11

“Now you know why we haven’t seen each other since then,” Jack said quietly to his guest, Mr. Winkler. Repeating the story had been almost like reliving it; Jack felt tired and used. He poured himself another drink. “It’s funny how you don’t suspect so much prejudice, so much contempt, in somebody you know that well,” he said.

“Well, maybe his confusion was the Pringles’ fault,” Winkler suggested, staring thoughtfully at the floor. He added diffidently, “Then again, maybe there was some sense in his father’s ideas.”

“Sure there was. Quite a lot. Page wouldn’t have swallowed anything vicious or stupid,” Jack said. “Do you know the Pringles, Mr. Winkler?” He looked at his visitor curiously.

“Me? No, no,” Winkler said. “I suppose, being older, I can’t help sympathizing with them a little.” He cleared his throat. “You lost track of Page and Sunny after that?”

“No. Sunny began to write to Laura. She didn’t have anybody else. She was madder than hell at Page when she found out he’d told me everything. But she trusted us enough to get over it eventually.”

“I’m glad she did,” Winkler said. “I was afraid I’d miss part of the story.”

* * *

On their own, Page and Sunny began to read books on incest. Page took the ones on law and medicine; Sunny, all the history and mythology and psychology she could find. They both dug out what they were looking for and ignored the rest.

Page wanted to damn incest medically and legally. Sunny wanted to whitewash and glamorize it. And the books, which reflected the world’s confusion on the subject, gave them both ammunition.

What is incest? Why is it so wrong? Why are there strict laws against it? Because, said Sunny’s books, it’s so alluring. If the laws weren’t strict, everybody and his brother—literally—would be taking it up. The boy with his beloved mother, the girl with a father she worships, the brother and sister sharing the same bed too long or discovering each other erotically in some kind of emotional crisis.

There have to be laws against it, Sunny concluded, or we’d have an epidemic.

She read about the ancient Ptolemies, fabled kings and successors of Alexander the Great, who practiced incest for three hundred years and produced a defiantly healthy line to the end.

She read about Cesare Borgia, who fell madly in love with his luscious sister Lucrezia, and who arranged the plot by which her husband, the Duke of Besaglia, was strangled.

She read of strange customs in the Melanesian Islands where sisters turned away and covered their faces at the approach of their brothers, so powerful was the forbidden attraction between them.

She read about the gold-encrusted Pharaohs, children of the Sun, who married their sisters to preserve the purity of royal blood. And she saw that after several thousand years of inbreeding they were still producing tough healthy children. Even Cleopatra, the symbol of seductive femininity, married her brother. And the poetry of love in Egypt still uses the words ‘Brother’ and ‘Sister’ to mean ‘Lover’ and ‘Beloved.’

* * *

Sunny ignored the bloodshed and bitterness and rigid strictures against incest that spotted these narratives. They were in the sections she skipped: the austere laws of Leviticus in the Bible, the tales of crop failure and calamity ascribed to incest in ancient Greece, the awful tragedy of Oedipus.

The thing that confused her most was not in the books. It was a small, almost artificially forced feeling, that she adored her husband even more because he was her brother. Perhaps she had to feel that way or lose her mind.

Sunny continued to see her doctor for regular check-ups. Finally, burning with curiosity, she asked, “Doctor Settick, what happens if two people, say two first cousins, get married and have children?”

He screwed his handsome young face into a laugh. “Whatever put that in your head?” he asked. When he looked at her that way she wished she were in the hands of an older, more businesslike doctor. But she liked Settick. She laughed a lot in his office, and it was the only place where she did.

She blushed at his question. “I read about it once,” she said. “When you’re pregnant you read all sorts of goofy books. If a brother and sister had a baby together would it—would it—”

“Would it what?”

“Would it be an idiot? A monster?”

“Not necessarily,” he said.

She tried to look casual, not relieved. “Oh,” she said, hoping he would go on. He did, crossing his arms over his chest while she looked demurely at the white sheet that covered her.

“When two people that closely related have children, however,” he said, “the children are likely to have their parents’ strengths and weaknesses magnified.”

“How does it work?”

