Margaret Millar

Experiment in Springtime

To my husband, Kenneth Millar

Chapter 1

In April, Charles almost died. His wife, Martha, nursed him assiduously and with a certain grim efficiency that Charles, in his moments of clarity, found amusing. Even on the point of death, he knew he bored her.

Perhaps it might have been different if there had been anything heroic about his illness — if he had leaped glamorously off a high building or had plunged into the lake to save a child. But the fact was that he had simply come home from the office with a bad headache and had accepted the two headache tablets given to him by his wife, Martha. It was not, of course, Martha’s fault that he was allergic to so many things and that the headache tablets turned out to be aspirin. Aspirin, as the doctor pointed out and as Charles later had good reason to believe, was sheer poison to him.

The doctor, a man called MacNeil, seemed very interested in the case and anxious to substantiate his own diagnosis. Nearly every time he came, he brought with him old medical journals and newspaper clippings in which he read about an old man in Manchester who had died of taking one aspirin and a young boy in Kansas who became ill when he touched one. Charles listened vaguely. Manchester and Kansas seemed equally remote. His own world had narrowed to four walls, and there were only two people living in it, himself and Martha. Other people drifted in and out, other sounds penetrated the walls, and the clock ticked away the minutes here as inexorably as in the outer world, but time and space had become more intimately related. Space was this room, and time could be measured by the increasing boredom on Martha’s face.

Each flicker of her eyelids and movement of her hands, every inflection of her voice, had come to mean something to Charles. The very manner in which she picked up a book to read aloud indicated to him whether she liked the book and whether she wanted to read at that particular moment or not.

“You don’t have to read to me,” he told her. “Brown could. He doesn’t do much else around the house.”

“But I want to.”

“Well, all right, then.”

He didn’t enjoy being read to any more than she enjoyed reading, but it was too difficult to tell her that outright. He was forced to observe her more and more closely, and if an inadvertent sigh or gesture gave her away, he would ask her to change books or to leave him alone so he could rest.

It was a queer reversal of things that it was she, and not himself, who was under observation. He was the patient, she was the nurse. It was Martha who should have been watching him and calculating his reactions. She did watch him, naturally, but with the detached and professional scrutiny of a trained nurse, as if he had, in becoming ill, ceased to have any identity apart from the illness. He was no longer Charles, her husband, but a piece of anonymous broken-down machinery. Machinery could be mended with patience and care; you don’t have to think about it or wonder about it.

He disliked having her nurse him at all, allowing her to see him helpless day after day, as dependent as a baby. Babies were rather cuter than men of thirty-six, however. You could nurse a baby without despising it.

Here again, as in the case of reading aloud, it was hard to say anything. He hinted broadly sometimes.

“Why don’t you take your mother and Laura to a movie this afternoon?”

“I don’t really care for movies. Besides, Laura sees too many, they give her silly ideas.”

“All girls sixteen have silly ideas anyway.”

“I want Laura to be different.”

Laura was her younger sister but Martha always talked about her as if she were her daughter.

“Martha.”

“Yes?”

“I’d like to have known you when you were sixteen.”

She seemed surprised. “Why?”

“I suppose I’d just like to know what you were like.”

“I wasn’t very interesting.”

The subject was closed. He could never entice her into talking about the past. She would listen gravely and patiently to his hour-long accounts of his own boyhood, and the times Brown had kept him out of trouble by lying to his mother, his prep-school escapades, his college friends, his mother, his troubles, but she was never tempted to return his confidences. Occasionally he considered the possibility that the past might be too painful for her to discuss, though he realized that this was unlikely. From her mother and sister he had learned enough of her background to know that she was, apart from her prettiness, an ordinary city girl from an ordinary family who had lived in an ordinary house. She went to high school and business college, and he had met her in the office of a friend of his where she was a stenographer. She was twenty-one when he married her five years ago.

That was all. There was nothing exceptional about Martha except that he loved her. Everything that she did do, or didn’t do, had been important to him ever since he met her. He could not afford to lie here in bed, inviting her to despise him for his weakness. He must, therefore, prove to her that he was not at all helpless. His body might be temporarily useless but he had his weapons. He could fling words across the room like knives. The machinery might be broken but it must not remain anonymous, and knives could draw attention as well as blood. Especially when you had so much time to choose and sharpen and take aim.

“Martha, why did you marry me?”

“Now, Charles. You know the doctor said not to talk too much.”

“But I want to know. Why did you?”

“I can’t read to you if you’re going to keep interrupting me.”

“I don’t see why you can’t answer a question like that.”

“Because it isn’t the kind of thing people ask. It’s so... so...”

“Personal?” he said dryly. “That’s the word you want, isn’t it?”

“No. I meant, isn’t it obvious why people marry?”

“My dear Martha, could you possibly mean sex?”

“I don’t want to...”

“Could you possibly expect me to believe that you married me because you wanted to go to bed with me?”

“Now, Charles. You’re getting upset.” She added earnestly, “The trouble is, you think too much.”

“That’s the trouble, is it?”

“The doctor said...”

The doctor said a great many things, most of them to Martha alone, downstairs in the drawing room. She found many of his phrases confusing, not because she couldn’t understand them (for Dr. MacNeil took great pains to clarify every statement), but because they reminded her of other things. “Anaphylactic” could easily be the name of a weed killer; “histamine” sounded like a flower, and “allergy” would start her off planning the menus for the week. She couldn’t help her mind wandering. And the more her mind wandered, the more pains MacNeil took to explain everything; so the sessions in the drawing room were sometimes intolerably long. They gave her, moreover, the feeling that she was in a defensive position, and that it was Charles, not MacNeil, who was at the bottom of all this talking. For MacNeil had begun to ask her as many questions about herself as about Charles, treating the case as a double one. She rather resented this. She had never been ill a day in her life, and she had done as much to make Charles well again as anyone possibly could. He had no right to question her.

At the end of April MacNeil had said that Charles could sit up in a chair for a little while each day.

She relayed the news to Charles immediately. “The doctor says you may get up as soon as you’ll make the effort.”

“Really?” Charles was lying with his eyes closed and his long thin hands crossed on his chest. He looked dead and quite innocent. Purified.

“He said it would be good for you to get up,” Martha said, unconscious of any exaggeration, “even if you don’t feel like it.”

“Really? Well, I don’t think I will for a while yet. I’ve never had so much attention before in my life.” He raised himself on one elbow and looked up at her thoughtfully. “You’re practically killing me with kindness, my dear.”

She flushed slightly. “I do my best.”

“I know you do, and a very good best it is. I practically died, didn’t I?”

“Now, Charles. Dr. MacNeil said it was morbid to go on talking about it all the time.” Though MacNeil had said nothing of the sort, still it was the kind of thing he probably would have said if it had occurred to him. “You’re to put it right out of your mind and concentrate on getting well and back to work again.”

“Oh, no,” he said, with the ironic politeness that exasperated her. “I like it here. I’ve grown quite fond of my little deathbed. I like to lie on it and watch you hovering over me like a black angel.”

“Don’t try to be funny, Charles.”

“Good Lord! Funny!” He raised one of his hands in protest, and then let it flop feebly back on the bed covers.

