This
is the first story I ever published in a newspaper or periodical. Set in
Britain, it appeared in the London
Evening News early in the 1960s,
but here I’ve re-set it in suburban New York.
IN THE DARK
Still in her bath robe, and cradling her coffee cup in both hands, Midge
watched from the bedroom window as Guy drove out through the big iron gates to
catch the 7:47 train. He always left for
the station at 7:30 sharp, and he never missed the train. One thing you could
say about Guy was that he was predictable. While showering she remembered that
today was his 43rd birthday. She’d said nothing about this when they
made their routine embrace on the landing. And nor had he.
Downstairs in the kitchen she shivered and turned up the
thermostat, and outside in the leafless mid-December garden a rising, blustery
wind drove hailstones against the windows. She made herself some toast and
another cup of coffee.
Every day began like this now that the twins had left home and gone to
college. The house was empty, and so were her days. She hated this house,
though her friends and relatives always told her how beautiful it was, and how
lucky she was to have it. It was a big isolated, stone place in a rambling
garden, built in the 1880s near Bedford Hills by Guy’s family. She and Guy had
moved in ten years ago, after her in-laws had retired to Florida. Her own
parents and most people she knew said much the same about Guy as they did about
the house She was lucky to have him. He was handsome, good-natured and
successful, they said. With Guy, the twins and
Rock House, what more did she want?
Well, what did she want? She’s
often asked herself that lately. They had financial security -- Guy was a
senior partner at a well-regarded publishing house on Madison Avenue – they had
attractive, mature, civilized children, and they were healthy. The real
problem, she told herself, was that she was bored. Bored with her own lonely
existence and, yes, she might as well admit it, bored with Guy. Once Fiona and
Zoe were both happily settled at Brown, Midge had called her former boss at the
law firm where she’d worked in Manhattan, and he’d told her she could have her
old job any time she wanted. That had been six weeks ago; she’d rabbited on
about it to her family and friends, but she hadn’t followed it up.
She pulled on her raincoat and darted out to retrieve the Times, which
today lay on the gravel drive in a blue rainproof bag. By eight o’clock she’d read what little
of the paper interested her. So what was she going to do with herself today? There was something demeaning about her
present situation, she mused. People made jokes about stay-at-home wives,
baking cookies, going to coffee klatches, watching soaps. Guy’s forgotten
birthday nagged in back of her mind. She supposed she should have taken the
initiative for a change and, after a little subterfuge with his secretary,
surprised him by turning up at the office and picking up the check at somewhere
pricey and romantic in Manhattan. But it was too late for that. So while she
wasn’t the cookie-baking type she could, as a sort of penance, make her husband
an apple pie for his birthday dinner here at home.
Every fall, Guy gathered apples from their own orchard and
stored them in a dilapidated but dry fallout shelter at the bottom of the
garden. The shelter, barely visible from the house, had been built sixty or
seventy years ago by Guy’s eccentric grandfather, Edward McKenzie. Neighbors
had jokingly called it ‘McKenzie’s
Mausoleum.’ It was dark and cold
down there, and there were spiders, and so Midge hardly ever went there,
preferring to get her husband to bring apples up to the house whenever she
needed them.
But today, partly motivated by guilt, she dressed quickly
and slipped on her raincoat again, took a basket and a powerful flashlight, and
headed down the path to the shelter beyond the wet, wind-torn hemlocks and maples. She realized along the
way that she was whistling between her teeth, something she did as a little
girl, but now only when she was apprehensive or uneasy. She turned on the
flashlight as she descended the five brick steps, and the steel door opened
easily on well-oiled hinges. Before her,
under a low, vaulted concrete roof, was a narrow walk space with, on either
side and at the far end of the little chamber, double-tiered bunks covered with wire mesh, whose mattresses had
rotted and been removed decades ago.
Now, on their horizontal wire racks, neatly laid out so none of them
touched each other, were rows and rows of apples; red and orange and yellow
eating apples, and oversized green cookers, perfect for pies.
So intent was Midge on finding the most succulent apples
that she barely noticed the wind had become even more violent in the garden
outside, and it was only when a gust caught the door and slammed it shut behind
her that she let out a little cry. She turned, walking back to the doorway, her
hand suddenly trembling, and focused her flashlight on the door. At first she
didn’t register that there was no door knob on this side, only a little black
hole in the gray steel panel that must moments ago have held some sort of shaft
on which a knob would normally fit.
Wasn’t that how they worked? On her knees she scrabbled on the concrete
floor for the missing knob, but found nothing.
Back in the warm kitchen the answering machine clicked on. “We can’t come
to the phone right now . . .” Midge’s
voice. Then another. A man this time.
“Midge Honey, it’s me. Guy . . . you there?”
There was a pause while he waited for her to pick up.
“I guess you’re out. Look, Midgie, bad news. I’ve got to go away for a
while . . . ten days, or even a bit longer. We’ve decided to bring Charles
Hudson’s second book out four months earlier than we planned. We need to hit
the stores with it while his first blockbuster’s still in everyone’s minds.
Anyway, Charles wants me go to his place in Vancouver and edit the book with
him. I’m going late this afternoon. He won’t deal with anyone else. Says he
wants the organ-grinder, not the monkey. Cheeky bastard. I’m flattered, but
it’s a pain in the butt; there’s too much going on here in New York.”
Guy paused for breath. “Hey, things are really buzzing
here. I’ll call later. Love you.”
