It was her turn to register shock and disbelief. “Dad said Doc Blue
might do it,” he added rigidly.
“Your _father_ said that?”
“In this case, he happens to be right.”
Sunny shook with resentment. “How can you think such a thing? This
innocent baby, this part of yourself you were so almighty proud of, and
you want to murder—”
“And you want to go on living with me. Me, your _brother_!” he shouted.
“And give birth to an imbecile—”
“Page, don’t!” she cried with all her strength. “Get out! Get out! Get
out!” She collapsed into the sofa, whimpering.
He stood in the door for a moment, watching her until she looked up to
see if he had gone. They gazed at each other, speechless with the size
of their despair and the size of their love.
“Don’t tell anyone. _Anyone_,” she pleaded.
He nodded and pulled the door shut behind him.
“And let me know where you are,” she called after him. “Page? Page!” But
the door was closed; he had left her and nothing indicated he had heard;
or, having heard, that he would keep in touch.
9
Sunny sat where she was until the cramps in her legs reminded her of the
hours that had passed. Like a hurt animal she roused and shook herself.
With all the care of other nights she performed her usual nightly
chores: bathed, brushed her teeth, curled her hair on trim tin rollers.
It comforted her, as if she could enter the bedroom when she finished
and find Page waiting for her.
To her surprise her hands moved, her heart beat, her mind functioned.
She looked at her face in the mirror and her features were still in
their places. She touched them to be sure.
For the first time she studied her face for signs of similarity to her
husband’s. She got his photograph from her dresser and, turning on both
dresser lamps, stood at the mirror full front, holding Page’s picture at
the level of her own face.
It was several minutes before it began to come clear: the tiny dents at
the sides of their noses, the sweep of the jawline, the full curve of
the underlip. But suddenly the likeness leaped at her, like a light
switched on in a basement, and made her wonder how they could have
missed it all this time, why their friends and family hadn’t caught it.
All those small subtle signs imploring recognition: those two mouths
that knew the feel of each other so well, those two pairs of green eyes
that looked at each other so often but saw, it now seemed, so very
little.
But the thing that astonished Sunny the most, hurt the most, was the
sudden total opposition of their views. Their faces might be alike,
their love painfully strong. But in their minds something terrible had
happened. He had taken one tack and she another, and the two were
irreconcilable.
Sunny’s first thought, when she was able to think, was to save their
marriage somehow. The morality of the thing was secondary; _everything_
was secondary to her love and her life with Page. They would worry about
morality after they agreed to stay together.
But to her tragic surprise, they didn’t agree. He saw things exactly in
reverse: morality dictated a separation. Their marriage was an offense
to society, to religion, to the law. Page couldn’t live with that and
keep his self-respect.
Sunny put Page’s neglected clothes back into his dresser drawers and
told herself he would have to come get them sooner or later. She would
see him then. In the meantime she would contrive a way to lure him back
to live with her, back where he belonged.
She knew he had adopted his step-father’s attitude. All the curses he
flung at Pringle on the phone didn’t change that. But she hoped
Pringle’s words would carry less weight with him in the long run than
her own.
In the next few days she spent a lot of time at the mirror with Page’s
photo in her hand. It gave her the same message every time: _You are
brother and sister. It’s true. You look alike and nobody saw it before
simply because nobody would have believed it._
Gazing at her guilty features she realized that Page would never be
persuaded of the morality of their marriage. She would have to win him
back on the strength of his love for her alone, and let the morality go
hang. She felt she would die without him.
* * * * *
Page did not come back for several days. She guessed he was holed up
somewhere, suffering as she was and uncertain what to do. She waited at
first with confidence, sure that he would need his things. He couldn’t
get them without seeing her and he couldn’t see her without wanting her;
that was her secret weapon. She didn’t leave the house.
But when three days had passed she began to get scared. Finally,
swallowing her pride, she called Jack Mann. “He isn’t home yet,” she
said, “and it’s past dinnertime. Have you heard from him?”
“No, honey, not for the past few days. I was going to call you, in fact.
His office says he’s home with the flu.”
“What?” she exclaimed. So Jack caught on at once that something was
wrong. It humiliated her, and yet relieved her that she could share some
bit of her troubles.
“I tried to get him for lunch yesterday,” Jack explained kindly. “Only
have a couple of weeks left before I go to Chicago, you know.” He
paused. “Want to talk about it, Sunny?” he asked.
