In the last moments of shopping she found a walnut pipe rack and humidor thing for Ben for which she paid $4.98. In the shop she had been pleased by the way it looked, but when she unwrapped it to gift-wrap it herself, the finish had that shiny look of cheapness. After she had worked on it a long time, cutting the gloss by carefully rubbing it with steel wool, it was much more handsome.
Ben’s present to her was a small antique vase he found in a shop on Second Avenue. She could only guess the amount of stolen time used in finding something so lovely that was within the limit they had set.
The kids had prepared long and discouragingly expensive lists. Ben and Ginny had budgeted $100 for them, and due to the increased pressure of work because of the end of the year, Ben had been unable to help her but, as he told her later, she had performed a vast miracle of judgment and selection.
The bonus came through on January tenth. It was for $1500. Ben managed, for Ginny’s sake, to conceal his disappointment. He knew it was a bit churlish of him to feel disappointment. There could easily have been no bonus at all. But he had so carefully worked out just how he would disburse the anticipated $3500, and had dwelt upon how much that amount would ease the endless tension—
Ginny, thinking it came as a surprise to him, too, was delighted. And it seemed to dilute some of her growing resentment toward National. He said nothing to decrease her pleasure. He did not tell her that, because it was considered 1965 income, a tiny additional tax nip would be taken out of each monthly check for the rest of the year.
He paid $600 on his $2200 note at the Lawton National Bank, reduced the insurance loan by $400, and left $500 in the checking account for emergencies.
And then began the time of waiting. The winter was exceptionally severe again, the fuel bills high. The reserve shrank to $300. The house thermostat stopped working and had to be replaced. Ladybug had flu for a week and, in spite of Ginny’s precautions, she gave it to Chris, and the prescribed antibiotics were $14 a patient. Ben, returning late from a stormy meeting of the Civic Betterment Committee (men who work for National take an active interest in the affairs of their home communities), took to the deep snowy ditch to avoid a skidding drunk, and the tow-truck fee was $15. The water company, with the approval of all agencies concerned, slapped a special $20 assessment on all users.
These were the small things. A very special guest, a member of the board of directors of National, drops a handsome Danish cocktail glass on the hearth. Once there were a dozen. Now there are seven. So for any special entertaining for more than seven in the future, a new set must be purchased. Little things. Like being pecked to death by sparrows.
So the little things make you irritable with each other. But it is not only the little things that corrode dispositions. It is the unspoken awareness, always just around a dark corner of the mind, that big things can happen, and do happen, and the process of life is in part the knowledge that they will happen and in being prepared for them. They lived with the knowledge of their defenselessness. In a primitive culture, they would have worn charms to ward off evil, and had they been able to believe in the efficiency of the charms, they would have felt secure.
But in suburbia there are no magic things you can wear suspended from a string hung around your neck. You pray for breathing space, for time to plant your feet.
Love was there, in abundance. But an endless worry about money is an astringent that sucks the juice from love, renders it wan and slow-moving. And penury is, perhaps, more endurable in matching surroundings. It becomes grotesque in a $40,000 house.
The stress of enduring an unfair situation makes people seek outlets for their irritability. Ben and Ginny were handy targets for each other. The apologies, in time, became more a matter of protocol than of guilt. And each of them built up a distorted picture of what the other one thought. Ben taught himself to believe Ginny thought him a spineless conformist who dared not complain for fear of upsetting plans so far in the golden future they were meaningless. Ginny grew to believe that Ben considered her spoiled and petulant, unwilling to endure all this for his sake, thinking only of pleasures she was missing. And, in the perversity of all mortals, they made more effort to fit the mistaken conception than to correct it. Some of the warmth went out of the house, and a lot of the closeness went out of the marriage during the cold months, and the children felt it and were troubled by it, and acted in ways unlike themselves without knowing why — knowing only that they more frequently deserved punishment, and taking a curious satisfaction in receiving it.
There was no snow in Columbus, Indiana, on the morning of the third day of March, and the temperature was in the low twenties, and dropping steadily. It had been above freezing during the night, and there had been a hard driving rain, which had frozen in a cellophane skim over everything the rain had touched.
Martha Weldon had got up early, as was her habit, and had the coffee on before Geraldine Davis came down, smiling, yawning, to the kitchen. Martha was a tall, heavy woman with an air of pious thoughtfulness, an authoritative, rather ponderous presence. Geraldine was also a widow, and she was four years younger than Martha. Geraldine had begun to “help out” at Martha’s house seven years ago. She was a small, lean, tireless woman of good spirits but with a talent for malice. Her life income from her husband’s insurance was too tiny to support her. She made ends meet by helping Martha and two other elderly women. She had the knack of keeping it on the basis of a friendship between equals, so that the necessary matter of slipping money to her had to be done with greatest delicacy.
Martha also had a small income. It had been larger quite a few years ago, and it was fortunate that, as it dwindled, her only living son, Ben, had been able to contribute to her support.
Three years ago one of the women Geraldine helped had died, and the other had gone to Oklahoma to live with a daughter. Geraldine told her problems to Martha. As a result, Martha suggested she give up her miniature apartment and move in with her. There was more than enough room. They would be good company for each other. It seemed an excellent arrangement.
After breakfast on that cool, bright morning Martha sat at the desk in the living room and wrote to Ben and Ginny. She knew that Geraldine knew what she was doing, and she also knew that it would give Geraldine her usual opportunity to make overly casual comments about how long it had been since Martha had seen her grandchildren, and how young people these days lacked consideration, and how you’d think a boy doing as well as Martha kept telling her he was doing, making all that money and all, could afford to send more. Maybe he just never thought of it. Young people were certainly thoughtless.
It was a few minutes after nine when Martha stepped out the front door to put the letter in the mailbox attached to the post at the head of the porch steps. The board floor of the porch was painted a dark green. She took two heavy steps on the dry wood, and a third step onto the slick, transparent, invisible ice. She struck the edge of the top step with a terrible force, felt her thigh snap, and tumbled in a white roaring spin of pain to the cement sidewalk, down the four shallow steps of the porch, and lay there moaning, rolling her head from side to side. She was half aware that Geraldine had come to her, that Geraldine was in great panic. And when Geraldine made a stupid futile effort to pull at her, as though to drag her into the house, Martha screamed once, with the strength of a young woman, and fainted.
Ginny phoned the office at 12:40 and caught Ben just as he was leaving for lunch. Geraldine had not been very coherent. Martha had had a bad fall, and was in the hospital, and Ben should come at once. He told Ginny he would leave right away. He kept a small travel case with the essentials at the office for emergency business trips. His secretary had not left yet. He had her check flights for him and make a reservation. He could use his air-travel card and reimburse the company. The other men were out to lunch. He left it to her to tell them the situation, and he dictated a hasty memo that made staff assignments of the work he was handling, and told her to reshuffle his appointments as best she could.