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George doesn't jump. He doesn't go back to his car. He walks all the way home, and when he opens the front door (weather stripping dangling loose, paint peeling from where the dog scratches to be let in) his shoes are soaked through and there are three men waiting in his living room. The bank examiner shakes his head solemnly, disapproval making little wrinkles around his piercing accountant's eyes. The police officer puts a hand on his shoulder, no cuffs. The photographer blinds him with a flash and leaves a puff of smoke, the smell of which lingers in the room for hours. Not that George will know this.
The children have been sent to their rooms and Mary stands at the bottom of the stairs, hands twisted in her apron, until the men start to go towards the door. She gives a little cry then and dashes forward, and the place where she kisses him is cool on George's face as he leaves home.
They divorce after ten months. He asks, during one of the strained visits that make him feel relieved to return to his cell, whether it would have made a difference if he'd told her about the money. She shakes her head, her lovely, shining hair already pulled into the severe bun that he knows, somehow, is the beginning of a withdrawal into herself, so that one day it will be as though she were never married at all.
"The money was just what that made you decide to leave us at last," she says, like she was there with him on the bridge. Whether or not he signs the papers on the table she will always pull out the secrets inside him that he hardly knows himself.
George doesn't say but I stayed, because they both know that the water looked too cold and the fall seemed too far.
"It would have worked if you'd bought a steamer ticket," Mary says. "I would have kept loving you if you'd gone to climb the pyramids. But not if you were lying next to Uncle Billy."
George had never even thought of a rope. Uncle Billy had been braver than anyone suspected, in a way.
"You could have been so many things, George," she says softly. "I would have loved any of them but a coward."
When he leaves prison, he doesn't go back to Bedford Falls. He takes the little bit of money left after the dissolution of the building and loan, and he buys a one-way train ticket heading west.
*****
George doesn't go to the pond that day. He pores over the dog-eared atlas with Harry, quizzing him on South American capitals, and makes it to adulthood with two functioning eardrums. He's qualified 1A and serves a grueling three years in the Pacific fighting jungle rot in his shorts and crippling homesickness. In Honolulu he eats a coconut and brings home four more for the children. Mary declines hers, but with a smile that's brighter than all the smiles she's ever given him put together, and then some.
*****
George doesn't go to the pond that day. Harry tags along with the gang, and without George around they bully him mercilessly. No one is looking when he slides across the ice, and only when Chester Wilson sees a red cap floating on the water does anyone guess what's happened. The police don't find the body for two weeks, until the March sun begins to melt the stream.
There's no reason for the Baileys to blame George but they do, or so he thinks. At eighteen he leaves home for the merchant marines, and all the news his parents hear from him for years is what can fit on a travel-stained postcard. He'd never guess that his mother keeps every one.
*****
George goes to New York after college, and in 1930 his firm sends him to Egypt to work on an attempt at raising the Aswan Dam. Once he's had his third bout of yellow fever he gets to like the place, and he moves out of his stuffy hotel room into a squalid apartment in the oldest section of the city and gets serious about learning Arabic. He trades his suit for a caftan, to the amusement of the native workers, and on his holidays he travels to Giza and Alexandria and Luxor, collecting little statues and scraps of old parchment to send to Harry and his mother. The firm goes under in 1933 but one of the local contractors hires him on, and he moves north to Cairo to work on power stations and aqueducts.
Harry comes to visit in 1935, looking older than George himself after years of keeping the building and loan afloat, and seems shocked at the friendly ease with which his lean, tan brother haggles over the price of a taxi or a bottle of wine. George, in turn, is surprised at the passion when his brother talks about the family business. There's a certain wistfulness in Harry's eyes as he glances at the blueprints all over George's apartment, stacked in piles on the dusty fringed rugs, but when he describes the day they moved Giuseppe Martini and all his children into a new home in Bailey Park, George catches a little of the same feeling himself.
"Since Pop passed…" Harry says, and pauses. "Well, you know how Uncle Billy is."