She was not offended; only afraid to discuss it. “I guess I have the
bug, myself,” she said. “If you _do_ hear from him, Jack—”
“I’ll call you right away.” Again he waited, giving her an opening. His
instinct for people, for trouble, for people _in_ trouble, was too good.
There was no fooling him.
But she said, “Thanks, Jack,” and hung up quickly to avoid crying over
the phone.
She wondered, as she replaced the phone, if she had better call the
police. But she was afraid if they were called in, the whole fantastic
mess would come out in the papers. And if that happened it would destroy
Page.
In the middle of the morning’s anxious monotony she had an idea. Page
must have realized what she was up to, waiting there for him in that
neat little trap, ready to grab him when he came for his things.
Couldn’t he be watching the place, waiting till she went out for a
while? He could get in and grab his things then without having to face
her, and it would spare him the temptation he dreaded.
With the speed of new hope she got her coat and purse and left the
apartment. The cold air outside felt good to her. She glanced quickly up
and down the block, wondering if he saw her from the shadows of a
doorway. If he did he wouldn’t show himself.
Sunny walked toward the market on the corner where she bought her
groceries, bending her head slightly against the gray wind. Her eyes
were open wide, aching to see behind her. She spent six or seven minutes
in the shop. _That should give him time to get in_, she thought, and
went out without buying so much as a package of gum.
She ran back to her building with her heart struggling to break out of
her ribs all the way, and hurried into the warm entrance hall.
They met halfway on the stairs. Sunny was dashing up with her head down
and saw his feet first. Page stopped in his tracks, motionless with
surprise and indecision. “You got me after all,” he said at last, as if
she ought to move aside and let him pass to make up for it.
“Caught you like a thief,” she said to shame him.
“It won’t do any good, Sunny,” he said brusquely, trying to shove past
her, but she threw frantic arms around him. And suddenly he dropped his
bundles and kissed her.
“I love you,” they said together, the way they had at the beginning of
their love. It made her cry and made him wild to escape the need that
swelled in him.
“Let me go,” he said, pulling her arms away, but he saw that if he left
her there on the stairs she would become hysterical. She was close to it
already. He hesitated a few seconds and then the shame caught up with
him. She would take him for a weakling.
He retrieved his belongings and took her elbow, mounting the stairs with
her. “This will only hurt both of us,” he said grimly. “But if you want
to talk about it....”
“Thank you, darling,” she said and let him unlock the door for her. She
went in ahead of him and saw at once a note he had propped on the phone
table. She started for it but he grasped her hand, letting his things
fall again.
“It’s just a note,” he said impatiently. “If I hadn’t taken time to
write the damn thing—”
“I wouldn’t have caught you red-handed,” she said. She freed her hand
and picked it up, ignoring his plea not to read it. It said, “I love you
desperately. I will always love you, only you. Sunny, there will never
be anyone else. Page.”
When she looked at him again through wet eyes, he was gazing at the
floor. “It’s not as if you didn’t know it,” he said, embarrassed.
“I just like to be told,” she said.
“It’s against the law to tell you now,” he said. “Did you know that? Our
marriage is legally dead. If we went on living together we’d be
criminals.”
“Does that scare you so much? I’m willing to be a criminal, I’m willing
to be _anything_, if it means keeping you. But you’re not willing to do
that for me. You just want to sneak in and out of here with your clothes
before I catch you.”
“Don’t you wonder what living with a sickness like this all our lives
could do to us?” Page said earnestly. “It would be slow poison. All
you’re thinking about is right now. You want me and—and I want you.” He
stopped, trying to steady himself. “But suppose I gave in and we went
back together. Even if nobody ever found out it would destroy us,
Sunny—”
“Destroy _you_!”
“Knowing every time we touched each other, every time we kissed—”
“Page, I won’t have our love defiled, not even by you.”
“And what if somebody _did_ find out? Do you think they’d approve of it?
“Your parents won’t tell, if that’s what you mean,” she said.
“My father would despise us if we stayed together.”
“Well, who is more important, your wife or your father?” she cried
spitefully. “You never seemed to give a damn for him before.” Seeing him
brace for a fight she softened suddenly, imploring him. “Darling, your
father wouldn’t despise us. He wouldn’t approve, it’s true, but if he
saw we meant it; saw how deep our love is.... He loves you too much to
risk breaking with you forever. And I have a woman’s feeling your mother
secretly wishes we’d stay together, no matter what. They love us, Page.”