“Well, if you have bad eyes and your husband, who is also your brother”—he smiled interestedly at her—“also has bad eyes, your child is going to have a terrible pair of eyes. On the other hand, if you both have good vision, he’ll probably see like a hawk.”

“That sounds normal.”

“Almost. Incest just seems to exaggerate the parents’ characteristics in the children.”

“If you were both healthy, then, your children would be, too?”

“Very likely.” There was a small line of intrigue between his eyes. “Why all the questions?”

“Oh, my husband was telling me about a family he knew where the parents were first cousins. And their kids were crippled and bald.”

“You tell him it was probably some other complication than consanguinity,” said Settick. “That might have intensified the trouble, but it probably didn’t cause it unless there had been a lot of close inter-marriage over several generations. Why hell,” he said, “my own brother fell madly in love with our first cousin once.”

“He did?”

“Sure. Fortunately he was only thirteen at the time. He got over it. Still, it wouldn’t have been such a catastrophe if he hadn’t. From the standpoint of having kids, anyway. But he got smart and put off marriage. Didn’t get hooked till he was thirty-two.”

“That’s kind of old,” Sunny said.

“Couldn’t be helped. The damn fool went through medical school. And dragged me after him. Takes quite a while, you know, particularly if you specialize.”

Sunny chuckled with him. He had reassured her and she went home from the examination feeling better.

* * *

But Sunny had not reassured her doctor. Richie Settick had a couple of favorite patients, and one of them was Sunny Pringle. It was not the incest talk that bothered him. He dismissed that as vagrant curiosity inspired by her reading. His patients came up with all manner of moon-shot questions. He had learned to answer with a straight face, even when they brought him their horoscopes and ordered their babies delivered on a propitious day.

What troubled him about Sunny was that she was actually losing weight. Although the foetus continued to grow and Sunny didn’t complain, she was obviously worried and unhappy. And she was getting visibly thin.

“At the rate you’re going,” he informed her the next time she came, “you won’t need to bother with maternity clothes till the last week.”

“Oh, I’ll wear them anyway. Makes me feel motherly,” she said. “Besides, I’ll look like I’ve swallowed a watermelon the next time you see me.”

But she didn’t. When she came back her face and limbs were thinner still, her waist still small.

“You look too sexy to be as far along as you are,” he told her critically. “In five months of pregnancy you’ve lost two pounds. What are you trying to do, disappear?”

“Will it hurt the baby?” she asked anxiously. “I can’t work up an appetite.”

“Nuts,” he clucked at her. “I don’t see how you could be getting the minimum healthy diet. And I don’t mean just vitamin pills.”

“Dr. Settick,” she said seriously, “if anything happens to this baby, I’d want to die. But when I force myself to eat I upchuck.”

“What’s all this dying talk?” he broke in. “That’s no way to carry on, Sunny. Nothing’s going to happen to the baby. That’s number one. But if anything did, there’s nothing in God’s world to prevent you from having a whole passel of kids if you want them.”

“Yes there is,” she said quietly. The last few empty months in the apartment had made her desperate to talk to somebody, the way Page had been desperate when he confessed to Jack Mann. She didn’t want to open her soul to Dr. Settick. But he stood there waiting for some explanation; compassionate and friendly and with the sort of frank, good-featured face Sunny fell for. So she said in an unsure voice, “My husband doesn’t want any more children.”

“Can’t stand them, hm?”

“No.” She looked away, already sorry she had spoken. But the doctor came over to her and touched her gently. “Any time you want more you just come and see me,” he said. The words were insolent but Settick wasn’t. His tone was quite respectful. “You can always tell him it was an accident,” he added.

Sunny didn’t know whether to laugh or lose her temper. She turned scarlet and couldn’t look at him. “I love him,” she said.

“He’s making you unhappy, isn’t he?” Dr. Settick stood where he was, taken with the daffodil lights in her hair, the trembling of her finely-sculptured mouth.

“It’s something neither of us can help,” Sunny said, squirming with the intimacy of the situation.

“I’ll tell you something,” Settick offered. “The beautiful Mrs. Pringle is hurting her baby’s health by hurting her own. And if Mr. Pringle is to blame, I’ll talk to him myself. I’d rather flatten him out on the floor, but I’ll talk to him, I promise.”

