Thunder and Roses Read online

  She said nothing. He shrugged. “I know. I just wanted to hear you say it. No—” he said hastily, “don’t say it now. I was playing with you. I’m sorry.”

  The “I’m sorry,” was an echo, too. “Where are we going?”

  “That depends,” said Robin. “We’ll talk first.”

  He led the way across Washington Square South and up wandering West Fourth Street. Around the corner of Barrow Street was a dimly lit restaurant, once a stable, with flagstone flooring and field-stone walls. The tables were candlelit, the candles set in multicolored holders made of the drippings of the countless candles which had glimmered there before. A speaker, high up, murmured classical music. They found a table and Robin ordered sherry. The sound of his voice brought sharply to her their silence with each other; she had never been silent with Robin before. She felt a togetherness, a sharing, which was a new thing; he was not so evident to her as they were, listening to the music and watching the tilt and twist of reflected candle flames in the meniscus of their wine.

  When the music permitted, and a little after, she asked, “Where have you been?”

  “Nowhere. Right here in New York. And in the back room of my Westchester place. Sandy Hook, for a while. You know—around.”

  “Why have you been hiding?”

  He looked quickly at her and away. “Have I changed?”

  “You certainly have.”

  “A lot,” he agreed. “And I knew it. I didn’t want anyone else to know it. I didn’t want anyone to watch it happen. It’s happened fast. It’s happening fast. I—I don’t know where it’s going.”

  “Have you been sick?”

  “Oh, no—well, some aches in my hands and face and feet, and vertigo once in a while. Otherwise I’ve never been better.”

  Peg frowned. “Aches … what have you been doing?”

  “Oh—a little writing. A lot of reading. I holed up in Westchester with all the books I could think of that I’d ever wanted to read. I got right out of myself for a while. Not for long, though.”

  “What happened?”

  “It was strange … I got bored. I got so that a paragraph would tell me an author’s style, a page would give me the plot … maybe if I could have become interested in mathematics or something it would have been different. I was suddenly cursed with a thing you might call hyper-understanding. It made me quit working altogether. There was no challenge in anything. I could do anything I wanted to do. I knew how to do it well. I didn’t need to publish anything, or even to write it down. I didn’t need approbation. It was pretty bad for a while. I know what failure is like, and the what’s-the-use feeling. This was worse. This was what’s-the-use—it will succeed.”

  “I don’t know that I understand that,” said Peg thoughtfully.

  “I hope you never do,” he said fervently.

  After a pause, she asked, “Then what did you do?”

  “What you saw me doing tonight. Starting arguments.”

  “On maturity?” Suddenly she snapped her fingers. “But of course! I should have realized. You added nothing to that discussion—you just kept the ball rolling. But why, Robin?”

  He rubbed his knuckles. “I’m—very alone, Peg. I’m a little like Stapledon’s Sirius—I’m the only one of my kind. When I reached a stage of boredom at which I had to find some alternative for suicide, I began to look for something I could have in common with other people. It seemed a slim hope. At first glance, there was nothing which interested me which would interest enough different kinds of people to make me want their opinions.”

  “There’s always sex,” said Peg facetiously.

  “Sex!” he said scornfully. “The American public is basically disinterested in sex.”

  “What! Robin, you’re mad! Why, every magazine cover, every plot of every book and movie, practically, shouts sex. How can you say a thing like that?”

  “If the public were really interested,” he smiled, “do you think they’d need all that high-pressure salesmanship? No, Peg; people are most curious about the same thing that has been bothering me; I happen to be in the odd position of having to face it, which is where I differ from most people.”

  “Having to face what?”

  “Maturity.”

  She stared at him. “And that’s what most people are interested in?”

