Her familiar unbending voice awakened in him a kind of hungry longing, not for Margaret but for the peace he had once known.
“You sent me a postdated check,” she said. “I can’t allow that. It’s already five days past the first. You dated your check for the twelfth.”
“Well, I have no money. I haven’t got it. You can’t send me to prison for that. I’ll be lucky if I can raise it by the twelfth.”
She answered, “You better get it, Tommy.”
“Yes? What for?” he said. “Tell me. For the sake of what? To tell lies about me to everyone? You—”
She cut him off. “You know what for. I’ve got the boys to bring up.”
Wilhelm in the narrow booth broke into a heavy sweat. He dropped his head and shrugged while with his fingers he arranged nickels, dimes, and quarters in rows. “I’m doing my best,” he said. “I’ve had some bad luck. As a matter of fact, it’s been so bad that I don’t know where. I am. I couldn’t tell you what day of the week this is. I can’t think straight. I’d better not even try. This has been one of those days, Margaret. May I never live to go through another like it. I mean that with all my heart. So I’m not going to try to do any thinking today. Tomorrow I’m going to see some guys. One is a sales manager. The other is in television. But not to act,” he hastily added. “On the business end.”
“That’s just some more of your talk, Tommy,” she said. “You ought to patch things up with Rojax Corporation. They’d take you back. You’ve got to stop thinking like a youngster.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well,” she said, measured and unbending, remorselessly unbending, “you still think like a youngster. But you can’t do that any more. Every other day you want to make a new start. But in eighteen years you’ll be eligible for retirement. Nobody wants to hire a new man of your age.”
“I know. But listen, you don’t have to sound so hard. I can’t get on my knees to them. And really you don’t have to sound so hard. I haven’t done you so harm.”
“Tommy, I have to chase you and ask you for money that you owe us, and I hate it.”
She hated also to be told that her voice was hard.
“I’m making an effort to control myself,” she told him.
He could picture her, her graying bangs cut with strict fixity above her pretty, decisive face. She prided herself on being fair-minded. We could not bear, he thought, to know what we do. Even though blood is spilled, though the breath of life is taken from someone’s nostrils. This is the way of the weak; quiet and fair. And then smash! They smash!
“Rojax take me back? I’d have to crawl back. They don’t need me. After so many years I should have got stock in the firm. How can I support the three of you, and live myself, on half the territory? And why should I even try when you won’t lift a finger to help? I sent you back to school, didn’t I? At that time you said—”
His voice was rising. She did not like that and intercepted him. “You misunderstood me,” she said.
“You must realize you’re killing me. You can’t be as blind as all that. Thou shalt not kill! Don’t you remember that?”
She said, “You’re just raving now. When you calm down it’ll be different. I have great confidence in your earning ability.”
“Margaret, you don’t grasp the situation. You’ll have to get a job.”
“Absolutely not. I’m not going to have two young children running loose.”
“They’re not babies,” Wilhelm said. “Tommy is fourteen. Paulie is going to be ten.”
“Look,” Margaret said in her deliberate manner. “We can’t continue this conversation if you’re going to yell so, Tommy. They’re at a dangerous age. There are teen-aged gangs — the parents working, or the families broken up.”
Once again she was reminding him that it was he who had left her. She had the bringing up of the children as her burden, while he must expect to pay the price of his freedom.
Freedom! he thought with consuming bitterness. Ashes in his mouth, not freedom. Give me my children. For they are mine too.
Can you be the woman I lived with? he started to say. Have you forgotten that we slept so long together? Must you now deal with me like this, and have no mercy?
He would be better off with Margaret again than he was today. This was what she wanted to make him feel, and she drove it home. “Are you in misery?” she was saying. “But you have deserved it.” And he could not return to her any more than he could beg Rojax to take him back. If it cost him his life, he could not. Margaret had ruined him with Olive. She hit him and hit him, beat him, battered him, wanted to beat the very life out of him.
“Margaret, I want you please to reconsider about work. You have that degree now. Why did I pay your tuition?”
“Because it seemed practical. But it isn’t. Growing boys need parental authority and a home.”
He begged her, “Margaret, go easy on me. You ought to. I’m at the end of my rope and feel that I’m suffocating. You don’t want to be responsible for a person’s destruction. You’ve got to let up. I feel I’m about to burst.” His face had expanded. He struck a blow upon the tin and wood and nails of the wall of the booth. “You’ve got to let me breathe. If I should keel over, what then? And it’s something I can never understand about you. How you can treat someone like this whom you lived with so long. Who gave you the best of himself. Who tried. Who loved you.” Merely to pronounce the word “love” made him tremble.
“Ah,” she said with a sharp breath. “Now we’re coming to it. How did you imagine it was going to be, big shot? Everything made smooth for you? I thought you were leading up to this.”
She had not, perhaps, intended to reply as harshly as she did, but she brooded a great deal and now she could not forbear to punish him and make him feel pains like those she had to undergo.
He struck the wall again, this time with his knuckles, and he had scarcely enough air in his lungs to speak in a whisper, because his heart pushed upward with a frightful pressure. He got up and stamped his feet in the narrow enclosure.
“Haven’t I always done my best?” he yelled, though his voice sounded weak and thin to his own ears. “Everything comes from me and nothing back again to me. There’s no law that’ll punish this, but you are committing a crime against me. Before God — and that’s no joke. I mean that. Before God! Sooner or later the boys will know it.”
In a firm tone, levelly, Margaret said to him, “I won’t stand to be howled at. When you can speak normally and have something sensible to say I’ll listen. But not to this.” She hung up.
Wilhelm tried to tear the apparatus from the wall. He ground his teeth and seized the black box with insane digging fingers and made a stifled cry and pulled. Then he saw an elderly lady staring through the glass door, utterly appalled by him, and he ran from the booth, leaving a large amount of change on the shelf. He hurried down the stairs and into the street.
On Broadway it was still bright afternoon and the gassy air was almost motionless under the leaden spokes of sunlight, and sawdust footprints lay about the doorways of butcher shops and fruit stores. And the great, great crowd, the inexhaustible current of millions of every race and kind pouring out, pressing round, of every age, of every genius, possessors of every human secret, antique and future, in every face the refinement of one particular motive or essence —
“I’ll get a divorce if it’s the last thing I do,” he swore. “As for Dad — As for Dad — I’ll have to sell the car for junk and pay the hotel. I’ll have to go on my knees to Olive and say, ‘Stand by me a while’ Don’t let her win. Olive!” And he thought, I’ll try to start again with Olive. In fact, I must. Olive loves me. Olive—
Beside a row of limousines near the curb he thought he saw Dr. Tamkin. Of course he had been mistaken before about the hat with the cocoa-colored band and didn’t want to make the same mistake twice. But wasn’t that Tamkin who was speaking so earnestly, with pointed shoulders, to someone under the canopy of the funeral parlor? For this was a huge funeral. He looked for the singular face under the dark gray, fashionable hatbrim. There were two open cars filled with flowers, and a policeman tried to keep a path open to pedestrians. Right at the canopy- pole, now wasn’t that that damned Tamkin talking away with a solemn face, gesticulating with an open hand?