“There’s nothing you can say that would help,” she said. “He won’t come.”

“With a wife like you?” He took the sexual implication of the phrase, and again she didn’t know how to handle him. His hand touched her breasts and it was no neat medical gesture. Sunny brushed it quickly away.

“Hey,” she said. “None of that. I told you, I love the guy.”

“Okay, you love him,” Settick said, turning away from her with a sigh. “These things happen. Wives do love their husbands, although to hear some of my patients talk you’d never believe it. You know something, Sunny? You’re all backwards. You not only love your husband, you actually want more children. Do you know how many women come in here day after day telling me what slobs they’re stuck with and how many screaming brats they’ve got at home? They hate being mothers, they hate being wives. God, it’s enough to keep a man single for the rest of his life.”

She smiled at him. “They’d probably all stay right where they are if you gave them a choice.”

He shook his head with a laugh. “What makes you such an optimist?” he said.

“I have to be. It’s all I’ve got.” For a moment she was afraid she would lose control and cry in front of him. But she found a measure of dignity by staring carefully at the large stethoscope through which mothers were allowed to listen to their growing baby’s heartbeats. She had heard her baby’s heart not ten minutes ago. It sounded like the rapid tapping of a metronome in the next room, and it moved her unspeakably.

“I wish you’d tell me what’s the matter, Sunny,” the doctor urged. “I didn’t mean to get fresh just now. Forget it, will you? That’s the price you pay for being so damn beautiful.” He smiled disarmingly.

“It’s okay,” she said, letting him persuade her that he meant no offense.

“You’re worried and you’re not eating right,” he said briskly. “I’m going to put you on a diet, to gain, and some tranquilizers.”

She protested but he wrote a prescription for her. “It’s for the baby,” he said. “You don’t have to live on them.”

Sunny got off the examination table, holding her sheets around her.

“Are you getting a divorce by any chance?” Settick asked, unable to resist.

“We don’t need to,” she said cryptically.

He surprised himself by recalling at that moment the questions on incest one of his patients—was it Sunny?—had put to him: just a fleeting notion that crossed his mind and left it the moment he saw her out the door.

* * *

Sunny’s letters to Laura and her talks with Dr. Settick were her only relief from solitude. Laura was the sole person she could tell everything to. Her notes were restrained at first, but Laura’s warmth and concern shone through her answers and gave Sunny the courage to be honest.

“It takes two to dissolve a marriage, just as it takes two to make one,” Laura wrote. “So Page can’t call it quits by himself, whatever the heartless law books say. Fight for him. He’s worth it. Or at least he will be when he grows up and realizes life is more important than arbitrary rules.”

Sunny reread the letter a dozen times. And from then on her own letters were graphic charts of her heart and mind. She described the long gray days that not even a sweet spring breeze could brighten. And the nights, infamous in the poems of separated lovers, and hourglass-endless.

“I like being mad at Page,” she wrote Laura. “It gives me energy—keeps my pride alive. I think how mean I’ll be when he comes home. And when he begs me to take him back—oh, how tender and passionate! I have only one fear, Laura—that he’ll never come. The longer he waits, the more I wonder. Maybe I’ll have to start crawling again after all.”

Sunny took Laura’s sympathy with gratitude, with greed, but it didn’t replace her husband. And it was all Laura could give her.

* * *

Page’s Sunday Magazine column was getting noticed. It was funny, a little rough and overstated, but clever. Sunny loved it. It surprised her and made her laugh—and then weep because he hadn’t shared it with her before he shared it with the public.

She cut out the columns, pasting them in a scrapbook. The best she taped to her mirror to memorize:

“It’s like a gold yoyo,” he said of a modern canvas. “If you want it you’ll pay anything for it. If you don’t, nothing is too damn much.”

He quoted a famous movie producer signing a witless young lovely for a new film: “Never mind about the lines. Just be sure to bring your face along.”

Sunny yearned with a choking envy to share all this with him: the excitement he felt as his name gained currency, the pleasure of turning out quotable prose, the odd thrill of having your words read by people you would never know. To be denied her part in his blossoming career was one of her worst burdens.

