THE FEAR OF INNOCENCE
807
twenty-three, I wrote him once more out of the bewilderment that
cancelled all my attitudes, long unused anyhow and grown almost
unfamiliar. I could scarcely recall his face, certainly not evoke it
revised by death's imminence. He had returned to boyhood to die,
and only I was absent, far-off, not writing and harried.
It was a difficult time for me. For three years I had been writing
poetry, finding in marriage a warmth and illumination eager to be
words, a break in the inhibiting coldness that had preceded it; but I
had suddenly, inexplicably dried up and I was scared.
It was one of those times when one feels with a deep, quiet
certainty that he will never be able to write again. I read detective
stories frantically, suffered from piles and athlete's foot, discovered
that my hair was growing thin, and, rereading my three years' body
of work, found it a few cries toward an impossible conversion, no
more.
There was the abortion, too-or perhaps it was all essentially
that. In my resolve to have no children, the whole residue of fear
that had survived my induction into responsibility monstrously pros–
pered. To be sure, I told myself, there are juvenile decisions that are
resistance merely, against which our current stutters, is heat: to cry
against marriage and marry, to damn the community and surrender
to it is normal; one even learns to play Bridge; but this last, delicate
scruple cannot be abandoned for all that is baffled when body and
body are sundered always by the intervention of some discreet
machine.
We scarcely felt the bafflement for a while, being yet each other's
explorers, crying to each other from pinnacle or declivity what vistas
we had discovered or what darknesses. But the real end of such coup–
ling is not knowledge only, and afterwards it irked us: the month's
end niggling worry, the delays of preparation, the dull constant peril
(we defined it so) at the core of joy.
"Oh, Goddam it," I cried when we were, despite all,
in
the usual
terrible phr.ase, "caught," "Oh, Goddam it!"
"It wouldn't be so horrible a thing after
all
to have a child."
Vivian smiled ambiguously out of a face lumpy, green eyes marred
with the drug we had been vainly trying. "My ears ring. My mouth's
sour. I'm tired! tired! and I shall never put one of those uglinesses
between my teeth again. I can't. I can't."
