The Swing of the Pendulum by Adriana Spadoni

"IT'S impossible. I'm almost fifty -- and there is Alice."

Whenever Jerome could grasp the fact of Alice, the night's madness dulled to acceptance of conditions. Alice was married. She would have children of her own. He would be a grandfather. Only ten or fifteen years of real usefulness lay ahead. A quarter of a century of comfortable security, uncomplicated by emotion, stretched backward.

Three o'clock. Half past. A dog barked. A distant rooster crowed. Jerome was glad of the sounds. Soon the "terrific stillness" before the dawn would be all shot through with these safe, pleasant sounds of every day. The sun would come up. Milk wagons would rattle down the lanes. Malone would clump about in the kitchen. She would call him to breakfast and he would eat it while he read the morning paper, propped against the sugar-bowl. Then he would take the eight o'clock boat, as he had for fifteen years, and go to the office.

And there he would sit waiting and listening for sounds across the hall, inventing reasons to consult with Jean. He had done it for months, incredibly ignorant of his own reactions. But now he was not ignorant. That moment on the sidewalk, had flared into the deepest corners, burned away the ridiculous tangle of logic by which he had convinced himself, the night of the concert, that his emotion had been "biological. " Good God, he had called it that, a momentary spark, struck from the cold past, by the unexpected beauty of Jean's flesh!

It was no momentary spark. He did not want to take Jean in his arms and kiss her once, as he had wanted to do that night. He wanted her for always, day and night, to share with her the years before them.

And he was almost fifty. A thousand little habits, acquired through years, locked him fast. Alice and he had walked happily side by side. Jean's path would not run parallel to his. It would cross and crisscross.

She was strong. She pulsed with life. She might want a child. He and Jean and their child. And Alice and Sidney and Sidney, Junior. Like an immigrant family with the generations overlapping. Sidney Junior grinned and gurgled at him.

The sun rose. The night dew melted. The earth awoke refreshed and younger than the youngest human thing upon it. Jerome went wearily back into the house. He felt old and confused with the night's thinking, hours of balancing between -- fifty and thirty. Aching with a body-hunger his brain could not appease, blind in this storm of desire, lit with lightning flashes of self-ridicule, with amazement of the thing, with disbelief in its possibility, with the gurgling of Sidney, Junior, with strange reluctance and anger.

Milk wagons rattled down the lane. The sun rose full over the hilltops. A new day was begun, one of those new days, one of those "twenty-four hours to make into what you will. " Jerome smiled feebly.

"Another twenty-four hours like this and there'll be nothing left of me to do anything with."

Malone banged about in the kitchen. At last she called him to breakfast. He sugared the cereal she set before him, arranged the paper against the sugar-bowl, and stared at the headlines.

When she thought he was ready she brought the first helping of hot waffles. He saw her look at the untouched bowl and with difficulty made her understand that he did not want it. He buttered the waffles and poured the honey on them, stacking the crisp quarters one upon the other as he always did. And there they were when Malone came with the second plate. She stood holding the covered plate until Jerome told her impatiently to stop baking them. He felt that in this unreasonable world, Malone might go on baking waffles all day.

At a quarter to eight as always, Jerome pushed back his chair. He looked at the paper still folded to the front page and the crust of the single slice of toast he had attempted to eat.

"It's fifty all right -- or I would have eaten it -- and not known what it was."

Then he went into the living-room. He wrote two notes, one to the office and one to Jean. He was called out of town most unexpectedly. The business would take several days, and as he would be in the northern part of the State, he had decided to go on for his vacation, without returning. The notes were brief and almost duplicates, except that he added to Jean's a regret that they would not be able to finish the piers together. He sent the notes by messenger and packed his trunk.

Jean took the note from the boy and laid it unopened on the desk. Twice she picked it up and put it down again uncut. It was a scorching morning but her hands were cold and although all the windows were open, she felt that the room was airless. She crossed to the window and leaned out a little way. Below, the city, like the sea beating against a cliff, washed the base of the building, where, in a high, safe niche, she stood alone with the note from Jerome Stuart. In a moment she would open it and make a decision, although she knew that when she did open, the decision would have been already made.

Jean went back to the desk and opened the envelope. She read the half sheet and tore it slowly into bits. Her body scorched, but her fingers were icy to her own touch.

Jerome Stuart had run away. There was no love in his desire. He did not want to want her. She had disturbed his peace against his will and he had gone as he might have gone to escape the contagion of an illness. And last night she had sat for hours on the roof, almost afraid to think, because of the small, eager fear that had come upon her!

When Minnie came for the morning's dictation, Jean felt that she had been sitting at her desk for weeks. Only years of habit made it possible to pick up the day's routine, but early in the afternoon, Jean left the office and went home.

The sun beat fiercely upon the asphalted gravel. Jersey was hidden under its pall of smoke. Nearer at hand, huge chimneys belched their blackness into the quivering heat. The day was still roaring at its task.