Margaret Millar
Experiment in Springtime
To my husband, Kenneth Millar
Chapter 1
In April, Charles almost died. His wife, Martha, nursed him assiduously and with a certain grim efficiency that Charles, in his moments of clarity, found amusing. Even on the point of death, he knew he bored her.
Perhaps it might have been different if there had been anything heroic about his illness — if he had leaped glamorously off a high building or had plunged into the lake to save a child. But the fact was that he had simply come home from the office with a bad headache and had accepted the two headache tablets given to him by his wife, Martha. It was not, of course, Martha’s fault that he was allergic to so many things and that the headache tablets turned out to be aspirin. Aspirin, as the doctor pointed out and as Charles later had good reason to believe, was sheer poison to him.
The doctor, a man called MacNeil, seemed very interested in the case and anxious to substantiate his own diagnosis. Nearly every time he came, he brought with him old medical journals and newspaper clippings in which he read about an old man in Manchester who had died of taking one aspirin and a young boy in Kansas who became ill when he touched one. Charles listened vaguely. Manchester and Kansas seemed equally remote. His own world had narrowed to four walls, and there were only two people living in it, himself and Martha. Other people drifted in and out, other sounds penetrated the walls, and the clock ticked away the minutes here as inexorably as in the outer world, but time and space had become more intimately related. Space was this room, and time could be measured by the increasing boredom on Martha’s face.
Each flicker of her eyelids and movement of her hands, every inflection of her voice, had come to mean something to Charles. The very manner in which she picked up a book to read aloud indicated to him whether she liked the book and whether she wanted to read at that particular moment or not.
“You don’t have to read to me,” he told her. “Brown could. He doesn’t do much else around the house.”
“But I want to.”
“Well, all right, then.”
He didn’t enjoy being read to any more than she enjoyed reading, but it was too difficult to tell her that outright. He was forced to observe her more and more closely, and if an inadvertent sigh or gesture gave her away, he would ask her to change books or to leave him alone so he could rest.
It was a queer reversal of things that it was she, and not himself, who was under observation. He was the patient, she was the nurse. It was Martha who should have been watching him and calculating his reactions. She did watch him, naturally, but with the detached and professional scrutiny of a trained nurse, as if he had, in becoming ill, ceased to have any identity apart from the illness. He was no longer Charles, her husband, but a piece of anonymous broken-down machinery. Machinery could be mended with patience and care; you don’t have to think about it or wonder about it.
He disliked having her nurse him at all, allowing her to see him helpless day after day, as dependent as a baby. Babies were rather cuter than men of thirty-six, however. You could nurse a baby without despising it.
Here again, as in the case of reading aloud, it was hard to say anything. He hinted broadly sometimes.
“Why don’t you take your mother and Laura to a movie this afternoon?”
“I don’t really care for movies. Besides, Laura sees too many, they give her silly ideas.”
“All girls sixteen have silly ideas anyway.”
“I want Laura to be different.”
Laura was her younger sister but Martha always talked about her as if she were her daughter.
“Martha.”
“Yes?”
“I’d like to have known you when you were sixteen.”
She seemed surprised. “Why?”
“I suppose I’d just like to know what you were like.”
“I wasn’t very interesting.”
The subject was closed. He could never entice her into talking about the past. She would listen gravely and patiently to his hour-long accounts of his own boyhood, and the times Brown had kept him out of trouble by lying to his mother, his prep-school escapades, his college friends, his mother, his troubles, but she was never tempted to return his confidences. Occasionally he considered the possibility that the past might be too painful for her to discuss, though he realized that this was unlikely. From her mother and sister he had learned enough of her background to know that she was, apart from her prettiness, an ordinary city girl from an ordinary family who had lived in an ordinary house. She went to high school and business college, and he had met her in the office of a friend of his where she was a stenographer. She was twenty-one when he married her five years ago.
That was all. There was nothing exceptional about Martha except that he loved her. Everything that she did do, or didn’t do, had been important to him ever since he met her. He could not afford to lie here in bed, inviting her to despise him for his weakness. He must, therefore, prove to her that he was not at all helpless. His body might be temporarily useless but he had his weapons. He could fling words across the room like knives. The machinery might be broken but it must not remain anonymous, and knives could draw attention as well as blood. Especially when you had so much time to choose and sharpen and take aim.
“Martha, why did you marry me?”
“Now, Charles. You know the doctor said not to talk too much.”
“But I want to know. Why did you?”
“I can’t read to you if you’re going to keep interrupting me.”
“I don’t see why you can’t answer a question like that.”
“Because it isn’t the kind of thing people ask. It’s so... so...”
“Personal?” he said dryly. “That’s the word you want, isn’t it?”
“No. I meant, isn’t it obvious why people marry?”
“My dear Martha, could you possibly mean sex?”
“I don’t want to...”
“Could you possibly expect me to believe that you married me because you wanted to go to bed with me?”
“Now, Charles. You’re getting upset.” She added earnestly, “The trouble is, you think too much.”
“That’s the trouble, is it?”
“The doctor said...”
The doctor said a great many things, most of them to Martha alone, downstairs in the drawing room. She found many of his phrases confusing, not because she couldn’t understand them (for Dr. MacNeil took great pains to clarify every statement), but because they reminded her of other things. “Anaphylactic” could easily be the name of a weed killer; “histamine” sounded like a flower, and “allergy” would start her off planning the menus for the week. She couldn’t help her mind wandering. And the more her mind wandered, the more pains MacNeil took to explain everything; so the sessions in the drawing room were sometimes intolerably long. They gave her, moreover, the feeling that she was in a defensive position, and that it was Charles, not MacNeil, who was at the bottom of all this talking. For MacNeil had begun to ask her as many questions about herself as about Charles, treating the case as a double one. She rather resented this. She had never been ill a day in her life, and she had done as much to make Charles well again as anyone possibly could. He had no right to question her.
At the end of April MacNeil had said that Charles could sit up in a chair for a little while each day.
She relayed the news to Charles immediately. “The doctor says you may get up as soon as you’ll make the effort.”
“Really?” Charles was lying with his eyes closed and his long thin hands crossed on his chest. He looked dead and quite innocent. Purified.