John D. MacDonald
Forever Yours
This summer, they had agreed, is all we need. If we try, we can get back what we used to have — because basically it is still a good marriage.
During the days alone at the lakeshore cottage, Carol tried to veer away from the disloyal thought that perhaps they were being too surgical about it. Mel had insisted, his eyes grave, steady, that their only hope was to talk it out, to have a quiet summer. So Donny, at seven, went to a good camp over near Old Forge. They knew he was too young but, as Mel said, it would do the boy more good than a home life where the tension was something you could cut with a knife.
On Wednesdays Carol’s sister, Jeana, would drive up from Utica to the cottage on the lake and together they would go over to the camp where Donny was. He was round and brown and the sun had bleached his hair. When Carol hugged him he wiggled with a new manly impatience, and he smelled of fields and wool blankets.
Jeana would ask, usually on the drive back to the lake, “How is it going?”
And Carol would make her face bright. “It’s going to be all right, Jeana. Really it is.”
“It better be. You’re my two favorite people, hon.”
Like that man long, long ago — something about day by day in every way. Keep saying it is going to be all right, and maybe it will be.
Mel was taking Fridays off, and he would leave Utica at five every Thursday night and get to the cottage at about six-thirty. On Mondays he would leave at seven in the morning. By mutual agreement he brought no one up with him. Because this was a summer for mending a marriage.
When it was dark and she couldn’t see his face, it was easier to talk. The nights when they sat on the small screened porch overlooking the lake were the best nights. Then she could keep her voice calm. “I don’t want to be Victorian about it, darling. Mostly it’s a feeling of something very special having been lost. I’m not just trying to hurt you when I say that. There’s pride involved. I mean, as a woman I want to be enough for my husband. I don’t want him snuffling around for something he thinks I can’t provide.”
“Snuffling,” he said mildly. “Quite a choice of words. I went off the beam, Carol. We start with that. But it wasn’t a case of looking for something. I’ve explained all that. We were afraid of what a jury might do to our case if she got to the stand. I went over to Syracuse to sound her out on an out-of-court settlement. You see, I started out with the idea of being as charming as possible. It meant money for our client if I could sell her the idea. It was just one of those fatal coincidences that the ice storm hit just as I got to her house. Only a fool would have tried to drive back down that hill into Syracuse. This isn’t an excuse, either, but being isolated like that — no traffic moving, the wires going down and candlelight — without electricity her furnace wouldn’t work, and I built a big fireplace fire—”
“I don’t want to hear any more,” she said harshly.
“I just want to say that even though I’ve never thought of myself as exactly a tower of strength, Carol, I never thought I’d get into... a deal like that. You see, you always have been enough.”
“But it wasn’t only that, Mel. You know that.”
She heard his tired sigh in the darkness. “That’s the worst part, the part I want you to find the strength to forgive — that I let it go on. The damage had been done. I guess that’s the way I rationalized it. That’s why I kept going back, telling Helverson that I was getting closer and closer to talking her into a settlement. Then Grace saw us in a bar in Syracuse when I was supposed to be in Albany... It all sounds so... so trite.”
She spoke eagerly. “That’s just it. Trite. Small. Nasty. The sort of thing that happens to other people, not to us. We’ve been married nearly nine years, Mel. I used to hear gossip about other couples, and it would always give me a little selfish, warm feeling. I knew our marriage was good and we’d never get — into a mess. What would have happened if Grace hadn’t seen you?”
“That’s where the timing was really bad, because by then I had begun to take stock and see what I was doing to myself and to you. The woman wasn’t worth it. She’d begun to get on my nerves. It would have been the last time, in any case.”
“And you wouldn’t have mentioned it, would you?”
“No,” he said flatly.
“Maybe that’s the part I can’t forgive so easily, darling. Because, you see, even before Grace came to me, panting with her news. I knew something was wrong with you. You’d gone away from me. You were on the other side of some strange wall. I thought it was business worries, or some troublesome case. I didn’t want to pry. I thought you’d tell me in your own time.”
He reached out in the darkness and found her hand. “The important thing is to get over it — somehow. Rebuild trust and confidence.”
“And love.”
“Love is still there. You know that. Carol. A thing like this smashes your pride, but it doesn’t kill love.”
“I hope you’re right, darling.”
“Do you see how helpless I am? What a stupid thing to say: ‘Dear, it won’t happen again.’ I know it won’t, but it sounds so asinine to try to say it.”
After a while she said. “There are times every day when I forget it. I really do. Then something always brings it back. I get — pictures in my mind — of you and her. It’s like a madness. I can’t stop thinking then. I can’t turn my mind away from it. I hate you then.”
“We’re getting somewhere, talking it out this way. We are, Carol.”
“Or are we just stirring it with a stick?” she said, almost sullenly.
“I forget it too — usually while I’m working. Then I remember. And I feel so helpless, because the one thing you can’t do is wipe out the past. I hope we’re adults, Carol. We can live with the fact, and live in bitterness toward each other, or we can find each other again in the old way. In the good way.”
“I’m trying, Mel,” she had whispered. “I’m trying so desperately. But she’s still trying to get in touch with you, isn’t she?”
“Letters and phone calls. I tear up the letters unread, and hang up on the calls.”
“She frightens me.”
“Don’t let her frighten you. She has no weapon to use. None at all.”
During most of July, whenever they talked about it, they seemed to go back over the same ground, repeating the same thoughts yet using different words, different expressions each time.
When she was alone. Carol dealt with herself firmly. You have a good husband. He loves you. He is good with Donny. You’ve placed too much importance on physical faithfulness. The wish is the deed, hence every man is, in his own sense, an adulterer. If you keep punishing him, you’ll lose him. And the fact of losing him would make this minor loss seem petty indeed.
They had happy times some weekends. Too happy, it seemed. Gaiety had a thin edge of hysteria, and once, in the midst of laughter, her tears came and he could not comfort her.
It was the first Tuesday in August that Carol walked to the store, phoned Jeana and asked her to go over to the house and get the blue cream pitcher from the sideboard. Mel could have brought it up just as well, she knew, but she didn’t want to explain to him why she wanted it. It had been part of a set given to her great-grandmother on her wedding day. Only the small pitcher was left.
Carol knew that her reasoning was more emotional than logical, but the rented cottage was bare of any possession which could give her a sense of family, a feeling of continuity. And somehow she wanted to have something physical near her to make her think of the line of family, of the other marriages that had survived, though they must certainly have been rocked by similar crises.