this fashion. It was better when he had not known any of them. Then he could have maintained some of the variations of the game. Such as all the young men climbing into their Fords and Plymouths and Chevvies after kissing their young wives and setting out toward the city, but, of course, never going there, flickering off, instead, into some obscure dimension from which they would emerge, putting on their man-faces, at five.

  Perhaps, he thought, it is just because you cannot understand that way of life. It is in some obscure attunement with the new boulevard, with too much electronics. Or maybe, Benjamin, you are merely a snob.

  The village square looked changed and naked and for a few moments, as he waited for the light to change, he was puzzled. Then he noticed the raw stumps and realized that they had taken down more of the elms. He wondered if they had been standing when he had driven through the town that morning on his way to the city. Maybe they had been gone for days. Or weeks. And he had not noticed. Dutch elm disease was bad this year. At least there wasn’t any of it up on the hill yet. But there might be. He decided to ask Sam about sprays. If one tree went, it cost a fortune to get it felled and removed.

  The light changed and he turned right onto Gilman Street, accelerating for the steepness of Gilman Hill, wondering if he could get all the way up without that robot under the hood shifting him back to a lower gear. It was a daily contest with the robot, and it never failed to annoy him. Yet he was unable to stop playing that particular game. It seemed an infringement on his dignity, a continual persecution by servo-mechanism, even when he won. In the winter he seldom won. He wished they would make this same car with a manual shift. Every day they took more decisions away from you.

  It was nearly six thirty. A bit later than usual. The big car moved smoothly up the hill. He decided as he neared the crest that on this night the robot had been decisively defeated, but at that moment a child’s ball rolled into the road. He swerved away from it, lifting his foot from the gas pedal, and heard the disheartening clunk as the car went into a lower gear. He felt annoyed out of all proportion to the defeat and at the same time amused at his own childishness.

  Once he was over the crest of the hill, the robot permitted a return to the higher gear. Ahead, on his left, was the land his father had purchased. Eight acres which the will had divided into four parcels of two acres each, one for each of the four children of Michael Delevan. And they had not even known he owned the land until the will was read. It had seemed a strange remote place then, a hilltop near an outlying village. But with the years, with the growth of commuting, Clayton Village had changed character. The old man had made a good guess. When the village became fashionable as a commuter community, there were the four Delevan kids with nice big lots on high ground. The four Delevan kids. Ben, the eldest. Quinn and Alice, the twins. Robbie, the kid.

  It was so alarmingly easy, even at fifty, to think of yourself again as one of the Delevan kids. Half a century and yet the mind, with one deceptive twist, could wipe away the years. Fifty had a dreadful sound. The very consonants of the word itself. A withered, secretive sound. A dried bell. Half of a century. Five decades. Two and a half generations. This, you knew, was beyond midpoint. More than half of life was gone. There were some who lived to be a hundred. But it was not life. It was a trick, faintly obscene, to be treated by the working press with that familiar mixture of heavy-handed humor and bathos.

  It seemed utterly unfair of the old man, Michael Delevan, to have made this one good guess on property value, thus leaving one false hint of shrewdness after having, with blind and stubborn arrogance, with both greed and carelessness, milked the Stockton Knitting Company into spavined sickness before he died. It could never come back completely. It could never be well again. It could be levered and pried and prodded along, staggering from one year into the next.

  There were four parcels of land on top of the hill. The parcel nearest the village was vacant, brush-grown, wild. That was the place where Robbie, the youngest of the Delevan children, might build one day should he come back from far places.

  Benjamin, the eldest, the President and Chairman of the Board of the Stockton Knitting Company, Incorporated—he who now drove this big car swiftly through the transition hour of Job to Home—lived in the middle house. He lived in that white house with his wife, Wilma, that white-haired lady who had comfortably shared so many of his years, and with his teen-age son, Brock, and with his teen-age daughter, Ellen.

  Ben’s was the middle house, with the twins on either side of him. In the house nearest the village lived Quinn Delevan, vice-president of the company, low-handicap golfer, mild husband of the husky Bess, stepfather of her son, David.

  Quinn’s twin was Alice, who shared his tallness and thinness and quietness. She was now a Furmon, having married the hearty George Furmon, having borne his three children—two of them simultaneously in accord with that hereditary gene. It was George Furmon who had built the three white houses on the hill, building his own no more honestly and solidly than the two he built for Benjamin Delevan and for Quinn Delevan—his wife’s twin brother. They were rambling houses, pleasant to live in, hellish to heat, cool in the summer, designed for maximum privacy.