He had lost a great deal of weight during the month. His eyes seemed to have fallen too far back into their sockets. It gave him a sly, calculating expression, as if he had chosen deliberately to withdraw and think little dark secrets.

She glanced down at him with faint distaste. Sometimes, when he was sleeping, or when he was too weak to move his head off the pillow, she felt a deep pity for him. He seemed so bitterly unhappy, as if he had spent his life expecting things that never happened, and waiting for someone who never came.

But convalescent, Charles was at his worst. He had so much time to think and talk, and he took delight in making strange remarks she couldn’t understand and jokes that to her were pointless. It was all very well to be bitterly unhappy, but it wasn’t fair to take it out on your wife.

“I have to go downtown,” she said abruptly. “Would you like Mother to come and sit with you?”

“All right.”

“I’ll tell her then.” She leaned over and straightened one of his pillows. “Is there anything I can get you before I leave?”

He took her hand and pressed it against his cheek. His skin felt dry and crisp, like the cast-off skin of a snake. (“He shouldn’t have a fever,” MacNeil had told her. “In fact, it’s very unusual.”)

“You’re looking very beautiful this afternoon,” Charles said. “Like an elegant young widow. Why do you always wear black?”

She frowned, suspecting a trap. “I don’t know. Because it’s easy, I guess. I don’t care much about clothes.”

“I’m glad the reason is not anticipatory.” He rubbed his cheek against her hand. “Martha?”

“Yes.”

“Nothing. Nothing at all.”

He sank back among the pillows and turned his face to the wall with a slow, sad sound that seemed to come involuntarily out of his mouth.

She had the impression, as she so often had these days, that she had failed him. She had done something, or neglected to do something, vital. Was it such a simple thing as forgetting to kiss him goodbye?

She bent down and kissed him lightly on the temple.

“I want to rest,” he said, and rubbed the spot where she’d kissed him.

She drew in her breath. The air in the room smelled musty though the windows were open and the curtains suspiring in and out with the breeze. Outside, she could see the courtyard; it was too early in the year to have the fountain turned on, but the tulips were in bloom. This spring they had turned out exactly as she wanted them. They were all the same height and color and the same distance apart. They looked very neat and respectable. Charles called them smug, but of course he didn’t appreciate flowers.

She looked back toward the bed. The contrast between the tulips and the hump under the covers that was Charles made her strangely uneasy. It was as if this spring promised or threatened to be different from all the others she had shared with Charles.

He moved slightly and she became aware that she’d been standing at the door for a long time without speaking. She never knew what construction he would put on a little pause or slight incident, so she turned hurriedly and went out. All the way down the hall she expected to hear him call her back and ask her to explain:

“Why were you standing there?”

“I don’t know.”

“What were you thinking about?”

“About tulips.”

“You wouldn’t stand there and just think about tulips.”

“Well, about spring, too.”

“And me?”

“And you. I was thinking, supposing you died.”

Well, supposing he did. It would be terrible, naturally; he was still too young to die. On the other hand, somebody was dying every second, and it wasn’t as if Charles enjoyed life very much. For that matter she didn’t enjoy it very much herself, but she didn’t expect a great deal from it, and Charles did. On the occasions when he was in high spirits there always seemed to be an hysterical edge in his laugh and his voice, as if he were terrified by what lay beyond the moment of happiness and could ward it off only by a noisy insistence that it was not there.

In the hall downstairs she pressed the call bell, and a minute later Brown came in from the kitchen, straightening his hair. He was a tall, weedy, middle-aged man in a wrinkled suit. He had worked for Charles’s mother for years before her death, as a kind of male housekeeper. It was typical of Charles that he should talk about living beyond his income and at the same time insist on keeping Brown. Brown’s duties were both vague and light. If he felt like watering the lawn he watered the lawn, and managed to look very righteous about it in the bargain. He took orders from her pleasantly enough, but she could never be sure that the orders would be carried out. Brown was a very light-hearted man.

She saw that his eyes were red and he was trying to stifle a yawn, and she knew he’d been lying down on the cook’s couch again.

They had four servants, and yet not one of them behaved as a servant should. They all seemed to know that she and Charles didn’t get along very well, and like children taking advantage of the dissension between their parents, they were continually stepping out of bounds.

Once she had gone to the trouble of defining their jobs and making a list for each one:

Lily: Make beds (8 A.M.: 8:30 A.M.)

Dust upstairs and downstairs (8:30 A.M.: 9:15 A.M.)

Scrub verandas (9:15 A.M.: 10 A.M.)

It worked nicely on paper, but it happened that at 9:15 A.M. Lily had a toothache, so that Forbes, who at 9:15 A.M. should have been washing the car, did the verandas instead, while Brown washed the car instead of helping Mrs. Putnam in the kitchen. She burned the lists without telling Charles, who would undoubtedly have considered it very funny.

In spite of the fact that she herself was very orderly, she was unable to impose any kind of order on the household. Everything went wrong. Wherever she looked there would be a bit of fluff on the rug or an ashtray that needed washing, a tap that dripped or a picture hanging crooked. If she planned an elaborate ten o’clock Sunday morning breakfast, English style, Charles would suddenly decide to work and leave the house early, her mother would sleep in, Laura would be on another diet, and she would be left alone at the table surrounded by toasted crumpets and kippers while the smell of steaming kidneys permeated the house and made her quite ill. If she sat there long enough she became violently Anglophobe and thought it was no wonder the English were so skinny and had rheumatism all the time. This feeling was easily transferred to Brown, who was in a vague way English and therefore on the side of the kidneys.

“Is the car ready?” she said, unable to keep the irritation out of her voice because the memory of the kidney-smell was so vivid to her, and because she just now recalled that the cook’s couch had a brand-new slipcover on it. She wondered if Brown took his shoes off when he lay down. Probably not.

He was watching her warily, ready to ingratiate himself in case she noticed anything.

“The steps and banister need dusting,” she said.

“Well, Lily was going to do it but she...”

“I think we have enough servants in this place to see that things are tidy.”

“Yes, Mrs. Pearson.”

“I told you last week.”

“Well, it slipped my mind, Mrs. Pearson.” He yawned again, keeping his mouth closed and contorting his face so that he seemed for a moment to be in acute anguish.

“Do you take your shoes off when you lie down on the couch?” Once the question was out she felt humiliated, as if Brown had somehow got the better of her by forcing her to ask it.

He made the situation worse by replying, “No, Mrs. Pearson. I just hang my feet over the edge.”

She felt utterly defeated and without dignity. Feet were something so intimate and private she didn’t discuss them or even think about them. She would as soon have been seen without any clothes at all as without proper shoes and stockings. Yet here she was, talking about not just feet, but what was far more revolting, Brown’s feet. She couldn’t stop herself from picturing them — long and bony and grey at the back of the heel, with coarse black hair on the big toe — dirty, personal, obscene feet...

“The car,” she said.

“Forbes will bring it right around.”

“And tell my mother Mr. Pearson would like to see her.”

She walked away, her spine rigid. She always walked rather awkwardly because she held herself too straight, as if she had just finished reading an article on posture. Her feet, in low-heeled black suede oxfords, struck the floor heel and toe together, like a mechanical tin soldier’s.