  “Certainly. You heard the argument tonight. I’ve started the same one hundreds of times recently. It’s about all I do, these days. I’ve heard it knocked around in bars, in parks, in subways and buses and parish houses. Try it yourself. Bear in mind, though, that not everyone calls it maturity. Some call it self-help, and where their self-help will get them; others call it wishful thinking. Coué was preaching maturity; so were Philip Wylie and the Federation of Atomic Scientists and Fletcher, with his disgusting idea of chewing each mouthful of food a hundred times; Santayana and Immanuel Kant and Thoreau and, in their twisted ways, Dr. Townsend and Schopenhauer and Adolf Hitler and Billy Sunday were striving toward maturity insofar as maturity represents a greater goal for humanity, or a part of it … it’s a sorry mistake to think one part deserves it over the rest.…”

  “Have you found out what true, complete maturity is?”

  “True, complete maturity isn’t,” he said positively. “But I think I know what it would be if it happened along. And don’t ask me. If I’m ever absolutely sure, I’ll let you know. Now let’s talk about you.”

  “Not yet,” she said, “if at all. I want to know first why you are making these rounds.”

  “Research,” he said shortly.

  “Certainly you can find more authoritative sources outside of bars and buses.”

  “Can I? By reading the experts, I found out that with very few exceptions, the more erudite and articulate a man gets, the more he feels that the rest of the world lacks what he has, and that therefore maturity is his condition, immaturity is the state of those less gifted than he. The man on the street talks more sense, though he may do it with less polish. I run into blocks occasionally—remember the hesitant psychiatrist?—and sometimes people in the late thirties confuse ‘maturity’ with ‘middle aged’ so thoroughly that they are kept from thinking about it. But by and large a gentle push in the right direction will yield the most astonishing conclusions. A mature man would be a tough, naked swami, perched in the fork of a tree, living an indescribable psycho-cosmic existence. Or he would be a camouflaged man, superficially a nonentity, living with but not of society, leaving it meticulously alone in favor of a private, functional, hyper-sensual existence. Or he would be a mysterious gangster, pulling strings, making and stopping wars for amusement. It’s fascinating, Peg. Most people describe maturity as an extension of themselves; some describe it as something hateful and terrible; occasionally one, like that boy Cortlandt tonight, will become objective enough to dream up something like the Messianic gorilla he described.” Robin shrugged. “Research.”

  “I see. And—and you? What’s happening to you?”

  “I think I’m getting there. I think I’m going to be that thing that has never happened before.”

  “Let me make some tests,” she begged.

  Very slowly he put his right hand, palm down, on the table, and said “No.” It was the most positive utterance imaginable.

  “Robin, why not?”

  “Remember my two reasons for quitting the treatments?”

  “I remember,” she said acidly. “You thought that if you matured any more you’d stop producing your glittering little works of art. And you were afraid of Mel Warfield.”

  He apparently took no offense, but simply nodded. “They both still apply—transmuted, extended; but still the same two excellent reasons.”

  “I don’t understand. You’re not composing or writing or inventing now.”

  “I’m doing something much bigger. I’m—maturing. Peg,” he said with a flash of his old diffidence, “do pardon my colossal immodesty, but there’s no other way to phrase it—I myself am becoming a work of
art, a deeply important, complex, significant thing. I am more completely alive now, I think, in every one of my senses, and in new ways that I’m only beginning to understand, than any man has ever been. You don’t want to aid that process. You want it stopped. I’m different now, but not so different that I couldn’t be a man among men. My difference will increase, and you are afraid of it, and there’s nothing more to your unease than the emotion which makes the brown monkeys tear apart the white one.”

  “I’m afraid of nothing except that you’ll turn into a monster!” she said hotly. “You seem all right now, but you obviously haven’t rid yourself of all your childishness. It’s childish in the extreme to imagine that nothing bad can happen to you.”

  “You won’t say that,” Robin said softly, “when you’ve heard my definition of maturity.”

  “Maturity!” she spat. “Do you know what maturity is in a vegetable? It’s death. Do you know what maturity is in a simple animal? It’s nothing—it’s the redivision of immature cells, indefinitely—it’s everlasting life, and everlasting immaturity. What are you, that can find something between those extremes?”

