Another door into the hallway opened, and she turned and saw a man in his shirtsleeves, shaking his head. She ran into the back hall and, crying, started down the fire stairs. Like the stairs in a monument, they seemed to have no beginning and no end, but at last she came down into a dark hall where tricycles and perambulators were stored, and found her way into the lobby.
WHEN Mr. Bruce and Mrs. Sheridan left the hotel, they walked through the Park, which, in the late-winter sunshine, smelled faintly like a wood. Crossing a bridle path, they saw Miss Prince, the children’s riding mistress. She was giving a lesson to a fat little girl whose horse was on a lead. “Mrs. Sheridan!” she said. “Mr. Bruce! Isn’t this fortunate!” She stopped the horses. “I wanted to speak to both of you,” she said. “I’m having a little gymkhana next month, and I want your children to ride in it. I want them all three to ride in the good-hands class. And perhaps the next year,” she said, turning to the fat little girl, “you too may ride in the good-hands class.”
They promised to allow their children to take part in the gymkhana, and Miss Prince said goodbye and resumed her riding lesson. In the Seventies they heard the roaring of a lion. They walked to the southern edge of the Park. It was then late in the afternoon. From the Plaza he telephoned his office. Among the messages was one from the maid; he was to stop at the Chardin Club and bring Katherine home.
From the sidewalk in front of the dancing school they could hear the clatter of the piano. The Grand March had begun. They moved through the crowd in the vestibule and stood in the door of the ballroom, looking for their children. Through the open door they could see Mrs. Bailey, the dancing teacher, and her two matrons curtsying stiffly as the children came to them in couples. The boys wore white gloves. The girls were simply dressed. Two by two the children bowed, or curtsied, and joined the grown people at the door. Then Mr. Bruce saw Katherine. As he watched his daughter doing obediently what was expected of her, it struck him that he and the company that crowded around him were all cut out of the same cloth. They were bewildered and confused in principle, too selfish or too unlucky to abide by the forms that guarantee the permanence of a society, as their fathers and mothers had done. Instead, they put the burden of order onto their children and filled their days with specious rites and ceremonies.
One of the dancing teachers came up to them and said, “Oh, I’m so glad to see you, Mrs. Sheridan. We were afraid that you’d been taken sick. Very soon after the class began this afternoon, Mr. Sheridan came and got the two girls. He said he was going to take them out to the country, and we wondered if you were ill. He seemed very upset.”
The assistant smiled and wandered off.
Mrs. Sheridan’s face lost its color and got dark. She looked very old. It was hot in the ballroom, and Mr. Bruce led her out the door into the freshness of a winter evening, holding her, supporting her really, for she might have fallen. “It will be all right,” he kept saying, “it will be all right, my darling, it will be all right.” THE WORM IN THE APPLE
THE CRUTCHMANS were so very, very happy and so temperate in all their habits and so pleased with everything that came their way that one was bound to suspect a worm in their rosy apple and that the extraordinary rosiness of the fruit was only meant to conceal the gravity and the depth of the infection. Their house, for instance, on Hill Street with all those big glass windows. Who but someone suffering from a guilt complex would want so much light to pour into their rooms? And all the wall-to-wall carpeting as if an inch of bare floor (there was none) would touch on some deep memory of unrequition and loneliness. And there was a certain necrophilic ardor to their gardening. Why be so intense about digging holes and planting seeds and watching them come up? Why this morbid concern with the earth? She was a pretty woman with that striking pallor you so often find in nymphomaniacs. Larry was a big man who used to garden without a shirt, which may have shown a tendency to infantile exhibitionism.
They moved happily out to Shady Hill after the war. Larry had served in the Navy. They had two happy children: Rachel and Tom. But there were already some clouds on their horizon. Larry’s ship had been sunk in the war and he had spent four days on a raft in the Mediterranean and surely this experience would make him skeptical about the comforts and songbirds of Shady Hill and leave him with some racking nightmares. But what was perhaps more serious was the fact that Helen was rich. She was the only daughter of old Charlie Simpsonone of the last of the industrial buccaneers?who had left her with a larger income than Larry would ever take away from his job at Melcher & Thaw. The dangers in this situation are well known. Since Larry did not have to make a living?since he lacked any incentive?he might take it easy, spend too much time on the golf links, and always have a glass in his hand. Helen would confuse financial with emotional independence and damage the delicate balances within their marriage. But Larry seemed to have no nightmares and Helen spread her income among the charities and lived a comfortable but a modest life. Larry went to his job each morning with such enthusiasm that you might think he was trying to escape from something. His participation in the life of the community was so vigorous that he must have been left with almost no time for self-examination. He was everywhere: he was at the communion rail, the fifty-yard line, he played the oboe with the Chamber Music Club, drove the fire truck, served on the school board, and rode the 8:03 into New York every morning. What was the sorrow that drove him?
He may have wanted a larger family. Why did they only have two children? Why not three or four? Was there perhaps some breakdown in their relationship after the birth of Tom? Rachel, the oldest, was terribly fat when she was a girl and quite aggressive in a mercenary way. Every spring she would drag an old dressing table out of the garage and set it up on the sidewalk with a sign saying: FRESH LEMONADE .15?. Tom had pneumonia when he was six and nearly died, but he recovered and there were no visible complications. The children may have felt rebellious about the conformity of their parents, for they were exacting conformists. Two cars? Yes. Did they go to church? Every single Sunday they got to their knees and prayed with ardor. Clothing? They couldn’t have been more punctilious in their observance of the sumptuary laws. Book clubs, local art and music lover associations, athletics and cards?they were up to their necks in everything. But if the children were rebellious they concealed their rebellion and seemed happily to love their parents and happily to be loved in return, but perhaps there was in this love the ruefulness of some deep disappointment. Perhaps he was impotent. Perhaps she was frigid?but hardly, with that pallor. Everyone in the community with wandering hands had given them both a try but they had all been put off. What was the source of this constancy? Were they frightened? Were they prudish? Were they monogamous? What was at the bottom of this appearance of happiness?
As their children grew one might look to them for the worm in the apple. They would be rich, they would inherit Helen’s fortune, and we might see here, moving over them, the shadow that so often falls upon