Before she left she paused to brush off some lint from her black suit and to adjust the brim of her black felt hat. As an afterthought she extracted from her purse a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. She had had the glasses for years and the lenses no longer fitted her eyes and invariably caused a headache. But she thought the glasses suited her; they made her look more intelligent, yet at the same time naive, like a college girl who knew a great deal about books but had a lot to learn about the world.

She ran her hand lightly over the knot of straw-colored hair at the nape of her neck. When she was Laura’s age her hair had been wavy and as bright and garish as brass. But with the years the color had become more and more indeterminate, and since she had let her hair grow long, the wave had disappeared. She was not displeased with this result. There were too many artificial blondes and artificial waves and curls; she preferred to appear natural and simple, and to give the impression that while she was a beautiful woman, she had none of the little airs and vanities of beautiful women. She had given up make-up and perfume, her clothes were unobtrusive, and, as a privilege of wealth, the faintest bit dowdy. Her skirts were always a bit longer than was fashionable and her hats were as sensible and durable as her shoes.

She glanced into the hall mirror. She was looking very nice, she thought. Black suited her and, no matter what Charles said, she intended to go on wearing it, because, like the glasses, it was an integral part of her disguise. Only the most discerning people would stop on the street to look at her twice and notice the beautiful modeling of her mouth and forehead and the dark grey eyes.

The only real fault she had to find with her appearance was her size. She was too big, both tall and, in spite of rigorous and agonizing dieting, a trifle overblown. She felt it wasn’t quite nice to have so obviously female a figure.

A long time ago, when her breasts were just beginning to be noticeable, she was terrified of this new responsibility, but she was also secretly a little proud. It meant she was becoming a woman, and she resented her father’s jokes: “Gosh almighty, Martha’s getting a shape. Can you beat it, the kid’s getting a shape.”

Well, her father was dead now, and she had her shape, and she was a woman — oh, God...

She turned quickly from the mirror and went outside.

Forbes was waiting for her, a dark-skinned, neat little wizard who sat behind the wheel of the car with careless ease as if he’d grown out of the upholstery like a polyp.

She put on her gloves, making a quick inspection of the veranda. It was quite clean, but someone had killed a spider on one of the pillars. Its pulpy corpse clung to the white wood and oozed yellow.

She drew back, shaken and disgusted. She hated dead things. She wondered if Charles would look like that. It was funny that she’d never before thought of Charles having any insides.

Forbes leaped nimbly out of the car and opened the door for her. All the way downtown, while her soft grey eyes gazed blurrily out of the window, she thought of Charles’s insides.

Chapter 2

Charles lay with his hands behind his head, staring toward the windows. When the sun reaches the left curtain, he thought, I will do something. I will make some decision.

The curtains fluttered coyly like ladies’ skirts. They were dark yellow silk (like Martha’s hair, Charles thought; she probably chose them to match), and when the sun hit them they seemed to blaze up as if someone had touched a match to them.

The sun was making the room uncomfortably hot. Charles would have liked the shades drawn but he felt too inert to do it himself and he didn’t want to ring for Brown and thus throw away practically his first opportunity to be alone and think out the problem. It seemed that for weeks now he hadn’t been alone. Whenever he opened his eyes there was Martha. Sometimes she’d be sitting in a chair, reading, her knees together and her feet flat against the floor. She held the book too close to her eyes, and whenever she turned a page she sighed gently. It was a tragic little sound and it affected Charles because he couldn’t think of any reason why Martha, or anyone else for that matter, should sigh when turning a page.

“Is it a sad story?” he asked.

“Sad? Oh, no.”

“Well, you sighed.”

“I was just breathing.”

Perhaps that was the explanation for a great many things — Martha was just breathing.

Or sometimes when he woke up Martha would be giving him fresh water or straightening his blankets or putting the windows up or down, briskly and with a certain impatience that suggested the windows should be putting themselves up or down.

Usually, however, she just sat beside his bed with her hands folded on her lap. When she thought no one was watching her, her face had a dazed, slightly stupid expression. It was impossible to tell what she was thinking. Once he asked her, and her eyebrows flew up in surprise.

“Why should I be thinking anything?”

“I don’t know.”

“I thought you were sleeping,” she said coldly. Her tone added: You should have told me you were awake instead of lying there spying on me.

“Next time I’ll ring a bell,” he said.

“What?”

“Nothing. I was joking.”

Though she pretended otherwise, she was perfectly conscious of her beauty and she didn’t mind being watched. It was simply that she had to give the signal, like a child playing a game: “All right, I’m ready. You can look now.”

The sun passed behind a cloud. The curtains turned somber, and the cold wind that swept suddenly across the room was a warning that summer hadn’t arrived yet and you couldn’t trust the spring.

That’s my signal, Charles thought. The time for decision. It is later than I think. I will now decide things, think out my problem.

But in order to think out a problem it was necessary first to define it, clearly and without any emotional trimmings. If he could define it like that, the problem might solve itself. The important thing was to present the facts without bias as if he were in a courtroom.

Your name?

My name is Charles Henry Pearson. I am thirty-six. I am on the board of directors of the Matson Trust Company, which should prove to the court that I am not without some intelligence.

Objection! Witness is prejudiced!

Sorry, Your Honor. Anyway, five years ago I was married to Martha Katherine Shaw. My reasons for so doing were manifold and manifest. I will now pass photographs among the jury.

Irrelevant, immaterial and irresistible!

But, Your Honor, I haven’t even started.

Case dismissed.

The hell with it. I refuse to leave until I have defined my problem.

Fifty dollars for contempt of court. Pay as you leave.

You won’t listen...

One hundred dollars.

But I haven’t even reached the important part yet. At the beginning of this month I came home from the office with a headache and Martha gave me two aspirin tablets.

One hundred and fifty!

But I nearly died...

It is the opinion of this court that the witness is guilty of prejudice and should be hanged by the neck until dead.

You can’t hang me!

But they could, of course. The rope grew taut around his neck and gradually choked off his breath.

When he woke up he found himself tangled in the sheets, and someone was knocking at the door.

“Charley?”

“Come in.”

The door opened and Martha’s mother came in.

“Brown told me you wanted to talk to me.”

Mrs. Shaw did not resemble either of her daughters, though there was a hint of Martha in her broad, strong forehead and her fair hair. She was an overweight, placid woman about fifty. When Charles had first met her, her husband was still alive. Their marriage was a happy one. They talked and acted like good companions, and no matter who was in the room, they were always exchanging smiling glances like lovers enjoying secret jokes. Charles watched them with envy and with a hope that some day he and Martha would catch each other’s eye in just the same way. Two weeks before he married Martha, Harry Shaw died suddenly from pneumonia. His wife took it calmly. She didn’t make a fuss. She merely withdrew from life, as a gambler who has lost steps out of the game. Whatever actions she took now were inspired by Martha. She herself didn’t care one way or another, whether she lived in this house or any other house, or whether she did her own washing and cooking or somebody else did it for her. Nothing seemed to bother her, and this was an admirable and totally incomprehensible trait to Charles, who was bothered by nearly everything.

