His work with Corridor Video had brought him into contact with some of Atlanta’s richest and most powerful men-and they were both astonished to find that these men were mostly okay. In them they found a degree of acceptance and broad-minded kindliness that was almost unknown in the North. Patty remembered Stanley once writing home to his mother and father: The best rich men in America live in Atlanta, Georgia. I am going to help make some of them richer, and they are going to make me richer, and no one is going to own me except my wife, Patricia, and since I already own her, I guess that is safe enough.
By the time they moved from Traynor, Stanley was incorporated and employed six people. In 1983 their income had entered unknown territory-territory of which Patty had heard only the dimmest rumors. This was the fabled land of six FIGURES. And it had all happened with the casual ease of slipping into a pair of sneakers on Saturday morning. This sometimes frightened her. Once she had made an uneasy joke about deals with the devil. Stanley had laughed until he almost choked, but to her it hadn’t seemed that funny, and she supposed it never would.
The turtle couldn’t help us.
Sometimes, for no reason at all, she would wake up with this thought in her mind like the last fragment of an otherwise forgotten dream, and she would turn to Stanley, needing to touch him, needing to make sure he was still there.
It was a good life-there was no wild drinking, no outside sex, no drugs, no boredom, no bitter arguments about what to do next. There was only a single cloud. It was her mother who first mentioned the presence of this cloud. That her mother would be the one to finally do so seemed, in retrospect, preordained. It finally came out as a question in one of Ruth Slum’s letters. She wrote Patty once a week, and that particular letter had arrived in the early fall of 1979. It came forwarded from the old Traynor address and Patty read it in a living room filled with cardboard liquor-store cartons from which spilled their possessions, looking forlorn and uprooted and dispossessed.
In most ways it was the usual Ruth Blum Letter from Home: four closely written blue pages, each one headed JUST A NOTE FROM RUTH. Her scrawl was nearly illegible, and Stanley had once complained he could not read a single word his mother-in-law wrote. “Why would you want to?” Patty had responded.
This one was full of Mom’s usual brand of news; for Ruth Blum recollection was a broad delta, spreading out from the moving point of the now in an ever-widening fan of interlocking relationships. Many of the people of whom her mother wrote were beginning to fade in Patty’s memory like photographs in an old album, but to Ruth all of them remained fresh. Her concerns for their health and her curiosity about their various doings never seemed to wane, and her prognoses were unfailingly dire. Her father was still having too many stomach-aches. He was sure it was just dyspepsia; the idea that he might have an ulcer, she wrote, would not cross his mind until he actually began coughing up blood and probably not even then. You know your father, dear-he works like a mule, and he also thinks like one sometimes, God should forgive me for saying so. Randi Harlengen had gotten her tubes tied, they took cysts as big as golf-balls out of her ovaries, no malignancy, thank God, but twenty-seven ovarian cysts, could you die! It was the water in New York City, she was quite sure of that-the city air was dirty, too, but she was convinced it was the water that really got to you after awhile. It built up deposits inside a person. She doubted if Patty knew how often she had thanked God that “you kids” were out in the country, where both air and water-but particularly the water-were healthier (to Ruth all of the South, including Atlanta and Birmingham, was the country). Aunt Margaret was feuding with the power company again. Stella Flanagan had gotten married again, some people never learned. Richie Huber had been fired again.
And in the middle of this chatty-and often catty-outpouring, in the middle of a paragraph, a propos of nothing which had gone before or which came after, Ruth Blum had casually asked the Dreaded Question: “so when are you and Stan going to make us grandparents? We’re all ready to start spoiling him (or her) rotten. And in case you hadn’t noticed, Patsy, we’re not getting any younger.” And then on to the Bruckner girl from down the block who had been sent home from school because she was wearing no bra and a blouse that you could see right through.
Feeling low and homesick for their old place in Traynor, feeling unsure and more than a little afraid of what might be ahead, Patty had gone into what was to become their bedroom and had lain down upon the mattress (the box spring was still out in the garage, and the mattress, lying all by itself on the big carpetless floor, looked like an artifact cast up on a strange yellow beach). She put her head in her arms and lay there weeping for nearly twenty minutes. She supposed that cry had been coming anyway. Her mother’s letter had just brought it on sooner, the way dust hurries the tickle in your nose into a sneeze.