  “I am Robin English, ex-child, post-adolescent, pre—”

  “Go on.”

  He grinned. “Can’t. It’s never happened. There’s no word for it. Now may we talk about you—aside from endocrinology?”

  She gazed at him, her glance touching his cheek, stroking down and back to nestle in the hollow of his neck.

  “Remember what I said once,” he mused, “about the amounts of wind we waste?”

  She nodded. “Let’s not.”

  He grunted approvingly. “I mentioned my senses.”

  “You said that they were—uh—hyperdeveloped.”

  “I like ’em,” he said, and smiled. “Maybe Cortlandt’s super-gorilla was a good guess. I like delicacy—by the bucketful. I don’t experiment, I don’t probe, I don’t instruct, and I don’t play around with sensual matters.”

  “I understand,” she said thickly.

  “I know what you want.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” she said. She was sure that, holding the overhang of the table so tightly, every tiny thread of the tablecloth would leave an impression on her fingers.

  “You want devotion, and sharing, and growth-together, and all the other components of that four-letter Anglo-Saxon monosyllable called love.”

  “You’re playing with me again.”

  “Sorry … I can’t give you those things. I think you know that. I’m far too preoccupied with my own importance … you see? It sounds much more effective when I say it myself! Anyway, do you want as much as I can give you?”

  “I think,” she whispered, “that you had better be specific.…”

  In her office, in the dark, as she told it all to Mel Warfield, Peg began to cry again. She tried to hold it in, tried to speak, and then gave up to it altogether.

  Mel rose from his perch on the edge of the desk and swore. “Spit it out, Peg,” he barked. “So he asked you and you said yes.” His fist struck his palm with a frightening snap, like bones breaking. “I wish I had killed him. I wish I had the chance now.”

  “You what?” She was shocked out of her tears. “Why?”

  “For what he did to you.”

  She stared at him in the darkness. “That’s a new wrinkle in chivalry,” she said, with the ghost of her old sense of humor.

  “I don’t understand you,” said Mel irritably.

  Suddenly she uttered an extraordinary sound, a sort of attenuated chirp of hysterical laughter. “Mel Warfield, what on earth do you think I—he—just what do you think he did?”

  “That is perfectly obvious,” he said. “What else could have driven you into such a state?”

  Her voice was suddenly clear and cold. “What he asked me, you purblind idiot, was whether I was a virgin. And I said yes. And he looked at me with that damned twinkle in his eyes and said, ‘Sorry, Peg.’ And then I came straight here and you found me. Now gather up your shiny ideals and that sink you call a mind and take them out of here and leave me alone!”

  When Mel had backed off almost to the door, he uttered a grunt, as if from a heavy blow, and then turned and fled.

  He called three times before he realized that the hospital switchboard operator’s bland “Dr. Wenzell is out, Dr. Warfield” was on Peg’s orders. He wrote a letter of apology which she answered after ten days—just “Let’s forget it, Mel,” on memo paper.

  The year grew old, grew cold and died, and a new one rose from its frozen bones, to cling for months to its infantile frigidity. It robbed itself of its childhood, sliding through a blustery summer, and found itself growing old too early. What ides, what cusp, what golden day is a year in its fullness, grown to its maturity? Where is the peak in a certain cycle, the point of farthest travel in a course which starts and ends in ice, or one which ends in dust, or starts and circles, ending in its nascent dream?

  The meteor, Robin English, had passed, and the papers put him in their morgues and gave themselves to newer wonders and wartalk. Margaretta Wenzell worked too much and began to grow thin. Mellett Warfield worked too much and began to grow grey. They had nothing to do with each other.

  And when Peg burst into his laboratory one grey day, there was a moment when she paused in the doorway, shocked by his appearance as he was shocked by hers. He was gaunt and dishevelled, and she was thin and livid. The moment passed.

  “Peg! Why, I’m so—”

  “Never mind that,” she said crisply. “Look at this.” She threw down a glossy eight by ten print.

