Peter said, “I know. There were problems.”
“I imagine there were. Everybody has them. Well, you know the play and the board. I’ll have a fast run-through on the script with you and then we’ll see what happens. It’s going to be the usual Wednesday night crowd plus a busful of blue-haired ladies from Trenton, so if you eff up nobody’ll likely notice. Just give Warren the spot when he’s supposed to get it or the cocksucker’s likely to stop in the middle of the scene and correct you from the stage.”
“They’d just think Miller wrote it that way.”
“They might, but Tanya won’t. She’s been shitting up the stage anyway and she has trouble handling the unexpected. Well, let’s plunge into it.”
The play was The Crucible, and Peter was familiar enough with it to pick up the overall rhythm early in the first act. He found it an easy show to work. There was a predictable ebb and flow to Miller’s treatment of the Salem witch trials, and before long he was handling the board automatically, keeping on top of it with most of his mind free for other concerns.
He would have preferred it if the evening’s work had been more demanding. The thoughts that came to mind were not ones he welcomed.
“Why don’t you leave me, Petey?”
Did she know, did she have the slightest idea, how he itched to get out of there? He doubted it. She raised the question often enough, had brought it up even during the good times. “I’m too old for you, Petey. Jesus, you don’t need a mother that much. The Oedipus bit is fun but it has to drag you down sooner or later. You ought to be out there in the world with some sweet young thing with firm little tits and a nice tight cunt. What do you want with an old bag? I mean, for God’s fucking sake, Petey—”
It would be so much easier if Robin were his own daughter. If that were the case he knew precisely what he would do. He would pick up the kid and get the hell out. You could do that, if you were the kid’s real father and the mother was as completely incapable as Gretchen was.
And he could even have done it with a treasonably clear conscience. Gretchen could not be worse off without the child to care for. Robin was a responsibility at a time when the woman could barely handle the responsibility of putting on her own shoes when she got out of bed in the morning. Gretchen was falling apart, and there seemed to be nothing he could do to put her back together again. Sometimes he thought no once could, that she was doomed to burn herself out no matter what anyone tried to do to help her. Other times he was fairly sure he did her some good, gave her something however frail to lean on, did her some service by walking along behind her and picking up what she dropped.
And still other times he wondered if he might not be bad for her, as she was bad for him, wondered if his presence was not partially responsible for what was happening to her.
“Why don’t you leave me, Petey?”
Because of the kid, you silly bitch. Did she realize that? It seemed that she must, but when she was in a bad way she was scarcely aware of Robin’s existence. Gretchen had failed to feed Robin — and often failed to feed her — not out of any malice but simply because she hardly knew Robin was there. She was locked too tightly into her own self to waste any thought on Robin.
Such a sweet child. Such a sweet perfect beautiful child, and how exciting it was to have a child who thought you were the most important person in the world, and if she were only his kid, God, if she were only his kid—
But she wasn’t, any more than she was Harold Vann’s. Vann had still been married to Gretchen when Robin was born, but had moved out long before the conception. Robin’s father could have been any of a few dozen men. According to Gretchen’s calculations, the girl had most likely been conceived during a two-week stay in Miami Beach, during which time she had sexual relations with a great number of total strangers, men whose names she never knew and whose faces she could not have identified.
“It’s funny I got pregnant that trip,” she told Peter once. “I seem to remember blowing most of them. Obviously there must have been some that I fucked. Either that or the kid’s the world’s first oral conception.”
She was very nearly born by the world’s first oral delivery. Gretchen was nauseated throughout nine months of pregnancy. She had had several abortions before, and wondered aloud during the late stages of pregnancy why she had not had another one this time. “I’m already sick to my stomach with this kid,” she said, “and the little bastard’s not even born yet.”
That Robin was not literally a little bastard was the result of Harold Vann’s benevolence. He had instituted divorce proceedings but withdrew them when he learned that Gretchen was pregnant and intended to have the baby. He waited until the child was born, then permitted Gretchen to divorce him. The terms of the divorce settlement called on him to pay four hundred and sixty dollars a month in child support until Robin reached the age of twenty-one. He also carried life insurance with the child as beneficiary.
A check arrived within the first five days of every month. Vann’s attorney drew it, signed it, and mailed it. The monthly check was the extent of Harold Vann’s contact with either Robin or her mother. “He never wants to see either of us,” Gretchen had said. “Never wants to know anything about Robin, how she’s doing, anything. He told me once that he felt a certain responsibility to Robin because he should have had the sense to have me sterilized. I can still hear him saying it. I suppose he was right.”
But he wasn’t, Peter thought. Gretchen and her unknown lover had accomplished a minor miracle, producing through their loveless coupling a precious and perfect child. Such a child justified a great deal. Among other things, it justified his staying with a woman with whom it was literally impossible to live.
Well, suppose he just picked up the kid and went? He doubted that Gretchen would go to the police. It was not even inconceivable that she would fail to notice Robin was gone. And he could see the two of them off somewhere, some little farm somewhere in New England or Nova Scotia, and he would raise enough food for the two of them, earn a little money with handcrafts, bring the kid up in the open air with animals to play with, teach her everything he knew, just the two of them off by themselves and—
No way.
He sighed, focused a baby spot, softened the footlights. No way, he thought. It was a beautiful fantasy trip but would not, could not happen that way. The little cabin in the woods, with or without Robin, would involve running away from more than Gretchen, more than New Hope. It would mean running away from aspects of himself which he could not ultimately outrace.
Nor, he admitted, would Gretchen be all that easy to leave, Robin or no Robin. There was something there that he still needed. And he wondered, not for the first time, if his love for Robin was not at least in part an excuse that enabled him to stay with a woman he did not love and often could not bear.
He made himself concentrate on the stage.
Warren Ormont scrubbed at the last of his makeup and peered solemnly into his mirror. He was altogether quite satisfied with what he saw there. Several years ago his hairline had begun a rapid climb and now had crept just slightly past the midpoint of his head. What hair remained was silver-blond and hung almost to his shoulders. The recession of his hairline had appalled him at first, but as his hair fell out in front and grew longer in back, he recognized that it was just the sort of thing his particular face required. His features — a strong beak of a nose, bright and intense blue eyes, a small precise mouth — were somehow drawn together and reinforced by his partial baldness.