Stanley wanted kids. She wanted kids. They were as compatible on that subject as they were on their enjoyment of Woody Alien’s films, their more or less regular attendance at synagogue, their political leanings, their dislike of marijuana, a hundred other things both great and small. There had been an extra room in the Traynor house, which they had split evenly down the middle. On the left he had a desk for working and a chair for reading; on the right she had a sewing machine and a cardtable where she did jigsaw puzzles. There had been an agreement between them about that room so strong they rarely spoke of it-it was simply there, like their noses or the wedding rings on their left hands. Someday that room would belong to Andy or to Jenny. But where was that child? The sewing machine and the baskets of fabric and the cardtable and the desk and the La-Z-Boy all kept their places, seeming each month to solidify their holds on their respective positions in the room and to further establish their legitimacy. So she thought, although she never could quite crystallize the thought; like the word pornographic, it was a concept that danced just beyond her ability to quantify. But she did remember one time when she got her period, sliding open the cupboard under the bathroom sink to get a sanitary napkin; she remembered looking at the box of Stayfree pads and thinking that the box looked almost smug, seemed almost to be saying: Hello, Patty! We are your children. We are the only children you will ever have, and we are hungry. Nurse us. Nurse us on blood.
In 1976, three years after she had thrown away the last cycle of Ovral tablets, they saw a doctor named Harkavay in Atlanta. “We want to know if there is something wrong,” Stanley said, “and we want to know if we can do anything about it if there is.”
They took the tests. They showed that Stanley’s sperm was perky, that Patty’s eggs were fertile, that all the channels that were supposed to be open were open.
Harkavay, who wore no wedding ring and who had the open, pleasant, ruddy face of a college grad student just back from a midterm skiing vacation in Colorado, told them that maybe it was just nerves. He told them that such a problem was by no means uncommon. He told them that there seemed to be a psychological correlative in such cases that was in some ways similar to sexual impotency-the more you wanted to, the less you could. They would have to relax. They ought, if they could, to forget all about procreation when they had sex.
Stan was grumpy on the way home. Patty asked him why.
“I never do,” he said.
“Do what?”
“Think of procreation during.”
She began to giggle, even though she was by then feeling a bit lonesome and frightened. And that night, lying in bed, long after she believed that Stanley must be asleep, he had frightened her by speaking out of the dark. His voice was flat but nevertheless choked with tears. “It’s me,” he said. “It’s my fault.”
She rolled toward him, groped for him, held him.
“Don’t be a stupid,” she said. But her heart was beating fast-much too fast. It wasn’t just that he had startled her; it was as if he had looked into her mind and read a secret conviction she held there but of which she had not known until this minute. With no rhyme, no reason, she felt-knew-that he was right. There was something wrong, and it wasn’t her. It was him. Something in him.
“Don’t be such a klutz,” she whispered fiercely against his shoulder. He was sweating lightly and she became suddenly aware that he was afraid. The fear was coming off him in cold waves; lying naked with him was suddenly like lying naked in front of an open refrigerator.
“I’m not a klutz and I’m not being stupid,” he said in that same voice, which was simultaneously flat and choked with emotion, “and you know it. It’s me. But I don’t know why.”
“You can’t know any such thing.” Her voice was harsh, scolding-her mother’s voice when her mother was afraid. And even as she scolded him a shudder ran through her body, twisting it like a whip. Stanley felt it and his arms tightened around her.
“Sometimes,” he said, “sometimes I think I know why. Sometimes I have a dream, a bad dream, and I wake up and I think, “I know now. I know what’s wrong.” Not just you not catching pregnant-everything. Everything that’s wrong with my life.”
“Stanley, nothing’s wrong with your life!”
“I don’t mean from inside,” he said. “From inside is fine. I’m talking about outside. Something that should be over and isn’t. I wake up from these dreams and think, “My whole pleasant life has been nothing but the eye of some storm I don’t understand.” I’m afraid. But then it just… fades. The way dreams do.”