He was, on the whole, rather fond of his mother-in-law, partly because she appeared to be fond of him, and partly because she came of an older generation of women who had been brought up to believe that men, simply because they were men, were something special. It was a welcome change from Martha, who managed, without moving a muscle, to convey the impression that men were a contemptible and ineffectual lot, a group of dilly-dalliers who had survived merely because no one had yet invented a way of continuing the race without them.

“I’m sorry I woke you up, Charley,” Mrs. Shaw said. “I’ll go away.”

“No, don’t. Sit down. I wasn’t sleeping. At least I don’t think I was. I was merely trying to figure things out.”

“You’re always trying to figure something out,” she said, smiling. She sat down without looking where she was sitting. Either she took it on trust that the chair was there waiting to receive her, or else she didn’t care whether it was there or not.

“What if the chair wasn’t there?” he asked.

She understood immediately. “But it always is. I remembered.”

“So it is,” Charles said, obscurely disappointed.

“You know, Charley, I think you’re looking better.”

“Am I?” He sat up in bed so he could see himself in the bureau mirror. “I think I look like hell.”

“Well, I never did consider you a beauty,” she said pleasantly. “So maybe you expect more of your own face than I do.”

“I’m not bald, anyway.”

“No, you’re not. Harry was as bald as an egg by the time he was thirty-six. It didn’t worry him any, though. I don’t remember that he ever bought a bottle of hair tonic in his life. He wasn’t a vain man.” She paused, allowing Harry time to come into the room, bald as an egg but with no hair tonic. “He had some little vanities but they weren’t connected with his appearance. He liked to believe, for instance, that he had complete control over the two girls, and that they obeyed everything he said.”

“And did they?”

“Well, no, they didn’t pay much attention to him, to me either, when I come to think of it. But they pretended quite nicely. Girls do that better than boys, and my girls have always been, not secretive, exactly, but self-contained.”

Secretive, Charles amended silently.

“I often wonder if it’s wise for people to have children when they’re as happily married as Harry and I were. We were complete in ourselves. We didn’t require children, I mean, the way some couples do. And I think the girls knew this and it made them feel out of things.” She added anxiously, “You see what I mean, Charley?”

“Yes.”

“It made them self-sufficient. They never confided in me, and maybe the reason is that subconsciously I didn’t want their confidences and they knew it even if I didn’t.” She turned away with a nervous little toss of her head. “I feel very guilty about it, as if I’d just found out that years and years ago I committed a crime.”

“Your conscience must be a sleepy little thing.”

She smiled. “Oh, dear, I don’t know what’s gotten into me this week. I’m getting as bad as you are, always figuring and figuring and never really accomplishing anything.”

“That’s what I do, eh?” Charles said blandly.

“Well, isn’t it?”

“I like to know why people do things, why everyone in this world does every single thing he does.”

“I wouldn’t like to know. It would frighten me.”

“It frightens me, too.”

They sat for a while in silence, contented in their fright, while a bumble bee flung himself in rhythmic frenzy against the screen.

Charles saw himself with a notebook in one hand and a crystal ball in the other, going out among the people of the world. When he returned, or when he died without returning, the answers would be all there in the notebook, and there would be no more war, no more famine, no more crime, no more poverty. The earth would be given back to the meek. By whom? By himself, Charles!

It was a childish and dangerous dream, and he recognized it as such. But he couldn’t destroy it. He kept it locked in his heart and took it out only when he was alone, like a miser counting his gold. No one would ever know...

“I don’t know what’s got into me today,” Mrs. Shaw repeated. “Maybe it’s the weather, do you think?”

“Possibly.”

“I feel...” She closed her eyes as if she could feel better when she couldn’t see. “I feel I should be doing something, I should be active about something, but I don’t really know what.”

He couldn’t recall her ever being so talkative before. Perhaps it was the weather, and she’d felt a sudden challenge in the spring that had brought to life her old energy and interest.

She rose suddenly. “I hope I haven’t tired you, Charley.”

“Not at all.”

“Martha should be home soon.”

“I don’t mind being alone. She doesn’t have to stay home on my account. I wish, in fact, that she’d go out more than she does. I wish you’d tell her that.”

“I will.” But she departed hurriedly as if this was a subject she was anxious to avoid.

Charles lay down again. He did want Martha to go out, that part was true. But he also wanted her to miss him all the time she was out, to be in a great hurry to get home again, and to tell him when she returned everything she had said and done. She wouldn’t volunteer any information, but if he questioned her thoroughly he would eventually find out what stores she had shopped at, what clerks had waited on her, what people she had met. His desire for such information was motivated not by jealousy or by a need to live vicariously through her experiences but by the delusion that the more he knew about Martha the more completely he would possess her.

He remembered vaguely one of Grimm’s fairy tales about a girl who owned a tree that grew golden apples and silver leaves. No one else could pluck the apples, but when the girl herself reached out, they fell into her hands. Some day he would look up a copy of Grimm and find out the rights of the story. Meanwhile, it continued to worry him. He felt that his life with Martha had been spent standing under a tree of golden apples he could not pluck, and that some day someone else might come along and the fruit would fall into his hands. The true and rightful owner — was she waiting for him? — was she hoarding the apples deliberately?

No, it was impossible. There was no tree. There was no warmth or love in Martha. It was her body that misled you. The curving hips and voluptuous breasts invited the touch, and you had to touch them repeatedly before you learned they were plaster props. Plaster breasts like a cast covering a broken heart.

Broken, he thought. I wonder why I said broken? Nobody could have broken Martha’s heart. I knew her first. There was no one else.

All the same it worried him. To take his mind off the subject he began to count the number of leaves in each ridge of the wallpaper. Finally his eyes wandered back to the windows and he saw that the sun had reached and passed the left curtain, and that the time for decision was gone.

He had a moment of panic. There was still time, still time to decide, to do something, anything.

The only thing he could think of doing was sitting up in bed and swinging his feet over the edge. He was sweating, and his pajamas clung to his back and along his ribs, emphasizing his frailness. He saw himself in the mirror across the room. He certainly did not look like the true and rightful owner of any golden apples. A shave might help, and a grey pinstripe suit with a navy-blue tie. Very well, he would get dressed, and what’s more, he would shave himself.

His feet fumbled for his slippers. He reached for the bathrobe that Martha had folded at the foot of his bed, and stood up. He was shaking so badly that he couldn’t get his arms into the sleeves of the robe. He struggled, the robe dragging on the floor, twitching as if it were alive and determined to resist him.

After a minute he stood quiet, helpless, in the grip of a new and terrible fear. He was afraid to die. Up to this time he had been too ill to care much about it, living had seemed so much trouble. But now that he was on his feet again he must stay there, he must exercise that sick old man in the mirror. He must stop playing his little game of hints and ironies and come right out and ask Martha.

No, not ask her. Tell her. Tell her he knew.

He leaned over and picked up the bathrobe and put it on. Then he straightened his shoulders and looked once more, challengingly, into the mirror. He felt calmer. Everything’s going to be all right, he thought.

He walked toward the door without knowing exactly where he wanted to go or what he wanted to do. It was good to be in motion, to be independent. It meant he was no longer a victim, but a man capable of victimizing.

He went out into the hall. A maid in a green uniform was dusting the banister with sketchy haste. She was about thirty, with nice eyes and bad skin.