  Ben turned in his driveway remembering again that he had forgotten to order gravel for t
he driveway, the coarser grade Sam had recommended so that it could not be so easily washed away by the spring rains. Sam Coward was the leathery old man who took care of the grounds around the three houses. If requested to plant something that did not appeal to him, it would be taken with some mysterious blight. Left to his own plans and programs, he made everything grow with unexpected lushness, and on this day the lawns looked remarkably well, Ben thought.

  As he made the turn in the drive to park by the garages he saw, to his instantaneous dismay, that his terrace was crowded with people. He thought for a moment that it was a party which had slipped his mind. But as he glanced quickly at individuals, he saw that it was all family. Though they lived here together, it was a rare time when everyone was together. He stopped the car and saw them there, looking toward him. Quinn and Alice with the twin stamp and the Delevan stamp on their lean faces, meaty florid George Furmon. And the two women, brought into the tribe, into the name, by marriage—breasty, vivid Bess, who was Quinn’s wife. And his own wife, Wilma, sitting there with their two almost adult children, Brock and Ellen. Out in the yard, in the long shadows, the blond little girl called Sandy—Alice’s youngest—turned solemn and dedicated and tireless cartwheels on the deep, soft green of the grass.

  He stopped the car and reached to turn off the key, seeing them all there as people dear and well-known to him, and then suddenly seeing them all as strangers again. Very pleasant people. Sitting there in sunlight, in assurance, in their casual ease. With bright clothes and wrought-iron furniture on flagstones, and late sun prisming through the shaker and pitcher and glasses, touching the acid yellow of lemon rind. He had a sudden and vivid urge toward violence, wanting to put the big car in gear so that it would surge through the tailored hedge and bound up over the flagstone edge and into the lot of them. It was so clear an image that he could hear the screams, the sound of breaking glass, the coarse grinding of wrought iron against the bowels of the car.

  He turned the key and turned the motor off and sat for a moment feeling oddly pleased with the image he had created, and somewhat shaken. The pleasure was that oblique pleasure of imagined horror. These random impulses toward violence seemed to occur too often lately. Crazy impulses. Perhaps everyone had them. But only a madman would go around responding to such impulses. Maybe with all normal people it remained in proper perspective. A game. Nothing more.

  Yet when he got out of the car and walked toward the gap in the hedge, smiling, they still looked like strangers to him, so much so that he was, in turn, sharply aware of how he must look to all of them, a rather dumpy man in a dark, rumpled suit, balding, his jowls shadowed with the day’s beard, his hat in his hand, like someone approaching with faint apologetic air to beg from them, without quite knowing what he intended to ask for. Or how he would use it were it given him.

  “The gang’s all here,” he said, almost pleased with the fatuousness of the expression.

  “You’re late, dear,” Wilma said, and met him at the edge of the terrace for the uxorial kiss, which he implanted quickly on her soft, dry, textureless mouth. There was about her an unaccustomed air of excitement. That air, combined with the gathering of the clan, meant news. For one good moment he wondered if it meant that Brock had been accepted by a decent college, though God knew the odds were against that. He glanced at his son, but it was not a moment when he could read his son’s face. Brock sat slouched, his head tilted back, eyes shut against the sun as he slowly drained a bottle of Coke.

  Ben nodded and spoke to all of them, Quinn and Bess, George and Alice, Brock and Ellen.

  “Shall we tell him now or wait until he sits down?” George Furman asked, his heavy voice a little loose at the edges, as it became each day of his life at five thirty. And there was a slurred bite of sarcasm which, to Ben, meant that George did not consider the news as impressive as the others did.

  “I’ll get a drink and then sit down,” Ben said. He was aware of their faces. At least it wasn’t bad news. Perhaps a local scandal of some sort that did not affect them. Yet Wilma wouldn’t bring up something like that with both kids around. She avoided such topics when the children were there, even though she knew they had their own sources and would find out in any case.

  Ben poured himself a martini. The glass was warm from being in the sun. The drink was acid and tepid. He sat down with it, took a sip, said, “Ready or not.”

  The women all tried to speak at once, but Wilma got the floor. “What do you know, Ben? Robbie has gotten married. In Mexico City. He’s flying up with her. He’ll be here Saturday, three days from now.”

  It took him a moment to comprehend. “Good Lord,” he said softly. “Is she a Mexican?”