“Sure they love us. That doesn’t make us right.”
“Oh, say the damn word!” she exclaimed, shaking her head till the blond
curls flew. “We’re both so scared of it we can’t pronounce it.... Well,
_say_ it, go on!” she taunted.
“Say what?” he muttered stubbornly.
“_Incest._ Incest, Incest, Incest!” she shouted. “That’s it, that’s the
one big fact in our lives. Let’s at least call it by its right name.”
“Let’s just get rid of it, end it,” he said.
“Page, you know you can’t leave me,” she said, approaching him. “Any
more than I can leave you.”
“All right,” he flared. “We’ll live here and raise that little idiot we
spawned. And someday, somehow, the news will leak out. Only by that time
I’ll have a name, a reputation. We’ll be well known. Our child will have
ears and he’ll understand things—at least I _hope_ he’ll understand
things—and either this gets plastered all over the papers or somebody
gets smart and blackmails us. We lose our sanity either way. We’re
helpless, completely trapped.” He stopped, out of breath.
“I’ll take that chance,” she said. “For you.”
“You will now, but not ten years from now. How would you like your child
to have to face it with us? Sunny, there are things you can face by
yourself, but not with a child to protect.”
It was true. She felt the uprush of unwanted tears and cursed softly to
herself. “We might never have to face it. We could move.”
“Where? The moon? You can’t escape yourself, anyway. You take yourself
with you wherever you go—and your secrets and your shames. We’d have to
look at each other every day, every night in bed, and know....” He gazed
at her quietly for a minute, with his love, terrible and sharp in his
heart, making him weak. “Sunny? Are you afraid to have an abortion?” he
asked.
_Sacrifice the baby_, he was begging her, _and maybe we can live
together. If it’s just you and me with no kids to suffer with us._
She understood. “Yes, I’m afraid,” she said truthfully. “But not so much
of the pain as—” She gave a little sob. “I love this baby, Page.”
“You’d rather have the baby than me, is that it?” he said roughly.
“I’d rather have you both,” she wept. “We belong together, Page.”
“Not in the eyes of the law.”
“The law can go to hell!”
“Swearing won’t change it. Why do you suppose incest is forbidden?” he
asked. “Because brothers and sisters are falling all over each other
trying to get hitched? No, Sunny, no. It’s to protect children, preserve
the race. Did you ever hear of inbreeding? It happens to dogs and cows.
They get nervous and weak. They get stupid. They bleed. It happened to
the great royal families in Europe. What was it? Inbreeding. _Incest._”
“But that took generations,” Sunny protested. “That doesn’t happen the
first time.”
“It can,” he said with the certainty of a man who isn’t sure of his
facts; only his prejudices. “I knew a brother and sister who were the
children of first cousins. What do you think they were like?”
“Both gargoyles, of course,” she fumed.
“He was completely hairless from the day he was born. He didn’t have a
hair on his body—not on his head or his chest or his genitals. Not one
lousy eyelash did that guy have. He looked like polished plastic.”
“You can live with a thing like that,” she whispered.
“And his sister,” Page went on, “was a hopeless cripple from the waist
down. Her legs never carried her one inch in her life. They were just a
detour for her blood. They hung from her hips like sacks of water, and
you’d have sworn there wasn’t a bone in either one. She went everywhere
in a wheel chair. Her brother pushed her.”
“It might have been an accident or an illness,” she protested, trying to
hide the anxiety he had roused in her.
Page lighted a cigarette from the one that was burning out. “Their
parents were cousins. That’s the only explanation,” he said. “Cousins,
Sunny. We’re brother and sister.”
She covered her face with her hands and cried. It tore him nearly to
pieces to watch her. He had dramatized it for her, tortured her with it,
in the hope that she would agree to the abortion. He felt it was the
only chance for them to stay together. But it didn’t work.
“Maybe Dr. Blue was wrong,” she said pathetically.
He reached her in one big step and took her hard by the shoulders.
“Maybe our eyes aren’t the same color and our hair isn’t blond and our
noses and our ears and our mouths—” He faltered. “That mouth of yours,
that mouth I love so unspeakably much,” he said, helpless with her
closeness “... is my own mouth.” His voice separated each awful word.