“Hello, Lily,” he said.

She turned, startled. “Why, Mr. Pearson. Why, my goodness!”

“Thought I’d take a little walk around,” he said, smiling, “see how you were all getting along without me.”

Lily had a secret passion for Charles and his presence had the effect of alternately choking off her voice entirely or putting wheels under her tongue. In private she frequently planned things to say to him, but when the time came she forgot them all. This occasion of his first appearance after his illness was to have been the scene of many suave and pretty sentences. She couldn’t remember one of them.

Mute, and on the point of tears, she twisted the duster around her fingers and wished that the floor would open up and swallow her.

Charles, who understood ordinary women quite well, glanced away and said cheerfully, “How’s your mother getting along, Lily? Brown told me she was in an accident.”

“Oh — she’s fine — she’s just fine.”

“That’s good.” He noticed that Martha’s door was closed. “Well, don’t let me interrupt you, Lily. I’m just getting re-acquainted with the house.”

Martha’s door, blank, imperturbable, like a royal sentry standing guard over the secrets of the princess’s bedroom.

Then he saw that it wasn’t quite blank. It was equipped with a golden eye, and a brand-new Yale lock. He turned, groaning, back to Lily.

“Burglars,” she said with a gasp.

“Burglars?”

“I mean — there might be, so she had a man come last week and put it on, on account of burglars.”

“Oh,” he said, as if he’d known all about it, had even suggested the idea himself. But the golden eye winked at him, and he felt suddenly exhausted and had to put his hand against the wall to steady himself.

Lily gazed at him with love and agony in her eyes. This was her love, her Mr. Pearson who moved naked and bold and humble through her dreams, and all she could talk about was burglars. Oh, if the floor would open up...

“Oh, yes, there is a great deal of crime in the city, a great deal,” Charles said, and slid slowly down the wall.

“Oh, Mr. Pearson! Brown! Oh, Brown!”

Her screams came to Charles muffled in cotton wool, and clung to his ears soft and sticky as rumors.

His ears were smothering, he would never be able now to go out among the people of the world. There would be war, poverty, crime, and a Yale lock on every door. The people would grieve in whispers: Charles Pearson will never come this way now; we wait, but he will never come. His wife won’t let him.

He blinked and found he was back in bed and Brown was holding out a glass of water to him.

“You haven’t got much sense,” Brown said. “Drink this. How do you feel now?”

“Fine,” Charles whispered.

Brown helped him raise his head. “I fainted like that the first time I got up after my operation.”

“That makes it all right then,” Charles said. Some of the water slid out of the side of his mouth and down his neck, but it didn’t matter. He felt light-headed and detached, as if the Charles Pearson who had fainted ignominiously in the hall had nothing to do with himself, was, in fact, rather a comic fellow, born to be a butt.

“It seems to me you don’t have much sense,” Brown said. “That’s my opinion.”

“Well, don’t nag.”

“I’m not nagging. Dr. MacNeil said you were only to get up and sit quietly in a chair the first few days.”

“He didn’t tell me that.”

“He told Mrs. Pearson. I heard him.”

There was no expression in Brown’s voice. None was necessary. The statement stood by its own strength.

Martha’s first piece of carelessness. A lie. Hardly even a lie so much as a small error in reporting. “The doctor said you could sit quietly in a chair,” had been transformed into, “The doctor said you may get up as soon as you’ll make the effort, he said it would be good for you to get up.”

Not perhaps such a difference in meaning, but a striking difference in texture. The first suggested that the doctor was rather grudgingly allowing him to get up; in the second, the doctor seemed to be implying that he could have been up long before this if he, Charles, hadn’t been a lazy bum.

A sourness formed on his tongue, as if the tears that he had dammed behind his eyes had found a secret passage to his mouth. The heat in the room became suddenly unbearable. It seemed to whirl, to gather itself into a ball that spun around and around him, forcing the moisture out of his body and leaving him as dusty and dry as a mummy.

I do not care about spinning things. Spinning things do not affect me. I can think quite clearly. Sweat and tears contain the same percentage of salt as sea water, and the square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. Right? Right. I have always had a very remarkable memory, Martha. I recall exactly what you said, and I recall exactly what Brown said. You are getting careless.

The doctor said...

The sentence rang over and over again in his mind like a dirge.

Chapter 3

Martha disapproved of the car. It was too sleek and ostentatious and didn’t match the personality she had selected for herself. Besides, every time she rode in the car, she was reminded, annoyingly, of the presentation speech Charles had made when he’d given it to her for her birthday, three years before. Charles had probably intended the speech to be ingratiating but it hadn’t sounded that way.

“I want you to have the best I can afford, Martha. I want to make up to you for all the years when you had so little.”

Those were his exact words. Implying that he’d picked her up from the gutter and rescued her from starvation, instead of from a $35-a-week-and-chance-for-advancement job at Burleson, Bonds. All the years when you had so little. Hooey. Maybe her salary wasn’t so large then as the one she received now for being Charles’s wife, but the hours were shorter and she was free. Free, at least, for something to happen to her.

Well, there was no point in thinking about that. It was over, she was married and settled, and nothing more would ever happen to her because she wouldn’t let it. She was not one to shirk her responsibilities or change her mind. Duty was her favorite word and doing it was her favorite occupation. No matter what her personal feelings about Charles were, she would have gone through hell for him if she thought people expected her to, and someone was watching. She had a great deal of what she considered strength of character, but which Charles called a perfectionist obsession. She was deeply hurt when he told her that. “You have an obsession, Martha. You want everything to be perfect, yourself and me and your mother and Laura and the servants and the house, and we’re all failing you daily and hourly.”

They continued to fail her and she continued to do her duty. As one dull and blameless day followed another, she had only one outlet, Charles’s money. Money was her drug, and spending it was her method of escaping from her life. The department stores and antique shops and French salons and auction houses all intoxicated her. Like a drunk who doesn’t care what he drinks as long as it contains alcohol, she bought without discrimination, without restraint. Later, when she took her purchases home and unwrapped them, her euphoria would evaporate and she would be left with a hangover. The genuine antique candlesticks looked shoddy, the bargain French original didn’t fit, and the still life was childish. But she couldn’t restrain herself from buying things, nor could she force herself to return or exchange them once they were bought. That would be a confession of failure, a weak spot in a strong character, a rift in the obsession.

“Forbes.”

She tapped on the glass partition that formed a Mason-Dixon line between her world and Forbes’s world.

The chauffeur gave no sign that he had heard. She frowned at the back of his head, trying to decide whether Forbes was getting deaf or subtly insolent. It was difficult to tell. From behind, he looked very young and guileless. His ears stuck out a little too far from his head, and the back of his neck was shaved and scrubbed and vulnerable, like a victim’s ready for sacrifice.

“Forbes.” She tapped again. This time he turned his head slightly and the illusion of youth and innocence disappeared. His face was ugly and sharp as a witch’s.

“Stop at Ryrie’s, Forbes.”

“Pardon, ma’am?” He kept one hand on the steering wheel and with the other he turned down the glass partition.

“Stop at Ryrie’s.”

“I won’t be able to get a parking place near there. Is it all right if you have to walk a couple of blocks?”