One morning, after reading his newest column, she suddenly chucked her pride and wrote him a fan letter:

She mailed it on a Monday morning in April. Tuesday was the first of May, and it was the day Page called her after nearly three dismal months of silence.

When the phone rang she ran to it from the kitchen as if she had been expecting it. With trembling hands she lifted the receiver. It might be Dr. Settick, after all. He had called her several times and once ended up asking her to dinner.

“Hello?” she said.

“Sunny?” It was Page. His voice sounded a little unsure, but there was no mistaking it.

“Oh, Page!” She pressed a hand over her mouth for a second and then said weakly, “How are you?”

“I’m miserable,” he said. “How are you?”

“Oh, darling!” Her heart kicked joyfully. “Are you really miserable?”

“Aren’t you?”

“Yes; God, I can hardly stand it. Did you get my poem?”

“Honey, it was beautiful. It was immortal,” he said.

“Page, can we meet somewhere? I mean—”

“Yes,” he said and she knew at once he had been thinking about it hard. He wanted to see her so much that he knew an argument would end up in his ignominious surrender. “Can you have dinner with me tonight?” he said.

“Can I!” she cried. “Beg me, darling.”

“Please, baby. Please.... I have your poem in my pocket. Any girl who can write such deathless verse deserves a filet mignon,” he said.

“Oh, you wonderful idiot. Darling, when will you pick me up?”

“Sunny, maybe I’d better meet you,” he hedged. He knew what would happen to him if he got caught in that apartment again. Sunny knew too and she couldn’t give up without trying.

“I’ve fixed the place up so nicely,” she said. “You won’t know it. I want you to see the new curtains and—”

“No,” he said anxiously, and she was afraid of scaring him off. She gave in with the hope that when they were physically close she could move him better than she could on the phone. All she asked was the chance.

“Where are you staying?” she said.

“Let’s not get into that.”

“I’m not going to storm the gates, Page. I really need to now. What if the baby comes and I have to contact you?”

“You can always call the office,” he said.

“Sure, and get told off again,” she reminded him. “Page, it might be an emergency. I’m completely alone in this city. The only friends I had were your friends and I never see any of them. And Jack and Laura are gone now. About the only human being I see who gives a damn about me is Dr. Settick.”

“How much of a damn?” he said, feeling an upswell of jealousy that suddenly made him determined. “All right,” he went on, “but Sunny, play fair. Promise me you won’t call unless it’s really urgent.” Somewhere in the back of his mind was the unacknowledged thought that he secretly wanted her to come; but he sternly ignored it.

“I promise,” she said. You can’t go to hell for breaking one lousy promise, she reasoned.

“I’m on East Thirty-second Street,” he said with misgivings, and gave her the number and the phone. If she ever showed up, his conscience would blast him.

Sunny wrote it down on the phone pad with a sense of triumph.

They agreed to meet at a small restaurant on Tenth Avenue.

* * *

But Sunny had other plans. She knew Page would blow his top if he found her in his rooms that very day. But she was as sure as love could make her that his anger would die a quick death.

She heard the tremor of love and long denial in his voice. If it was so desperately hard for her, a woman, to forbid herself the love she needed, how difficult mustn’t it be for a man? A young vigorous passionate man who adored his wife?

He’ll never resist, she told herself, laughing aloud with anticipation. She made herself stunningly beautiful. She took pains she rarely bothered with and hardly needed. But it made her feel irresistible to know there was a sheen of exotic color over her eyes, an underfilm of silver witchery on her lips, a fragrant mist in her swinging yellow hair.

She was still slim enough to look chic in a small-waisted dress. It had a full, soft skirt that hid her six-month stomach. She put on her four-inch heels, her sequined cocktail hat, black gloves and purse, and checked herself out in the mirror, ticking off each feature like a C.P.A. going over his books. Her glamorous reflection surprised her.

She looked older, beautiful in an experienced way. It was not just the makeup. It had something to do with the past three months of solitary introspection and yearning. She was full of the new things she had learned from the books, the new life she felt within her, and the new depths and shadows her heart had explored. They changed her face. She was no little girl any more. She was a lovely woman.