George does know. Billy is keen and sharp-eyed until he adds up a column of figures and leaves off two zeroes; full of good advice until confronted with a problem he's never seen before; charming with clients and steady and loving and utterly unreliable. And George knows that when he came home for his father's funeral, he was supposed to stay.
"You'd think with times the way they are we'd have our pick of good clerks, but they all seem to have tried their luck in the big cities instead," Harry says. "Like half the young people in town."
There's something George should say, but next week he's doing a walkthrough at the new waterworks and it's the first project he's ever managed by himself.
"Let me know if you need any money," George says.
When he goes home for Christmas in 1938 he runs into Sam Wainwright's wife at a party when he's at least two sheets to the wind, waving a cuba libre dangerously high in the air.
"Why, little Mary," he sing-songs, and she does look little. All he can see is the top of her head and two bright, amused eyes.
"Hello, George," she says. "I hear you moved to Egypt. How many wives have you got now?"
"Three!" he crows, spilling his drink at last, mostly on his own brillantined head. "I tell you, keeping 'em all happy's a chore I never imagined. The squabbles over clothes!"
Mary laughs, wiping a few drops of his drink off her nose with her handkerchief. "I hope you can afford to keep them well-dressed."
"Oh, yes, silk and pearls," George says, peering into his glass to see if there's anything left. There isn't. "Those Egyptian women have got style like you American women could never imagine."
Mary raises an eyebrow.
"Not that you haven't – " he says hastily, and slams down his empty glass. "Oh, hell. Don't let me ramble on like this, Mrs. Wainwright. I'm just an old bachelor whose brains have been scrambled by the hot Egyptian sun." He gets down on one knee, wringing his hands plaintively, and she laughs again.
"Rise, Sir Over-Easy," she says, tapping him lightly on the head. "You are forgiven."
George gets to his feet clumsily and bows, even more clumsily. "You are gracious, Queen Mary," he says. "And I…am drunk."
"It's Christmas," she says, like that explains everything.
"It is," he says. "And let me tell you, all that snow out there makes me feel it for once. You wouldn't believe how silly a palm tree looks covered in lights and tinsel."
Mary laughs again, and through a haze of lime-scented rum he feels pleased with himself for still knowing how to make a woman laugh.
"I'd like to see that," she says.
"Any time," George says. "I'm on the lookout for wifey number four, if Mr. Wainwright doesn't mind."
"Doesn't mind what?" Sam says, coming up and sliding his arm around Mary's slim waist. He spins her around, and over Sam's shoulder George can see that the mirth in her eyes has frozen into something else he can't quite read.
"Contributing to the Bailey harem," George says grandly, making himself more comical than before to cover up an awkward pause. "I'll buy this one off you for three camels, and that's a bargain."
Sam guffaws, pulling Mary close. She doesn't look at George. "Aw, they'd be no good out here in the snow, Georgie. 'Sides, camels can't cook like my little Mary." He presses a smacking kiss to her cheek, and she looks up again.
"Meatloaf every Sunday," Mary says.
"You've got the camels beat," George says, shaking his head. "All they can manage is cabbage soup and burnt toast."
All three of them laugh, but it doesn't really reach Mary's eyes until Sam hee-haws at someone across the room, and as she walks away George feels a queer twinge, like there's something he forgot to do.
*****
George marries Violet four months before the baby is born. He's a sickly little thing, and Violet is an impatient mother, but after a year of colic fits and mounting doctor's bills they're in possession of a sturdy, satisfactory toddler who has his mother's yellow curls and his father's easy temperament.
Violet becomes a slightly more patient mother, but flatly refuses to have another child. Eventually, resentfully, she accepts their financial limitations, and they're able to pay off their accounts with the milliner's and the dressmaker's and the department stores. They weather the bank crash, the war, and the winter Hank contracts measles, mumps, and chicken pox all in quick succession, and by 1952 their house is the pride of Bailey Park and they have two cars, a maid, and a summer cottage in Maine. George plays with his granddaughters on the beach while Violet exchanges gossip with her manicurist at the salon, and sometimes he wonders if his father ever felt the way George does when he sees Hank working in the office late at night, pride and pleasure mixed with the wistful question of what else his son might have been.