“Why, certainly,” she said, a little hurt that Forbes should have forgotten that she was very fond of walking. Though she seldom did any, she often pictured herself striding freely along country lanes with the sheerest enjoyment; and striding with her, at her heels, a dog. The dogs varied in breed, but their behavior was always perfect; they responded to her faintest whisper and were of indeterminate sex.

The car stopped smoothly beside the curb. Forbes was a good driver and a good mechanic — let credit be given where credit was due — but he had one baffling peculiarity. Every few months he would disappear for a week or so without telling anyone. When he returned, looking rather worn, he offered no explanation and Charles asked for none. It was as if Charles had some secret way of understanding and tolerating the various necessities of people’s natures; he would no more question Forbes about his disappearances than he would remind her of her extravagances.

She got out of the car and crossed the street, raising her feet carefully because the glasses made the sidewalk appear too close. She turned off onto Madison Avenue, excited to be out of the house again, and pleased with the crowds who seemed more polite and cheerful than she remembered them.

She quickened her pace. The drug was already having its effect.

A diamond clip for her mother for Mother’s Day. Two sweaters and a slip for Laura. A set of canisters, a crystal vase, a pair of real gold bobby pins. A tie for Charles. From counter to counter, out of one revolving door into another revolving door, until her arms were full and the euphoria had taken possession of her.

The tie for Charles was bought as an afterthought. He would never wear it, but it was a nice gesture, a nod in the direction of the fact that it was his money, after all, and he might as well get something out of it.

She passed from the last door into the street again. She paused, blinking gently behind her glasses, her eyes scanning the crowd as if she hoped, half-expected, to find a friend there. But there was no one she knew. She had lost touch with her old friends and had made no new ones. These people were all strangers, indifferent to her. They were all hurrying from someone and some place to someone and some place. Without interest, they brushed past her and she loathed them.

She began to walk again. The sun was warm on her face, the wind fresh off the lake, but in that minute’s pause outside the store she felt that she had died a little. She had waited and no one had come, nothing had happened.

The hangover was setting in already. She felt cheated — by the spring, by Charles, by the very packages which had grown heavy in her arms, by the whole world.

Behind her a man’s voice called, “Martha! Oh, Martha!” and for a second she hesitated because the voice sounded like Charles’s. It held the same bantering note, as if there was something intrinsically humorous about her name and the repetition of it. It was not Charles’s voice, of course. But her mistake was significant. It showed how much of the time she thought about him, how completely he had pervaded her life.

“Martha!”

She stopped and turned around. A man in a light brown suit and no hat was threading his way through the crowd towards her. She didn’t recognize him, and she was on the point of walking on and pretending she hadn’t heard him.

But it was too late. He was beside her, his hand familiarly touching her arm.

“Well, Martha.” He stood very close to her, smiling, and because they were the same height their closeness seemed indecently intimate.

She drew away and said stiffly, “I’m sorry, I...”

“I thought it was you hiding behind those glasses. Come on over here. I want to look at you.”

He gave her a friendly little push and she moved, from sheer momentum and shock, and stood in the doorway of a florist’s shop. There was a sheaf of daffodils in the window flanked by white china swans. She tried to concentrate on the daffodils, count them, one, two, three, four... He was deeply tanned and in contrast his eyes looked very pale and excited. He had a queer, tense way of standing, as if he was all ready to do something drastic, like snatch her purse or break into a hundred-yard dash. Anyway, there were twelve daffodils. An even dozen. A round dozen. A...

She turned and faced him. “Well, Steve. How nice to see you again.”

“Just got back a week ago. First thing I did was to phone the old number. But you weren’t there, naturally.”

“Naturally.”

“Take off those glasses and let me have a look at you. You’ve changed, Martha.” He was frowning and his face wore a disappointed expression.

“Oh, have I? Well, in five years you can expect a reasonable amount of change.”

“I want to talk to you. Come on in some place and have a drink.”

“No, sorry. I can’t.”

He smiled, very faintly. “Why not?”

“Well, it wouldn’t look right.”

“Why not again?”

“Besides, I have the car waiting.”

“Can’t cars wait by themselves or have they got them so personalized now that they have to have a companion?”

“This one happens to have a chauffeur in it,” she said with careful indifference.

He took a step back and said, “Well, well. Doing all right for yourself, eh, Martha?” He noticed then for the first time what she was wearing. “Husband dead?”

“Of course not. Why should he be dead?”

“Shouldn’t be. But then a hell of a lot of people are. Including me, almost.”

“Really?”

“I have a few pieces of flak here and there. When they get them all dug out of me, I’ll send you one for a souvenir. Do you want it plain or inscribed, for Auld Lang Syne?”

“I don’t consider that very witty.”

“No.” He avoided her gaze. “No, I guess it wasn’t.”

“Why aren’t you in uniform?”

“I’m out now. I’m a civilian.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Do? Well, first I’ll take a rest and then I’ll write a book not about the war, and when the book doesn’t sell, I’ll get my old job back on the News.”

“You mean you’re going to stay here?”

“That’s right.” He added dryly, “I hope you don’t mind. It’s a pretty big city, there should be room for both of us.”

“Why should I mind? As a matter of fact, Charles and I will do our best to help you.”

“Thanks.”

“If you’re serious about writing a book, perhaps Charles can help you make some good contacts. He knows a great many important people.”

“If it’s a good book, I won’t need good contacts, but it’s kind of you.” He glanced at her curiously. “Charles. Is that his name?”

“Yes.”

“I’d heard you married a good guy.”

“That’s nice.”

“I was very glad, naturally. I was hoping you’d get someone more suited to you than I was.” He shoved his hands in his pockets, as if they needed some restraint. “Why the funny clothes? Remember the blue dress with the white flowers on it?”

“Blue dress?” It was at the bottom of a trunk packed in layers of tissue paper and mothballs. The last time she’d taken it out to look at it she found that the flowers had yellowed. She had told Charles that she had a headache, and she went to bed and stared for a long time up at the ceiling in bitter silence. “No, I don’t remember.”

He traced a pattern on the sidewalk with the toe of his shoe.

“What’s he like? Charles, I mean.”

“He’s... well, he’s very nice. He’s older than I am. He’s good-looking and he has a nice sense of humor.”

“And money. In fact, the works.”

“In fact, the works, as you say.”

“Well, I’m damn glad to hear it.” He spoke with too much emphasis. “I really am. I’d like to meet him.”

“I’m afraid that’s impossible.”

“Oh?”

“Charles has been very ill.”

“I’m sorry to hear it.”

He twitched his shoulders and she saw that his suit was too small for him. She had told him once that he always got his coats too small and that the next time she would go with him to the tailor to supervise the measuring. But the next time he had gone to a tailor he had ordered uniforms and she didn’t even know about it until later. He had walked out of her life as completely as if he’d stepped off the edge of the world.

Yet here he was back, an image in a florist’s window. The daffodils grew out of his throat, reached up their yellow heads to touch the tip of his ear. The swans drew away, arching their delicate necks in elegant disdain.

“Look,” she said. He looked, and saw himself framed in flowers. Neither of them smiled.

“Well,” he said finally. “I don’t want to keep you.”