Sunny covered her lips with her hands as if they were court evidence of
guilt. “It’s so obvious,” he said, studying her face, lifting his
fingers to touch it. “God, why couldn’t we have seen it and saved
ourselves before we fell in love? I’ve spent hours in front of the damn
mirror. And the more I look at myself, the more I see you.
“I saw my face for the first time three days ago, Sunny. My face: _your_
face. The same!” It was a cry of despair. She bent her head like a
little girl being blamed for something she can’t understand. But he
raised it again till he could see every feature.
“Oh, my darling,” he said, wiping ineffectually at her tears. “Oh, my
love, my wife, my—my sister.”
He caught her in a crushing embrace, hiding his face in her soft neck,
and she felt him shake with sobs that only a strangling repressive
effort kept silent. He released her abruptly and turned, picking up his
bags and hurrying toward the door. Sunny rushed after him, catching at
his sleeve.
“Page, where are you staying?”
“I’ll get in touch with you,” he answered.
“I’ll die if I don’t know. Page!” she begged.
“Sunny, I have to be alone a little while. Can’t you see that? I’ll call
you, darling.” He struggled toward the door, afraid to prolong the stay.
He would succumb to her and betray them both, and end up hating her for
it. To make love to Sunny now was to make her filthy as well as himself.
His love was turned to lust since his wife had turned into his sister.
Those were his feelings, a Pringle’s feelings, and he couldn’t escape
them. Physical love with Sunny would be wrong and he despised himself
for wanting it so constantly.
He pushed her firmly away and reached the door. She stood where she was,
momentarily defeated, crying and heart-sick. Page was too moved, too in
love and too worried, to leave her without another word. He said, almost
hoping she wouldn’t hear, “Maybe if you got an abortion ... we could—”
She straightened up and said with a fierce pride that surprised him,
“Never!”
He shut the door quietly behind him.
* * * * *
Sunny waited another couple of days alone in the apartment, afraid to go
out and leave the reinstalled phone untended. But Page, in spite of his
promise, didn’t call.
Sunny phoned his office at the _Sunday Magazine_ twice, but they told
her politely that Mr. Pringle was out covering a story, and gave her her
own number to call.
He thinks if we just don’t see each other or hear each other, the
problem will disappear, she thought angrily. For the first time since
she had known him she was tempted to question Page’s courage. Not his
physical courage; he had been in Korea, and his record was good. It was
his moral courage she wondered about.
Sunny called Jack again. She knew her call would advertise serious
trouble between her and Page, but he was their closest friend and she
trusted him. “I don’t know where he is,” she admitted to him.
“Well, I don’t know where he’s living, but I do know he’s in his office
part-time. We talked yesterday about getting together for a drink.”
“They keep telling me he isn’t there,” she said.
“He probably isn’t. He’s out a lot on interviews. Why don’t you go down
there, if it’s that urgent?”
“He’d kill me,” she said.
“The hell with him,” Jack retorted. “If he hurts you, I’ll break his
head. It’s worth a try, Sunny. If it doesn’t work, let me know. I’ll try
to work something out.”
She thanked him and hung up somewhat reassured. It made sense for Page
to hold tight to his job. He needed work right now, all the more since
he had given up his wife. Sunny wished sourly that she had a similar
crutch to lean on.
* * * * *
She took Jack’s advice and went to the midtown offices of the _Sunday
Magazine_, but it was all for nothing. She wasn’t admitted to see him
and had to leave, frustrated and furious. But Page suffered over it,
too. He was angry that she should have tried to approach him in public
and make a display of their trouble, especially here where he had a new
job and had to establish his worth. But not all the wrath he could
muster over her dangerous foolishness helped him forget that he had
turned her out; embarrassed and hurt her. He ached with regret over it,
wanting to rush home and hold her and beg her to forgive him.
He stood in his small private office, looking out the window at the
complex geometry of the city. The street thirty-two stories below looked
so inviting that he let himself wonder how it would feel to jump. But
anything was better than suicide, any act less final than death.
Page fell into his swivel chair and wept all over his bright,
self-confident new column. For the first time he really wanted to
change; try to accept the thing for Sunny’s sake, but he couldn’t do it.
Not yet. It still seemed too much like a weak surrender to him. Sunny
would have to wait and let him come to her. For when she approached him,
and worst of all, in public, he panicked. It was partly the
uncontrollable sex thing, partly moral confusion, partly painful love.
10
Jack and Laura were packed and Jack had located a temporary apartment
for them in Chicago. Their New York place was almost empty. The moving
van would pick up the remaining things in the morning.