*****
George takes the job. It's Mary who tells him to do it, the last person he'd have imagined telling him to and the only person who could have. She tells him it isn't about the money, and even if it is, a little bit, they both know that the building and loan is the weight that will pull them slowly, inexorably down over the years. He can be a good man in a different way, she says.
He lets the poorest of Potter's tenants slide on their rents. He makes repairs when asked to, and justifies it to Potter by showing that new pipes today saves new boilers tomorrow. He gets Potter to raze existing shacks when he buys land and build new structures instead, pointing out the savings on bribes to the building inspectors. Potter knows what George is doing, of that he's sure, but profits don't go down and eventually they go up so no one ever says a thing, though Potter always smiles that secret, cruel smile whenever they meet.
Scarcely any new homes are built in town; it is more efficient, as Potter says, to rent one house to multiple families, or put up apartment blocks. Yards are a luxury, he tells George, and it's true that everyone can afford a Potter row house. They're clean, if small, and not the deathtraps they used to be. Everyone wins when restraint is exercised, says Potter, and it's hard to disagree.
George inherits the business when Potter dies. It's not really a surprise, though the old man was close-lipped to the last, and it's more of an empire these days. He spends more hours than ever closeted in his little office (Potter's office, gloomy and imposing, is left shut as a sort of memorial tomb), and if he never builds the neighborhood of pretty little Bailey houses that his father envisioned, and if he does send out a few eviction notices on Christmas Eve, there's a warm home waiting for him at the end of the day and a happy wife and four children who don't know anything about sleeping under leaking roofs and wearing cardboard-soled shoes. And after all, Mary reminds him from time to time, he needn't take all the worries of the world on his own shoulders. Sometimes a man has to save a little for himself.
*****
George doesn't jump. He runs all the way home, jubilant, shouting in the streets as every little part of his silly little life is made more precious by the moment. He bursts into the house, calling for his wife, and when he's kissed her and embraced the children he presents his wrists cheerfully to the bewildered police officer, who doesn't cuff him. The photograph that runs in the paper the next day shows George in the midst of perplexed, frowning people, grinning like a jack o' lantern.
Mary takes it all like a champ, bless her. She holds her head up when the old biddies in the market cluck their tongues as she passes by and defends George endlessly to her mother (she doesn't tell him this, but he knows). She tells the children not to be ashamed, and though George won't let them visit him in prison he gets their letters every week, from Janie's prettily-written compositions to the crayon scribbles that turn, inevitably, to legible print and complete sentences as Zuzu grows up. She'll nearly be a teenager by the time he sees her next, but it's just one more thing to live for.
"Everyone in town was so sorry," Mary says during one visit, leaning her head on her hand. Her fingertips are calloused from the mending she takes in during the evenings, and she used to wear white cotton gloves to hide them until George made her stop. "They all wished they could have done something, but I don't know what."
"Passed the hat around," George says, flippantly. Mary's dress is especially pretty today, and it's chocolate pudding night.
"They should have. After all you've done for them."
"Oh, Mary," he says with a laugh. "Eight thousand dollars. I don’t think those things really happen outside of heartwarming magazine stories."
"I suppose not," she says. "Still. They do love you."
"There are only a very small number of people whose love I care about," he says, taking her hand. He kisses each roughened finger, then her palm, and folds her hand shut. "Rita Hayworth, Betty Grable – "
Mary pulls her hand away and laughs, the sound like a tinkling bell in the bleak, cement-walled visiting room. "Clearly you made a mistake in marrying me," she says. "I don't think my legs are up to your standards."
"I never made a mistake in my life," says George.