Ring Around the Sun

CHAPTER NINE

WHEN the bus reached Cliffwood, darkness was begin to fall. Vickers bought a paper at the corner drugstore and made his way across the street to the town's one clean cafe.

He had ordered the meal and was just starting on the paper when a piping voice hailed him.

"Hi, there, Mr. Vickers."

Vickers put down the paper and looked up. It was Jane, the little girl who had come for breakfast.

"Why, hello, Jane," he said. "What are you doing here?"

"Me and Mommy came down to buy some ice cream for supper," Jane explained. She perched herself on the edge of the chair across the table from him. "Where you been today, Mr. Vickers? I came across to see you, but there was a man there and he wouldn't let me in. He said he was killing mice. What was he killing mice for, Mr. Vickers?"

"Jane," a voice said.

Vickers looked up and a woman stood there, sleek and maturely beautiful, and she smiled at him.

"You must not mind her, Mr. Vickers," she said. "Oh, indeed, I don't, I think she's wonderful."

"I am Mrs. Leslie," said the woman. "Jane's mother. We've been neighbors for a long time now, but we've never met."

She sat down at the table.

"I have read some of your books," she said, "and they are wonderful. I haven't read them all. One has so little time."

"Thank you, Mrs. Leslie," said Vickers and wondered if she would think that he was thanking her for not reading all his books.

"I had meant to come over and see you," Mrs. Leslie said.

"Some of us are organizing a Pretensionist Club and I have you on my list."

Vickers shook his head. "I am pressed for time," he said. "I make it a rule to belong to nothing."

"But this," said Mrs. Leslie, "would be — well, you might say, this would be down your alley."

"I am glad you thought of me."

She laughed at him. "You think us foolish, Mr. Vickers."

"No," he said, "not foolish."

"Infantile, then."

"Since you supplied the word," said Vickers, "I'll agree to it. Yes, I must admit, it does seem just faintly infantile."

Now, he thought, I've done it. Now she will twist it around so that it will appear it was I, not she, who said it. She'll tell all the neighbors how I told her to her face the club was infantile.

But she didn't seem insulted. "It must seem infantile to someone like you who has every minute filled. But I've been told that it's a wonderful way to work up an interest — an outside interest, that is."

"I have no doubt it is," said Vickers.

"It's a lot of work, I understand. Once you decide on the period you'd like to pretend you are living in, you must read up on the period and do a lot of research on it and then you have to write your diary and it must be day to day and it must be a full account of each day's activities, and not just a sentence or two and you must make it interesting and, if you can, exciting."

"There are many periods of history," said Vickers, "that could be made exciting."

"Now, I'm glad to hear you say that," Mrs. Leslie told him, eagerly. "Would you tell me one? If you were going to choose a period for excitement, Mr. Vickers, which one would you choose?"

"I'm sorry. I'd have to think about it."

"But you say there were many…"

"I know. And yet, when I think of it, it seems to me that the present day might prove as exciting as any of the others."

"But there's nothing going on."

"There's too much going on," said Vickers.

The whole idea was pitiful, of course — grown people pretending they lived in some other age, publicly confessing that they could not live at peace with their own age, but most go burrowing back through other times and happenings to find the musty thrill of vicarious existence. It marked some rankling failure in the lives of these people, some terrible emptiness that would not let them be, some screaming vacuum that somehow had to be filled.

He remembered the two women who had talked in the bus seat behind him and he wondered momentarily what vicarious satisfaction the Pretentionist living back in Pepys' time might get out of it. There was, of course, Pepys' well filled life, the scurrying about, the meetings with many people, the little taverns where there were cheese and wine, the theaters, the good companionship and the midnight talks, the many interests that had kept Pepys as full of life, as naturally full of life, as these pretentionists were empty.

The movement itself was escapism, of course, but escapism from what? From insecurity, perhaps. From tension, from a daily, ever-present uneasiness that never quite bubbled into fear, yet never quieted into peace. The state, perhaps, of never being sure — a state of mind that all the refinements of a highly advanced technology could not compensate.

"They must have our ice cream packed by now," said Mrs. Leslie, gathering up her gloves and purse. "You must come over, Mr. Vickers, and spend an evening with us."

Vickers rose with her. "Certainly. Some evening very soon," he promised.

He knew he wouldn't and he knew she didn't want him to, but they both paid lip service to the old fable of hospitality.

"Come on, Jane," said Mrs. Leslie. "It was nice to meet you, Mr. Vickers, after all these years."

Without waiting for his answer, she moved away.

"Everything is fine at our house now," said Jane. "Mommy and Daddy have made up again."

"I'm glad of that," said Vickers.

"Daddy says he won't run around with women any more," said Jane.

"I'm glad to hear that, too," said Vickers.

Her mother called to her across the store.

"I got to go now," said Jane. She slipped off the chair and ran across the store to her mother's side. She turned and waved at him as they went out the door.

Poor kid, he thought, what a life she has ahead of her. If I had a little girl like that — he shut the thought away. There was no little girl for him. There was a shelf of books; and there was the manuscript that lay waiting for him, in all its promise and its glory. And suddenly he realized how faint the promise was, how false and shallow the glory might be. Books and manuscripts; he thought. Not much to build a life on.

And that was it, of course. That was the trouble with not himself alone, but with everyone — no one seemed now to have much on which to build his life. For so many years the world had lived with war or the threat of war. First it had been a frantic feeling, a running to escape, and then it was just a moral and mental numbness that one didn't even notice, a condition that one accepted as the normal way of life.

No wonder there were Pretentionists, he told himself. With his books and his manuscript, he was one himself.