“It isn’t that I wouldn’t like you to meet Charles. But he has been ill...”

“Don’t apologize. I hardly think Charles would like to meet me,” he said pointedly. “Anyway, I probably wouldn’t fit in. You have quite a place, I suppose.” He hesitated, as if he didn’t want to hear about any more things she had but couldn’t stop himself from asking. “Have you?”

“It’s quite nice.”

“He probably built it for you when you were married, as in the Ladies’ Home Journal.” She didn’t answer and he went on, with a laugh: “It’s a damn funny thing, but in Italy whenever I wanted something to read like Time or the New Republic or the New Yorker, all I could ever find was the Ladies’ Home Journal. I became quite fond of it. I used to read the recipes. We all did. We had a kind of journalese talk. ‘If you’ve never tried fried green olives minced with chocolate ice cream, you’re really missing something.’ It got to be practically a code.”

He paused. She said quietly, “He built the house for me.”

“Sure. He would. Indirect lighting? Automatic heat, glass bricks, built-in bar?”

“There’s no need to...”

“Sun deck? Terrace? Maybe even a fountain?” He saw by her eyes that he’d struck it right. “By heaven, a fountain! I’ll be damned. Now wait, let me guess about the fountain. It’s one of these naked water-baby affairs, and the little darling is spewing the water out of its mouth. Am I right?”

“It’s not a neuter baby, it’s the infant Hermes.”

“Jesus,” he said softly. “You haven’t changed much after all, have you, Martha?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, except that it’s in very bad taste.”

She turned with an air of finality, but he put his hand on her arm to hold her back. One of the parcels fell on the sidewalk but neither of them noticed.

“No, wait, Martha. I’m sorry. You haven’t told me how the family is. How’s the kid sister?”

“Laura’s fine.”

“And your mother?”

“Fine.”

“And the old man?”

“He’s dead. He died a short time after you left.”

“I’m sorry to hear it. He was a good man, full of laughs.”

She began to walk and he followed her. His walk was oddly graceful.

“It’s a funny thing,” he said, “to come back like this, and you find some of your friends have died, and some are married and have kids, and some of them have moved away and some of them aren’t your friends anymore. I don’t know exactly what I expected. Five years is a long time, it was to me, anyway, but I still had the crazy notion that somebody would be keeping a place for me. You know? I expected to blow into town and phone a lot of people and have them say maybe: ‘Well, by God, it’s Steve Ferris. Come on out and we’ll have a party!’ Instead of that I had a hard time even identifying myself. There’d be a whispered conversation at the other end of the phone. ‘Darling, do we know anyone called Ferris?’ Or ‘Well, we were going to the movies, Steve, old boy. Maybe next week?’”

He smiled to show her that it didn’t hurt him. “Some of them had kids they couldn’t leave or wives who didn’t want to go out or have anyone in. A lot of them were dead, or just vanished. If I’d left a hole in anyone’s life, the gap had closed long ago. It’s a strange feeling.”

She walked faster but he didn’t appear to notice. He kept gliding along beside her, without effort.

“A damn strange feeling,” he repeated. “It’s as if they’d made up their minds that I wasn’t coming back and when I did it was a shock. It was so unexpected it was against nature, practically. That’s how you feel, isn’t it, Martha?”

“Of course not. I’ve never thought about you one way or another.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Then you’re very vain.”

“I guess I am,” he said slowly. “I guess that’s my whole trouble.”

They turned at the next corner and their shoulders touched for an instant. She drew away sharply.

Across the street a few yards down she could see Forbes. He was standing on the curb, running a cloth over one of the car windows. Two little boys stood beside him and watched, their heads tilted in awe.

She wondered whether Forbes had already seen her.

Abruptly she swung around and faced Steve. “Well, Steve, it’s been pleasant meeting you again.” In spite of the parcels she managed to hold out her hand in a friendly way.

“Has it?” He ignored the hand. His eyes were fixed on the car. “Some tub. Paid for? Yes, of course, it would be. How fast can it go?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?” He shook his head in bewilderment. What kind of crazy world had he come back to, that you could have a car like that and not see how fast it would go?

“I really must run along, Steve.”

“Certainly. I understand.”

“I hope, I sincerely hope, that the book turns out well. And if it doesn’t, I’m sure Charles will be able to do something for you.”

“Charles can’t do a damn thing for me except crawl down a drain.”

“Well, don’t be childish. Where are you staying?”

“The Neal Hotel. We’ve got fountains there, too, only we call them showers and they’re to wash in.”

He didn’t say goodbye, just turned on his heel and walked away as fast as he could.

Once he was out of sight around the corner he slowed down. He was feeling shaky and there was a sharp pain in his chest. He didn’t know whether it was from the piece of flak they hadn’t been able to remove, or from seeing Martha again.

He stopped at the first bar he came to. He sat down at a table and ordered an ale. The place was very dark but as soon as his eyes had adjusted he began to look around for someone he knew. He knew there wouldn’t be anyone, but he sat with tense expectancy, ready to jump up and greet someone and buy him a drink and talk over old times.

“Well, if it isn’t Steve Ferris! How’s the boy, Steve?”

“Great. Just great.”

“When’d you get back?”

“A week ago.”

“Why in hell didn’t you give me a ring? Seen any of the old crowd?”

“Sure. I just ran into Martha on the street.”

“Martha? Oh, we never see Martha anymore, not since she got married. The wife bumped into her one day and hardly recognized her. She had on funny-looking clothes and a new ritzy way of talking. The wife nearly died laughing...”

He ordered another ale and thought, well, that’s all right, I’m practically dead laughing myself. Charles and I. Charles has been very ill. What the hell.

The waiter came back and put a bowl of pretzels on the table.

“Thought you’d like some pretzels,” he said.

“Chawls, my boy, how very thoughtful of you.”

“We got some potato chips, too.”

“Why, Chawls, it’s a veritable profusion of fine foods.”

The waiter hovered over the table. He smelled of stale sweat and peppermint. “If you’re feeling lonesome-like maybe I can do something about it. If you’re not, well, there’s no harm in asking.”

“I am above the coarser things of life.”

“Well, I am myself, if you come right down to it,” the waiter said somberly. “I’ve got my principles, same as the next man.”

“Sure.” Steve smiled. “You could pick up a nice piece of change by selling Grandpa to a glue factory. Bet you never thought of that, Chawls.”

“My name’s not Charles.”

“Could be,” Steve said. “I personally know a man called Charles who sold his grandpa to a glue factory and he’s never regretted it for an instant.”

“What the hell,” the waiter said, and went away looking troubled.

Steve watched him for a while, not because he liked his face, but because he knew the waiter a little now and the other people were all strangers.

A man and a girl came in from the street and sat down side by side at the bar. The man had his hand possessively on the girl’s hip. The two of them kept looking and looking at each other, as if they were trying to drown themselves in each other’s eyes.

The pain in Steve’s chest sharpened. He got up. He saw the waiter come hurrying toward him and he reached for his wallet.

The waiter said with a frown, “I don’t know what gave you the idea my name was Charles.”

“How much?”

“Fifty cents. Matter of factly, my name’s Harry, not Charles.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Steve said and flung the money on the table.