Jack had talked Page into a last night’s outing. “You can’t let me go
without a send-off, old buddy,” he said. Privately, he hoped he could
help with whatever was troubling the young Pringles. It was probably a
typical newlywed complaint, but Jack pretended at first that he didn’t
know anything was amiss.
He met Page at a quiet little bar in Jack’s neighborhood. Both of them
were early. Jack was surprised at Page’s appearance. He was wearing the
right sort of clothes: the style-conscious young-executive sort. His
shirt was hand-tailored, his shoes were new. And yet he looked neglected
and unpressed.
“You look like I did when I was drinking myself to death,” Jack said
humorously.
“How?” Page said, anxious to get the first drink down and the second one
ordered.
“Seedy,” Jack told him.
“Thanks.” Page gulped over the hot whiskey.
Jack ordered a glass of milk and Page’s eyebrows soared, “Jesus, are you
still on the wagon?” he croaked, clearing his burning throat.
“More or less. Mostly more,” Jack grinned.
“Jack! You’re my friend. Get _drunk_ with me, for God’s sake.” He looked
so dismayed, with his face in lines and a button loose and his eyes lost
and troubled, that Jack, against his better judgment, ordered a shot of
Scotch.
“I do this out of sheer misguided brotherly love,” he told Page. “Laura
will probably divorce me when she finds out, but if it’s that
serious....”
“It’s _that_ serious.”
Jack waited for him to pick up the cue and tell him his problems. He
knew how to listen sympathetically to people, because he cared about
them. He was really interested, even in the dreariest dilemmas.
“I can’t talk about it,” Page said, putting the second drink away and
signaling for the third.
“Well then, what the hell am I doing sitting here getting drunk with
you?” Jack demanded to know.
“Shut up and drink,” Page said solemnly.
“It’ll take all night to get drunk on this stuff,” Jack said. “You could
down ten shots in a row and be sober as a pole. Why don’t we go up to my
place?”
“And slobber over your lovely wife?” Page objected.
“She isn’t home,” Jack said. She was, in fact, down in the Village
saying good-by to a few close friends.
“She isn’t? Let’s go.” The drinks seemed slightly stronger to Page than
Jack’s description—perhaps because he took down four or five in less
than ten minutes and they landed in an empty stomach.
Jack eyed him critically. “Can you stand up?” he kidded.
“Certainly, if you promise not to watch.”
They headed outside and the fresh air steadied Page. He was glad to go
with Jack. He had no wish to display his misery in a public bar. At the
same time he yearned to get high, to relax with an old friend who
wouldn’t judge him; muddle himself up and think about something besides
Sunny Pringle, his wife who was not his wife: his beautiful, bewitching,
seductive, adorable sister. But the liquor was just so much acid eating
up his little tin inhibitions. The higher he got the more he thought of
her; the more tempted he was to confess himself for the sake of the
comfort Jack would give him.
* * * * *
The Manns’s apartment was bare except for packing boxes full of books
and the built-in kitchen appliances. Jack and Page settled, with two
glasses and a bottle, in the kitchen.
Page wouldn’t talk about the thing for a while. He had given himself
strict orders, while he was still sober, not to mention it at all, not
even to this oldest and best of his friends. Not that Jack would ever
use it against him. But having revealed the thing once he might do it
again, and the more people who knew, the shakier Page’s future.
But as the evening wore on and the level in the whiskey bottle sank, the
urge for admission came over him again. It had all been stopped up
inside him for the past lonely, worried weeks. He wanted another
viewpoint, help, somebody to tell him what to do. Above all, he needed
someone to tell him he was right.
Jack was almost too easy to talk to. If you were sad he cheered you up,
if you were wrong he righted you, if you were happy he lived it up with
you. He was the one who had seen, even before Page himself, what a rare
and wonderful girl Sunny was.
Page put a friendly arm around him. “Jack, what would I do without you?”
he said in an unusual show of affection, brought on by straight Scotch.
“Why, you’d go straight to hell, old buddy. What else?” Jack grinned.
“Fill your glass?”
Page handed it over. “What did you say was the name of that drink?” he
asked, aware that his tongue was stumbling around in his mouth, like a
mole lost in the daylight.
“‘Jack’s Damnedest,’” Jack said. “Never fails.”
“What’s in it?” Page studied the glass suspiciously.
“Ten parts whiskey,” Jack said.