The Adjustment

SEVEN



TWO CAN LIVE AS CHEAPLY AS ONE



THE WHOLE TIME I knew her, which is to say the last ten years of her life, Sally’s mother had an awful odor that clung to her like a shroud, as though she’d never learned to wash properly, or had stopped caring at some point. I didn’t see how Sally’s father stood it, in fact had trouble picturing how Sally had ever been conceived. If Mr. Tate had endured some sort of brain injury that had removed his olfactory sense I hadn’t heard about it.

Neither she nor her husband displayed much affect at all, even when provoked. I could remember one night in high school when Sally and I got drunk and stayed out until four-thirty in the morning. We got home to find them waiting in the parlor, fully dressed, as though they were always up and Sally always out at that hour.

Sally, on the other hand, was a model of personal hygiene, especially after I introduced her to the thrill of muff diving. She was never shy about displaying her emotions, either; many’s the time she threw me out of her house for some slight I didn’t even know I’d committed. I taught her salty language and how to tell a dirty joke, and though I never made a reader or a scholar out of her she seemed an otherwise perfect mate when I married her at twenty-three, shortly after my graduation from Wichita U.

Something had changed while I was off to war. Her parents were dead, of course, but I sensed there was relief in that, at least inasmuch as she’d never again have to watch a friend pretending not to notice the old girl’s piquant ichthyological bouquet. My own mother’s homey qualities may have leached into her over the duration, but one of my first acts on returning was to treat my no longer blushing bride to four years’ worth of the filthiest jokes the Army could drill into a man, and she laughed so hard she had to change her underwear. And for those first months she was right along with me the way she used to be. I was out with her as many nights for fun as I was with old man Collins for the sake of the job.

It wasn’t the war years that changed her, then. It was the little intruder gestating in her belly. I thought long and hard about what Dr. Groff had told me about those chemical and hormonal changes, and I suspected that when the baby abandoned its claim on Sally’s womb the natural urges and imperatives of motherhood would counteract the waning of those chemical changes as her body returned to its normal state. In other words, her transformation to simpering homebody risked being permanent.

Her capacity for anger returned, however. I was almost grateful to see the old spitfire resurrected when I walked into the apartment on my return from KC. There was shrieking and crockery was thrown—just a coffee cup, but a nice Maggie-and-Jiggs touch—and a detailed discourse on what a rotten son of a bitch I was to leave her alone with no way to reach me. It turned out that the whole time I was gone Millie Grau was trying to get hold of me, and was very surprised to be told that Mr. Collins had sent me on a business trip. While Sally railed at me, I stuffed the message into my shirt pocket. Maybe when I walked back into Collins’s office I’d have a job offer to scare him with.

“You get right on the horn and tell the old man you’re sorry you disappeared. You have a wife and a baby to support.”

“First of all,” I told her, “I’ll tell him whatever I damned please. Second, I don’t have a baby yet.” I proceeded to explain to her my theory about the change in her behavior, and suggested that I knew people who could take care of the situation for us if we wanted to return things to the way they’d been before the war, when we were happy.

Her weapon this time was a cast-iron skillet that had belonged to her mother. Even though it just clipped the back of my skull it drew blood; curiously, this got me no sympathy. I retreated and with Sally screaming obscenities and threats from our open door I ran down the building’s main staircase to the street, where I hopped into the Olds and headed straight for the Eaton Hotel, where I got a four-dollar room for the night. This, I suspected, was not going to blow over without my eating a lot of crow.





IN THE MORNING I went to see Dr. Groff again. He didn’t seem surprised to see me back so soon.

“I want to know if there’s any way to induce an abortion without the woman knowing.”

“Use your head, Ogden, how’s she supposed to not know she’s not pregnant any more?”

“I mean is there a way to do it so it looks like a miscarriage?”

He shook his head, scowling. “Nope. None that I’ll be part of. I’ve done my share of angelmaking, but never without it being the woman’s express wish. I don’t know of any other doctor who’ll do such a thing either.” He drew back and his expression softened. “Listen, you’re a nervous first timer, it’s understandable you get crazy ideas. Don’t worry about it, things won’t change as much as all that. Look at it this way: every single ancestor of yours back to Adam and Eve did it. Why should you be the one to break the chain?”





I WENT STRAIGHT to my office and found another envelope addressed to DWAYNE OGDUNN on my desk. I put it into the cardboard grocery box I’d brought along with me and started cleaning out the desk for dramatic effect. Mrs. Caspian immediately dialed Miss Grau, without having spoken a word of greeting. My intention was to empty the desk and get out, the better to leverage my position, but as I was on my way out with the desk’s meager contents I found Herman Park blocking my path.

“You need to come with me, Mr. Ogden.”

“I’m going home,” I said.

“You’re coming with me to see Mr. Collins at his house, on his orders. Now you’ve treated me decent, Mr. Ogden, and I’ve got no itch to hurt you, but Mr. Collins said I was to go ahead if that was the only way.”

“Let me follow you in my car.”

“You don’t have a car. The one you drove in on belongs to Collins aircraft, and if you want to drive off with it later you’d better see the old man now.”





WE GOT INTO another company car, an Olds identical to mine but with a different smell to it, and drove out to the southern part of College Hill. Collins’s house was large even by the standards of the neighborhood, a three-story colonnaded stone house on an enormous wooded lot. A frail, white-haired maid who looked too old to be in service answered the door and led us in to see Collins. As we passed through the ornately decorated foyer—Oriental antiques of jade and brass on an oak chest, an enormous full-length oil portrait of old Everett in jodhpurs with his goggles hanging around his neck, a burbling fountain with a statue of a spitting nymph—I caught a glimpse of one of Mrs. Collins’s paranoiac eyes staring at us from an open sliver of a sliding door. Having met my gaze she slammed the door shut with surprising vigor and produced a solid bang.

Collins was upstairs in his room, under the covers with the lights out, when the maid led us in. “He’s expecting you,” she said.

“Mr. Collins?” Park said. “Here with Ogden.”

Collins mumbled something incomprehensible from his blanket.

“What’s that, sir?” Park said.

Collins shouted and thrashed. “Medicine, goddamnit, did he bring the f*cking medicine?”

Park looked at me in a half-panic, having evidently failed to understand that I had a mission to accomplish before I was brought into the mighty presence of the Great One.

“What medicine is that, Everett?” I asked. It was the first time I’d ever dared to use his first name to his face.

“You know goddamn well what medicine,” he said, saliva flying.

“Don’t you have a personal physician to take care of such things?”

“He won’t give me anything for the pain, says it’s not good to keep it up, anyhow I don’t even know what it was and goddamnit my ribs hurt.”

“Come on, Park, let’s go see if we can’t get Everett a script for those ribs.”





THAT NIGHT, ENSCONCED in my temporary home in the Eaton Hotel, I opened the envelope I’d found earlier in my desk. This time the note was typewritten, badly:

You son of a BITCH I know all about you cheat Uncle sam out money and other and if you think your going to get away with it thing again cocksucker. I am a real hard man. So you should start say your payers and get ready to give me all that doh. Bet your sorry now you killed her. Do you think the rules apply to everyone but you





Whoever he was, he knew me.