“Lovell and Percy are dead,” he said. “They buried them in the earth.”
“I’m late, Beaufort,” I said. “I’ll miss my plane. It was nice to see you. Goodbye.” And so off to the sea. THE FOURTH ALARM
Sit in the sun drinking in. It is ten in the morning. Sunday. Mrs. Uxbridge is off somewhere with the children. Mrs. Uxbridge is the housekeeper. She does the cooking and takes care of Peter and Louise.
It is autumn. The leaves have turned. The morning is windless, but the leaves fall by the hundreds. In order to see anything?a leaf or a blade of grass?you have, I think, to know the keenness of love. Mrs. Uxbridge is sixty-three, my wife is away, and Mrs. Smithsonian (who lives on the other side of town) is seldom in the mood these days, so I seem to miss some part of the morning as if the hour had a threshold or a series of thresholds that I cannot cross. Passing a football might do it but Peter is too young and my only football-playing neighbor goes to church.
My wife, Bertha, is expected on Monday. She comes out from the city on Monday and returns on Tuesday. Bertha is a good-looking young woman with a splendid figure. Her eyes, I think, are a little close together and she is sometimes peevish. When the children were young she had a peevish way of disciplining them. “If you don’t eat the nice breakfast Mummy has cooked for you before I count three,” she would say, “I will send you back to bed. One. Two. Three….” I heard it again at dinner. “If you don’t eat the nice dinner Mummy has cooked for you before I count three I will send you to bed without any supper. One. Two. Three….” I heard it again. “If you don’t pick up your toys before Mummy counts three Mummy will throw them all away. One. Two. Three….” So it went on through the bath and bedtime and one two three was their lullaby. I sometimes thought she must have learned to count when she was an infant and that when the end came she would call a countdown for the Angel of Death. If you’ll excuse me I’ll get another glass of gin.
When the children were old enough to go to school, Bertha got a job teaching social studies in the sixth grade. This kept her occupied and happy and she said she had always wanted to be a teacher. She had a reputation for strictness. She wore dark clothes, dressed her hair simply, and expected contrition and obedience from her pupils. To vary her life she joined an amateur theatrical group. She played the maid in Angel Street and the old crone in Desmonds Acres. The friends she made in the theatre were all pleasant people and I enjoyed taking her to their parties. It is important to know that Bertha does not drink. She will take a Dubonnet politely but she does not enjoy drinking.
Through her theatrical friends, she learned that a nude show called Ozamanides II was being cast. She told me this and everything that followed. Her teaching contract gave her ten days’ sick leave, and claiming to be sick one day she went into New York. Ozamanides was being cast at a producer’s office in midtown, where she found a line of a hundred or more men and women waiting to be interviewed. She took an unpaid bill out of her pocketbook, and waving this as if it were a letter she bucked the line saying, “Excuse me please, excuse me, I have an appointment…” No one protested and she got quickly to the head of the line, where a secretary took her name, Social Security number, etc. She was told to go into a cubicle and undress. She was then shown into an office where there were four men. The interview, considering the circumstances, was very circumspect. She was told that she would be nude throughout the performance. She would be expected to simulate or perform copulation twice during the performance and participate in a love pile that involved the audience.
I remember the night when she told me all of this. It was in our living room. The children had been put to bed. She was very happy. There was no question about that. “There I was naked,” she said, “but I wasn’t in the least embarrassed. The only thing that worried me was that my feet might get dirty. It was an old-fashioned kind of place with framed theatre programs on the wall and a big photograph of Ethel Barrymore. There I sat naked in front of these strangers and I felt for the first time in my life that I’d found myself. I found myself in nakedness. I felt like a new woman, a better woman. To be naked and unashamed in front of strangers was one of the most exciting experiences I’ve ever had.”
I didn’t know what to do. I still don’t know, on this Sunday morning, what I should have done. I guess I should have hit her. I said she couldn’t do it. She said I couldn’t stop her. I mentioned the children and she said this experience would make her a better mother. “When I took off my clothes,” she said, “I felt as if I had rid myself of everything mean and small.” Then I said she’d never get the job because of her appendicitis scar. A few minutes later the phone rang. It was the producer offering her a part. “Oh, I’m so happy,” she said. “Oh, how wonderful and rich and strange life can be when you stop playing out the roles that your parents and their friends wrote out for you. I feel like an explorer.”
The fitness of what I did then or rather left undone still confuses me. She broke her teaching contract, joined Equity, and began rehearsals. As soon as Ozamanides opened she hired Mrs. Uxbridge and took a hotel apartment near the theatre. I asked for a divorce. She said she saw no reason for a divorce. Adultery and cruelty have well-marked courses of action but what can a man do when his wife wants to appear naked on the stage? When I was younger I had known some burlesque girls and some of them were married and had children. However, they did what Bertha was going to do only on the midnight Saturday show, and as I remember their husbands were third-string comedians and the kids always looked hungry.
A day or so later I went to a divorce lawyer. He said a consent decree was my only hope. There are no precedents for simulated carnality in public as grounds for divorce in New York State and no lawyer will take a divorce case without a precedent. Most of my friends were tactful about Bertha’s new life. I suppose most of them went to see her, but I put it off for a month or more. Tickets were expensive and hard to get. It was snowing the night I went to the theatre, or what had been a theatre. The proscenium arch had been demolished, the set was a collection of used tires, and the only familiar features were the seats and the aisles. Theatre audiences have always confused me. I suppose this is because you find an incomprehensible variety of types thrust into what was an essentially domestic and terribly ornate interior. There were all kinds there that night. Rock music was playing when I came in. It was that deafening old-fashioned kind of rock they used to play in places like Arthur. At eight-thirty the houselights dimmed, and the cast?there were fourteen?came down the aisles. Sure enough, they were all naked excepting Ozamanides, who wore a crown.
I can’t describe the performance. Ozamanides had two sons, and I think he murdered them, but I’m not sure. The sex was general. Men and women embraced one another and Ozamanides embraced several men. At one point a stranger, sitting in the seat on my right, put his hand on my knee. I didn’t want to reproach him for a human condition, nor did I want to encourage him. I removed his hand and experienced a deep nostalgia for the innocent
