Pat Frank - Mr. Adam

In my own home the situation suddenly and violently departed from normal. It was Marge. Her entire disposition and character changed, and for the worse.

At first I put it down to delayed shock from the catastrophe that had overtaken Homer. Marge had been more than fond of Homer. Like so many weak men with stronger women, he apparently had appealed to all her protective instincts. In addition, she really had had a good deal of faith in A.I., probably acquired from talking to Maria Ostenheimer. Yet she had accepted the sterilization of Homer Adam without undue emotion.

Now she grew irritable, and touchy, and I blamed it on delayed shock. She was gradually realizing, I believed at first, that Homer’s suicidal disaster had doomed her to a barren marriage.

The habit and pattern and tradition of our life together—the small things that two people do together that make them one—were blemished or vanished entirely. These are very small things indeed, but of surpassing importance. There are the private jokes; and the ritual of who wakes first, and puts on the coffee; and who gets what part of the Sunday papers; and my growls because she uses my razor.

The business of the razor ordinarily used to go like this: When I started shaving I would discover that my razor had had it. I would curse and say that there were a few things a man could have in private, and one of them was a razor, and that if she wanted to shave her legs she could easily run over to the drug store on the Avenue of the Americas and buy a razor all her own. And she would say she had bought countless razors, but hers were always dull, and mine was always sharp. And I would say that was because I put fresh blades in mine, and she would say that was part of a man’s duty, and I would say I was going to cure her entirely, and take up electric shaving.

And there, ordinarily, was where it ended. But one day in June I was covering an exhibition of electric gadgets and a manufacturer presented all the reporters with electric razors.

The next morning I was running it over my chin when Marge saw me and immediately burst into tears. “You horrid man,” she said. “You don’t love me any more.”

“I don’t what?”

“You don’t love me any more. For years you’ve tortured me with threats about buying an electric razor, and now you have gone and done it, simply to show your contempt for me.”

I looked at her, and saw she actually was crying. An absurd and maudlin scene developed, at the end of which I threw my electric razor into the trash barrel.

Then there was the matter of getting up nights. Ordinarily Marge sleeps as if she had been hit on the head, until morning, but she began to develop a habit of waking up, at four or five, and then waking me up. “I want a bag of peanuts,” she would say, nudging me or kicking me from the other side of Smith Field. Sometimes she would wake up and say she wasn’t sure the front door was locked, or would I please get up and bring her a raw egg.

It was all inexplicable, and most unlike her.

The worst of it was her newly acquired jealousy and suspicion. Marge had never been jealous. For one thing, it is silly and futile for a newspaperman’s wife to be jealous, just as it is silly and futile for a doctor’s wife to be jealous. The uncertain hours and nature of his job provide a newspaperman with so many unimpeachable alibis that if a wife suspects him she will just run herself crazy, and never prove anything. In the second place, Marge simply wasn’t jealous. I don’t know whether it was confidence in herself, or in me.

Now, each night when I returned from work, she began to drop little fishhooks of questions into her conversation, trying to catch some fancied admission that would prove me unfaithful.

She fished in all the years of our marriage. Incidents that I had long forgotten, and girls of whom I had only the vaguest memory became subjects for hysterical accusations and violent scenes. One evening Marge casually put a magazine aside and said, “That secretary of yours in Washington, Jane Zitter—you saw a lot of her, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” I said. “She was a big help. Swell girl.”

“Stephen, you sort of lived with her, didn’t you?”

I saw what was coming. “Now look, Marge,” I said. “There wasn’t anything between Jane and me except that she was my secretary, and a very good one, too. And if you’ve got to exercise these silly notions of yours, pick on somebody besides poor Jane.”

“Well, you’re pretty excited about it, aren’t you,” she said significantly. “Actually, she did live with you, didn’t she?”

I knew I was going to blow up, and I began to pace the floor to relieve the pressure. “Marge, you know as well as I do that sometimes Jane spent the night up in the hotel. In her own bedroom. In her own bed. Nobody with her. Now lay off!”

“You’re shouting at me again,” she said. “You always shout when you’ve done something you can’t explain. Just because you make a lot of noise doesn’t make you less guilty.”

I was tired of it. I was tired of Marge and her incessant third degree. But I didn’t say anything more. I put on my hat, and went outside, and it was good to be alone. I realized that lately I had been leaving for work earlier than necessary, and returning home as late as possible. I walked over to Fifth Avenue, and then down to Washington Square. I found an empty bench, and sat down and tried to think.

I told myself that I was letting my nerves harass me into a point where I would reach an impasse with Marge, and there would be a divorce, although a divorce since W.S. Day seemed almost as futile as marriage. Then I began to analyze her actions. I tried to place myself in the role of a disinterested spectator. And particularly I began to analyze her spasms of jealousy and suspicion. I told myself that there could be no doubt of it, Marge was ill—mentally ill. She had all the symptoms.

It was quite the most horrible and dismaying conclusion I ever reached. I had never realized, before, that insanity in one close to you is far worse than physical illness, for when a person’s mind goes they are completely gone from you, as in death, and yet their body remains. Of course I had to be certain, and once I was certain I must see that she got the very best neurotherapy. I told myself that it probably wasn’t incurable. I would ask Maria Ostenheimer and Tommy Thompson over the next night and, without alarming Marge, they could tell whether it was so.

Before I returned home I stopped at a drug store, and called Maria, and told her the whole story, as unemotionally as possible, and from the questions she asked I could see that she was worried, and she promised to come over the next evening for bridge, and she would bring Tommy.

I went to sleep that night trying to remember what I knew of Marge’s family. Certainly her mother and father were quite sane, but I knew hardly anything of her grandparents. Maybe it didn’t matter.

So Maria and Tommy came over the next night—a Tuesday—ostensibly for bridge, but actually to put Marge under quiet observation for a few hours. It started off tamely enough, but it developed into quite a remarkable evening.

We started playing bridge in the usual way, talking about the usual things—the Transylvania question, and Manchuria, and wasn’t it shame about A.I.—but I could see that Maria and Tommy were watching Marge closely as if they had her in the hospital. They watched the co-ordination of her hands, they watched her eyes, and they dropped deft little, seemingly unrelated, questions into the stream of our conversation. And Marge, I do believe, appeared completely normal for the first hour or so, until she suddenly put down her cards and exclaimed, “I must have a dill pickle!”

“What’s that?” Tommy asked.