  “Oh, no, dear,” Wilma said. “Her name is—was—Susan Walton, and she was a civil service person in the embassy there. I guess it was all very sudden.”

  Robbie Delevan, the youngest of the Delevans, only twenty-eight, had been working in Mexico City on some sort of vague project that bore a dim relationship to the State Department. They had not seen him in over two years. It was one of Wilma’s self-imposed “duties” to write to him regularly, but Robbie had been neither a very interesting nor a very consistent correspondent.

  “Here’s the letter, dear,” Wilma said. “And her picture.”

  Ben looked at the picture first. A young girl who looked into the camera in a clear-eyed way, not quite smiling. A girl with pale hair and a look of graveness and dignity and a soft, young mouth.

  “Hmm,” he said.

  “My sentiments exactly,” George said thickly.

  “Read the letter, dear,” Wilma said in the soft voice of command.

  The letter said the expected things. Much in love. Arranged our leave at the same time. Suzy had no family. Decided we’d be married here. Flying to Washington first and then up to see you. Should arrive Saturday the twenty-third. And it was near the end of the letter that Ben read a line that gave him a twinge of alarm: “Could be I have had enough of foreign parts. But we’ll talk about that when we see you all.”

  One dead-weight Delevan on the executive payroll of the Stockton Knitting Company was quite enough. It would indeed be unfortunate if Robbie thought that, because of his name and his inheritance, he could ask that a place be found for him. A well-lighted place with short hours, handsome salary, and pleasing title.

  The bride had added a postscript to the letter: “Dear Robbie’s Family—I’m nervous as a bride. Robbie says that’s to be expected. I want you to know that we’re very happy, and I’m looking forward to meeting you all at last. Robbie has told so much about you that I feel as if I know you already. All our love—Suzy.”

  “That’s a sweet note from her at the end, isn’t it?” Bess said warmly.

  “She sounds like a good addition,” Ben said. He liked the look of her handwriting. It was not peculiarly slanted, nor tinted, nor affected. It had a look of decision.

  He left them talking and planning, and went into the house. He stopped in the kitchen and floated two ice cubes in bourbon in an old-fashioned glass and took the drink to his bedroom. He was glad he hadn’t had to finish the warm martini. He sat on the edge of the bed, waiting for the ice to chill the bourbon. The window was open and he could hear them talking out on the terrace, the sound of the voices, but not the actual words. The voices had a summer sound. Already there were insects in the fields. The birds were making a great racket these mornings.

  He heard his daughter laugh. Clear young voice of seventeen. Clean and young and fresh. Gay enough and sad enough to break your heart. There was nothing more miraculous than a daughter of seventeen.

  Lately all of them had seemed like strangers, except Ellen. He wondered if Ellen would grow up to be like his own mother. Whenever he thought of that long-dead woman, that was the phrase he used. His own mother. A private person, not shared by the rest of the children of Big Mike.

  He remembered his own mother as being tiny and crisp and tidy and always laughing, and with a smell of soap when
she hugged him, which was often. Soap made of flowers and the cakes were oval and lavender in color and when they were new and crisp, there were flower patterns on them. It was a big old house, but she had filled it for him. She died when he was ten, and then that aloof stranger in the house, his father—Big Mike they had all called him at the plant—had married again, two years later, married a woman who was tall, young, elegant, poised, dignified. As aloof as his father. It had taken Ben many months to learn that her cool poise and dignity had concealed a dull, frightened and conventional mind. When he had learned that, she ceased to awe him, and he began to love her, and she responded with starved affection, for there was very little love or warmth in Michael Delevan, and the big old house had been very cold after Ben’s own mother had died.

  When Ben was fourteen, the second wife, Elaine, had borne the twins, Alice and Quinn, and they had grown into tall, poised children, of fine, lean, almost arid construction, full of themselves and their quiet games. Robbie was born eight years later. Two years after that, when Ben was twenty-four, Elaine had died. Ben had gotten there in time. She died with simple poise and dignity and only Ben had seen the fear that was sharp and thin behind placid eyes, only Ben had felt the odd strength, the frantic strength of hands and nails, strange in one so wasted. Her name had been Elaine and it had suited her.

  Twenty-six years ago she had died. And though Michael Delevan had never seemed to be emotionally involved with her, had seemed to accept her as a convenience in his house, he was not the same after that. He lasted a year and, in dying, he sprung the trap that snapped shut on Ben. The twins were eleven. Robbie was three. There was the plant and the job and that was where he went. It was that simple.