Tuesday to Bed. Francis Sill Wickware

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      Copyright © 1948 by Francis Sill Wickware

      Published by Wildside Press LLC.

      wildsidepress.com | bcmystery.com

      CHAPTER 1

      STANTON WYLIE, lying on his back in bed, with one arm crooked around his head on the pillow, opened his eyes slowly and wondered why he was awake. For a split second he even wondered where he was. He had one of those peculiar alarm-clock minds, and before dropping off to sleep at night he could tell himself what time he wanted to wake up in the morning and be sure of doing so with a very narrow margin of error. This was a trick which he simply accepted without attempting any psychological explanation, and the results often puzzled him. This Friday morning, for example, he awoke at eight-twenty (having set the mental alarm for eight-fifteen the previous evening) and from beneath half-closed lids obliquely regarded the curtains ballooning out from the windows with no immediate comprehension.

      He licked his lips and stirred, aware of a feeling of strain in the crooked arm. Then his gaze—veiled by eyelashes which looked as thick as tree trunks in that strange focus—wandered from the curtains to an oblong of brown sole leather which seemed to be resting on the blanket at the foot of the bed. He vaguely recognized it, after a while, as the top of his overnight case, and he wondered what it was doing there. Then something snapped, and he remembered . . . Chicago; the Century this afternoon; the speech. Words began to parade through his mind. “Mr. President, Members of the Committee, ladies and gentlemen of the convention . . .”

      He sat up, stretching mightily, yawning, running a big-fingered hand through tawny hair, and making the bed seem preposterously inadequate to support him. He reached out and automatically turned off the switch on the cord trailing from the blanket, then looked automatically toward his wife’s bed. It was empty. The covers were thrown back, with the top sheet piled into a little mountain—a brown sheet, with a diamond-shaped pink monogram, “E.B.W.” What is Betsy doing up so early? he thought, and then reached out for the switch on her blanket. She never remembered, never would remember, he thought, but indulgently. She wouldn’t be the same if she did remember, and he didn’t want to change her. He caught the whiff of her perfume from the sheets as he leaned toward her bed with his hand on the switch, and he experienced a sensation of tingling gladness as sudden and exuberant as a bursting sky-rocket. The speech has got to be good, he told himself. I want her to be proud of it.

      The room was cool and dim. The brown carpet looked purple in the early light, and the pink walls were gray. Outside, a boisterous wind galloped across a slate-covered sky, and Stanton watched the lashing branches of the willow tree beyond the windows. Then he pushed two switches in a panel on the bedside table. Something hummed in the wall, and the windows slowly closed, with the curtains flapping once or twice before they resumed their sedate vertical folds. From above came a scratching, sputtering sound as the fluorescent tubes hidden behind the window valences abruptly flooded the room with daylight. Stanton touched a third switch, and the curtains rolled together like closing gates. The room—as Stanton blinked—came to life and color, with the mirrors in Betsy’s dressing alcove shining pink and brown and blue and reflecting sharp little facets from the bottles grouped on the mirrored top of the kidney-shaped dressing table skirted with the same pink-and-brown curtain material.

      On the brown carpet between the beds Betsy’s nightgown made a small rippling pile of pink silk, and Stanton picked it up and smelled the fragrance of his wife. He worked the fabric between his Angers, thinking of the relative tensile strengths of silk and nylon thread, then pressed the gown to his face and inhaled Betsy’s perfume. Nylon was a fine invention, he decided, but it didn’t have the personality of silk. It was too cold. It couldn’t absorb the essence of a woman’s body and hold it and send it out again like silk. Somewhat incredulously he held the nightgown at arms’ length and studied it. Although he had been married to her for nearly fifteen years, Stanton never had lost his sense of wonder that anyone as lovely as Betsy could be his wife—or his wonder at the lovely, fascinating, mysterious garments she wore. I am a very lucky man, he told himself, and immediately added: The speech isn’t good enough. I’ve got to do something about it.

      Then he let the pink silk splash back onto the carpet, and swung out of bed. In the bathroom he flicked switches again and there was a blaze of ultraviolet. He passed a cobra-headed electric shaver around his cheeks and chin, shed his pajamas and stepped into a glass-inclosed shower, where he pressed one of a row of insulated buttons on the wall and bathed in a spray automatically regulated to seventy-eight degrees Fahrenheit “. . . ladies and gentlemen, to say that this is one of the proudest moments of my life would, of course, be an understatement,” he orated above the hissing of the shower. No, too self-conscious, he told himself. The beginning shouldn’t be so formal. Now how about this? . . .

      He continued the rehearsal while drying himself with monogrammed towels which repeated the color combination of the sheets, continued while he dressed, abstractedly selecting a light gray tweed suit, blue chambray shirt and a navy tie with vivid red compasses, protractors and T-squares—Betsy’s find. “. . . We stand on the threshold of a new era,” he said to the mirror while he straightened the tie and adjusted a gold collar pin. I’ll say we do, he added to himself. His glance shifted from the mirror to a black wooden frame hanging a foot or so to the right, and for a moment all the life seemed to be blotted from his face. He stooped a little, and furrows stretched across his forehead and were gouged in slanting lines from the corners of his mouth. He was a big man, sparely built, and in that particular attitude he suggested one of the old Brady photographs of Lincoln—kindly, thoughtful, perplexed by a responsibility too vast for one man to face. Yet in the black frame he only saw the top third of a newspaper page, already starting to fade and yellow. It read: Oak Ridge Journal above a roaring black headline: IT’S ATOMIC BOMB!!!, with the dateline August 6, 1945. Attached to a corner of the frame was an oblong green plastic badge—MANHATTAN DISTRICT PROJECT—Stanton Wylie—some personal particulars, a cloudy thumbprint. That was all.

      Impulsively he put out a hand as if to pull the frame from the wall. Betsy always had objected to it—said it was morbid and out of keeping with the rest of the room, which it was. They had had quite an argument about it, with Betsy saying: “I don’t see the sense in it, Stanton. Why not hang it, if you must, in your office, or out in your workshop? Why here?” But he had insisted: “This is something easy to forget because we would like to forget it—or I would,” he had told her. “But I haven’t the right to forget it. I need to be reminded every day when I wake up and get dressed. Then maybe I’ll——” He never finished what he might have said, because Betsy shrugged impatiently and walked out of the room. “Oh, all right,” she said from the doorway. “Hang it there if you must, but it will just ruin——” The frame stayed on the wall, and neither of them mentioned it again. His hand stopped less than an inch from the badge. Then he dropped it to his side, and looked back into the mirror. “. . . stand on the threshold of a new era,” he repeated. “And it is up to us to see that it is the era of . . .” In the corner of his eye he saw the headline: IT’S ATOMIC BOMB!!! He shook his head in a puzzled way, and the lines deepened in his face. Betsy was so deft, so intuitive, so swift at forming opinions and grasping ideas, yet he never had been able to make her see what he meant, and he was sorry for that because he very much needed someone who would understand. But the last thing in his mind was blame of Betsy. No, it was his fault, СКАЧАТЬ