  “What—” he picked it up. It was slightly out of focus, a picture of a man elbowing his way through a crowd. The people around him were craning their necks toward a point off the picture, behind and beyond the grim figure. “It’s a blow-up of a picture from this week’s Day Magazine,” said Peg. “People crowding around a dogfight on 48th Street. That doesn’t matter. What does matter is the man who got caught in the crowd.”

  Warfield flicked the edge of the print in annoyance. “I’d hoped that this visit had something to do with me,” he growled.

  “It has,” she said. “You know who that is?”

  “Of course.”

  “What do you think?”

  Mel glanced at the picture again. “Getting to be quite a glamor boy in his old age, isn’t he?”

  Peg closed her eyes. There was a strange movement of the lids as she rolled the eyes under them. “You call yourself a doctor,” she hissed. “Look at his chin.”

  “Nice chin.”

  “You don’t remember Robin. You don’t remember that round baby face.”

  “I’m not in love with him.”

  Mel thought she was going to strike him. She jammed the picture under his nose. “Look, look,” she breathed.

  He sighed and looked. Then he saw what she meant. He went white. “Ac—” His voice failed him.

  “Acromegaly,” she said.

  “Oh, my God.”

  “We’ve got to get to him. We’ve got to arrest that condition before he turns into a monster and dies.”

  “Why should we arrest the condition?”

  “Why? Mel, are you out of your mind? When does your responsibility to a patient end?”

  “When the patient stops cooperating.”

  “I’ll find him myself. Somewhere, somehow or other, there’s a way to find him. I had hoped you’d help.” She turned away.

  “I know where he is,” he said dully. “I don’t see him.”

  “I don’t care. I’m going to every single—you what?”

  “I’ve always known.” He wet his lips. “He was under some sort of delusion, apparently. A week or so after he quit his treatments he came to see me. He … explained carefully that he had—uh—no use for you, that there was no longer any reason for me to want to … to kill him, and—you don’t seem surprised.”

  “He told me about it.”

  “You knew about that?”

 
; “Did you try to kill him, Mel?”

  “It was an accident, Peg. Really it was. And he compensated for it. Splendidly. I don’t know how he found out. The man’s incredibly sharp.”

  “It was that post-pituitrin excess, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, but that couldn’t have anything to do with this—this hypertrophy, I mean—” he faltered—“I don’t think so—”

  She stared coldly at him. “Take me to him.”

  “Now?”

  “Now.”

  He looked at her marble face, her set lips, and then slipped into his coat. She said, as he locked his door, “Why didn’t you tell me where he was?”

  “You didn’t ask me. And, frankly, I didn’t want you to see him, not as long as he refused to take his treatments.”

  “You could have let me decide that.”

  “Why did he let you know where he was?”

  “Part of his fixation. He told me I could—uh—kill him any time I wanted to, any way except with my needles. It seemed important to him. Oh, Peg—”

  She turned her face away from him. Downstairs, they caught a cab almost immediately, and Warfield gave the driver a Riverside address. Peg sat staring blindly ahead. Mel slumped in a corner and looked at his wrists, dully.

  Peg broke the silence only once—to ask in a deceptively conversational voice if anything had been learned that she didn’t know about the treatment of acromegaly. Warfield shook his head vaguely. She made a sound, then, like a sob, but when Warfield looked at her she still sat, dry-eyed, staring at the driver’s coat collar.

  They pulled up in front of one of those stately old cell-blocks of apartment houses that perch on the slanted, winding approaches to the Drive. They got out, and a doorman, a bit over life-size, swung open both leaves of a huge plate-glass-and-bronze door to let them into the building.

  “Mr. Wenzell,” said Warfield to a wax-faced desk clerk.

  “What?” said Peg.

  “He … it amuses him to use your name,” said Warfield, as if he were speaking out of a mouthful of sal ammoniac.

  “Mr. Wenzell is out,” said the clerk. “Can I take a message?”