Back in the apple store, Midge noticed that the flashlight batteries were
fading, and in a minute or two the light was no more than a watery yellow glow.
Still on her knees, she groped in shallow space between the rough concrete
floor and the lower bunk. She simply had to find that doorknob. The light was
even weaker now, but she let out a hysterical laugh as her hand closed over
something small and round. She had it! Dragging it out from under the bunk she
examined the object in the last of the light. A child’s ball, that must have
lain there for nine or ten years. With a frustrated whine she hurled the ball
back into the shadows.
By now the flashlight was dead, and still on her knees in
the blackness Midge began to cry, her body shaking, partly with fear, but also
because of the cold in this dark underground place. Where was that
doorknob? Almost certainly it was
farther into that narrow space under the bunk than she could reach? She rose to
her feet and, with the hesitancy of a child waking in a dark, strange room,
groped around her until, in a corner, she knocked something over. An old garden
hoe. She poked its handle under the bunk, waving it to sweep out any other
object that might be lying there, but there was nothing. Midge turned slowly
and repeated the sweep under the other bunk, finding only the dried-up fur and
little bones of some long-dead animal.
Tears streamed down her face as she crouched on the bottom
bunk. Maybe there hadn’t been any doorknob for years. Guy probably knew this,
and had learned how to open the door from outside without pulling out the rod
that would normally have had a knob at each end of it. He’d never had any
reason to open or close the door from the inside, so had never got around to
mending it.
Unable to see her watch, she had no idea what the time was,
but guessed it was not much later than nine o’clock. The day had hardly started.
It would be nine or ten hours before Guy came home. And how much longer would
it be before he realized she was down here?
For an hour or two, to keep warm, she paced the little
walkway between the bunks. Only a while ago she’d been in her comfortable
kitchen. She’d had another day ahead in which to do as she pleased. She could
have visited friends. She could have taken the train, lunched with a girlfriend
in Manhattan, and spent the afternoon at that new show at the Met.
Later, much later, it seemed, Midge kneeled on the floor and peered
through the crack under the closed door. Was this snow blowing under the door?
She slipped her fingers into its cold wetness and shivered. Why hadn’t she got
around to zipping the winter lining into her raincoat?
And all this was happening on Guy’s birthday. For the first
time she wondered how her husband had felt when she hadn’t given him a special
hug on his birthday, or even a card. Well, she had bought him a gift, but she hadn’t even wrapped it when they’d
got up this morning.
What a pig she could be to Guy sometimes. They always did
what she wanted to do. Went where she wanted to go. They drove up to her
parents’ place at Martha’s Vineyard for Thanksgiving, or Christmas. They’d only
flown to Florida to see Guy’s parents in Florida three times in the past ten
years, because Midge always complained that she hated Florida. When Guy found her down here tonight, and
they were back together in their comfortable routine, she swore she’d do
something about all this. It was the least she owed him. Why hadn’t this
occurred to her before? She sat down on the lower bunk, cupping her face in her
hands. She was surprised, when she thought about it, that Guy had put up with
her indifference, her coolness. Yet he was still around after nineteen years
with her. He was special, and deserved better.
With his papers in one briefcase, and his laptop in another, Guy threaded
his way across the concourse at Grand Central and just caught the 2:46
train. He didn’t have a lot of time. If
the train arrived on schedule at 3:45 he’d have about fifteen minutes at home
to pack his bags and make his peace with Midge before the car arrived to take
him to the airport.
A light snow fell as he hurried along the station platform to the exit. The
car slithered on the bends in the narrow roads outside the town. When he
reached home, Midge’s Toyota was in the drive. Good, he hadn’t missed her.
Inside the front door he called her name, but there was no answer. The lights
were on in the kitchen, and the radio, its volume turned up, played a piano
sonata.
In the hallway Guy shouted upstairs. “Midge. You up there?”
There was still no answer. It wasn’t a mystery, he assured
himself. She’d probably slipped out with some visiting pal on an errand. Maybe
they’d made a quick trip together in the friend’s car to the market. No
problem. Upstairs he packed his washing gear and a few changes of casual
clothes. Nothing fancy. He and old Charlie Hudson weren’t likely to be
dining-out in style. If past experience was anything to go by they’d be working
late every night on a diet of take-out Tex-Mex and Chinese. In the bathroom he
took a piece of soap and drew a heart on the mirror. Under it he wrote Goodbye, XX.
He was ready to go, but there was still no sign of Midge.
The car had arrived, a sleek black Mercedes, driven by a man in a uniform cap,
who took Guy’s bags and put them in the trunk.
“Damn!” Guy said under his breath as he climbed into the back seat. He’d
forgotten to buy a bottle of Charlie’s favorite single malt Scotch at that
liquor store on Lexington Avenue. You couldn’t get the stuff anywhere else. Oh
well. He’d probably find something almost as good at the airport.
“Let’s go,” he told the driver.
But then an idea occurred to him just as the car passed
through the iron gates.
“Hold on a second.” he said.
OK, he may have forgotten that special bottle of Scotch for his favorite
author and client, but suddenly he knew
what he could do. Wasn’t Charlie always bragging about the apples in his
garden, and how much bigger, juicer and sweeter they were in British Columbia
than in New York State?
Well, he’d show the old devil what real
apples looked and tasted like. Whistling cheerfully to himself, he pushed open
the car door. His feet slithered in the snow as he ran down the side of the
house and along the garden path to the derelict bomb shelter behind the
hemlocks and maples.
oo0oo