She knew that he sometimes dreamed uneasily. On half a dozen occasions he had awakened her, thrashing and moaning. Probably there had been other times when she had slept through his dark interludes. Whenever she reached for him, asked him, he said the same thing: I can’t remember. Then he would reach for his cigarettes and smoke sitting up in bed, waiting for the residue of the dream to pass through his pores like bad sweat.
No kids. On the night of May 28th, 1985-the night of the bath-their assorted in-laws were still waiting to be grandparents. The extra room was still an extra room; the Stayfree Maxis and Stayfree Minis still occupied their accustomed places in the cupboard under the bathroom sink; the cardinal still paid its monthly visit. Her mother, who was much occupied with her own affairs but not entirely oblivious to her daughter’s pain, had stopped asking in her letters and when Stanley and Patty made their twice-yearly trips back to New York. There were no more humorous remarks about whether or not they were taking their vitamin E. Stanley had also stopped mentioning babies, but sometimes, when he didn’t know she was looking, she saw a shadow on his face. Some shadow. As if he were trying desperately to remember something.
Other than that one cloud, their lives were pleasant enough until the phone rang during the middle of Family Feud on the night of May 28th. Patty had six of Stan’s shirts, two of her blouses, her sewing kit, and her odd-button box; Stan had the new William Denbrough novel, not even out in paperback yet, in his hands. There was a snarling beast on the front of this book. On the back was a bald man wearing glasses.
Stan was sitting nearer the phone. He picked it up and said, “Hello-Uris residence.”
He listened, and a frown line delved between his eyebrows. “Who did you say?”
Patty felt an instant of fright. Later, shame would cause her to lie and tell her parents that she had known something was wrong from the instant the telephone had rung, but in reality there had only been that one instant, that one quick look up from her sewing. But maybe that was all right. Maybe they had both suspected that something was coming long before that phone call, something that didn’t fit with the nice house set tastefully back behind the low yew hedges, something so much a given that it really didn’t need much of an acknowledgment… that one sharp instant of fright, like the stab of a quickly withdrawn icepick, was enough.
Is it Mom? she mouthed at him in that instant, thinking that perhaps her father, twenty pounds overweight and prone to what he called “the bellyache” since his early forties, had had a heart attack.
Stan shook his head at her, and then smiled a bit at something the voice on the phone was saying. “You… you! Well, I’ll be goddamned! Mike! How did y-”
He fell silent again, listening. As his smile faded she recognized-or thought she did-his analytic expression, the one which said someone was unfolding a problem or explaining a sudden change in an ongoing situation or telling him something strange and interesting. This last was probably the case, she gathered. A new client? An old friend? Perhaps. She turned her attention back to the TV, where a woman was flinging her arms around Richard Dawson and kissing him madly. She thought that Richard Dawson must get kissed even more than the Blarney stone. She also thought she wouldn’t mind kissing him herself.
As she began searching for a black button to match the ones on Stanley’s blue denim shirt, Patty was vaguely aware that the conversation was settling into a smoother groove-Stanley grunted occasionally, and once he asked: “Are you sure, Mike?” Finally, after a very long pause, he said, “All right, I understand. Yes, I… Yes. Yes, everything. I have the picture. I… what?… No, I can’t absolutely promise that, but I’ll consider it carefully. You know that… oh?… He did?… Well, you bet! Of course I do. Yes… sure… thank you… yes. Bye-bye.” He hung up.
Patty glanced at him and saw him staring blankly into space over the TV set. On her show, the audience was applauding the Ryan family, which had just scored two hundred and eighty points, most of them by guessing that the audience survey would answer “math” in response to the question “What class will people say Junior hates most in school?” The Ryans were jumping up and down and screaming joyfully. Stanley, however, was frowning. She would later tell her parents she thought Stanley’s face had looked a little off-color, and so she did, but she neglected to tell them she had dismissed it at the time as only a trick of the table-lamp, with its green glass shade.
“Who was that, Stan?”
“Hmmmm?” He looked around at her. She thought the look on his face was one of gentle abstraction, perhaps mixed with minor annoyance. It was only later, replaying the scene in her mind again and again, that she began to believe it was the expression of a man who was methodically unplugging himself from reality, one cord at a time. The face of a man who was heading out of the blue and