He passed the bar without a glance at the man and girl, and went up the steps into the street.

Chapter 4

She drove home with the packages clutched tight against her body as if in self-defense.

She was certain that Forbes had seen her talking to Steve. There was no need for secrecy, merely talking to a man was no crime, no matter who the man was. Yet she was reluctant to have Charles find out about the meeting, and find out, especially, from Forbes, who disliked her. Forbes had such a guileless method of tale-bearing. He managed to give Charles an exact account of her movements without ever seeming to: “Yes, Mr. Pearson, it’s a beautiful day. A lot of people out. The Avenue was very congested, I couldn’t get a parking place anywhere near Ryrie’s...”

She could, of course, tell Charles herself. Just a simple harmless sentence: “I just met an old friend of mine on the street, Steve Ferris. I’ve probably mentioned him before.”

No, that wouldn’t do. Charles would remember distinctly that she hadn’t mentioned him before and he would demand to know why. Charles’s memory was very inconvenient.

In the long run, she felt, it would be safer to tell her mother, and then if Charles found out she could claim that she wasn’t being secretive, she merely thought he wouldn’t be interested. Let him pounce on that if he wanted to, let him lie awake every single night thinking about it, but he’d never be able to prove a thing except that, beginning in high school and continuing until the time he entered the Air Force, Steve had been her boyfriend. That was all that anyone knew, and even Charles, with his fiendish ability to ferret out secrets, would never know anything more.

As soon as she reached home, she went up to her mother’s room.

The shades were drawn and Mrs. Shaw was asleep on the lounge beside the bay window. Martha stood in the doorway for a moment listening to the sound of her mother’s breathing. She was not exactly snoring, but at the end of every breath she gave a little grunt as if of satisfaction.

“Mother.”

“Eh?”

“Sleeping?”

“Eh? Oh, it’s you, Martha.” She made a half-hearted attempt to raise herself, then sank back with a groan. “I dozed off. Exhausting weather. I can’t seem to breathe.”

Martha crossed the room and pulled the shades back with a jerk. “Try taking off those hideous corsets.”

“I’m sure they have nothing to do with it. I’ve always worn corsets.” She blinked and sat up, holding her hands over her eyes. “I wonder if it could be my lungs.”

“Steve Ferris is back.” The air smelled of chocolate. She opened a window. “I saw him on the street.”

“Well.” Mrs. Shaw’s round blue eyes glanced around the room as if they wildly expected to see printed somewhere on the wall the correct and tactful reply. “Well. Isn’t that nice? Did he — how did he look?”

“Same as ever.”

“Well.”

“He asked about you.”

“That was nice. I always wanted to see him in his uniform. You remember we never did.”

“I remember. He’s not in uniform anymore. He’s been discharged. He was wounded.”

“What a shame! I was very fond of Steve. So was Harry. He didn’t know about Harry, I guess?”

“No. I told him.”

“What did he say?”

“He said that Father was a good man, that he was full of laughs.”

“That’s right, he was, wasn’t he?” You hear that, Harry? People haven’t forgotten you. “Martha.”

Martha was staring stonily out of the window.

“What?”

“I hope... I hope you...”

You are my child and I love you and I hope you are happy. What she felt was very simple but she couldn’t say such things to Martha. She was beyond the reach of words. “Martha, my dear...” Her confusion and helplessness brought tears to her eyes.

Slowly Martha turned her head. Her mother looked a little grotesque in her grief. Her spine was stiff because of the corsets, her legs were spread apart in front of her, and from the bottom of the pink lace negligee her feet stuck straight as boards into the air.

She said wearily, “Why are you crying?”

“Oh, I don’t know — everything...”

“I hope it’s not on my account. Don’t get the romantic idea that seeing Steve again has upset me. As a matter of fact, I’m rather glad I ran into him. If I had any illusions left about him, they’re gone.” She laughed. “I’d forgotten he was no taller than I am.”

“Charles is very tall.”

“He still bites his fingernails. And he talks — well, he doesn’t talk like a gentleman. It was painful listening to him.” Outside she could see the round cherubic buttocks of the infant Hermes. “He has bad taste. You should have seen the suit he was wearing. It didn’t fit and it was the wrong color, a sort of cinnamon brown. He thinks he’s going to write a book. He’s as cocky as ever. Let’s drop the subject.”

She went over to the mirror and took off her hat and smoothed the hair back from her temples. Her eyes were a little bloodshot and they ached as if invisible thumbs were pressing on her eyeballs.

Mrs. Shaw watched her in silence. Thinking back into the past had forced her to realize how alien and detached Martha had become. The change had been so gradual and the physical aspects of it so slight in themselves that they had escaped notice at the time — the disposal of a piece of jewelry, the sudden switch to black clothes, the gift of all her makeup and perfume to Laura, the resurrection of the glasses she’d worn in high school. All very small things and done subtly over a period of years, yet here they were, added up and totaling a different Martha.

A nun, Mrs. Shaw thought with a shock. She’s like a nun, dedicated to something, no one knew what. She had taken her life and placed it on some nameless altar as a sacrifice and an atonement for some nameless sin.

“Why are you staring at me?” Martha asked. Even her voice had altered. It was cold and even, as if for years now nobody had said anything to interest her and nobody ever would again. “Is anything wrong?”

“No. Oh, no.”

“Were you in to see Charles?”

“We talked for a while. After I left he got up for some reason. It was too much for him; he fainted in the hall. Lily happened to be there and she and Brown got him back to bed. There’s nothing to worry about, he’s all right now.”

“Did they phone Dr. MacNeil?”

“Yes. He may drop in tonight to see him.”

Martha put one hand casually in her pocket and her fingers curled around the key to her room. “Where in the hall?”

“I don’t know.”

“What was Lily doing?”

“I don’t know,” Mrs. Shaw said in bewilderment. “My door was shut. I didn’t hear anything. What does it matter?”

“I just wondered how far he’d gone. I wouldn’t want him to strain his heart.” She had never seen a picture of a heart but she could imagine Charles’s heart quite plainly. It was pink and moist, a wet, spongy breathing tumor with the blood flowing in and out, thereby keeping Charles alive. “He must take better care of himself.”

“You’ve been wonderful to him, Martha. So devoted, I’m sure he appreciates it.”

“Oh, I’m sure he does,” Martha said dryly. She picked up the parcels that she’d dropped on the bed. “I’ll go in and see him.”

“What’s in the boxes?”

“One of them is yours. For Mother’s Day.”

“Can I open it now?”

“If you want to.” She had lost all interest in the gifts. The diamond clip had joined its predecessors and taken its place between the shoddy brass candlesticks and the French original that didn’t fit.

Charles was sitting up in bed in a confusion of pillows. The room was darkened but she could see his eyes turned toward the doorway, hard and bright and dry, as if they’d been watching for her for a long time.

“Well, Charles,” she said cheerfully. “I hear you overdid things a bit. Are you feeling better?” She entered the room swiftly, thrusting the boxed tie toward him as an appeasement: here is a tie for you, so you can’t possibly say anything unpleasant to me. She put the box in his lap. “Here, I brought you something.”

He looked at her sardonically. “Thank you very much.”

“It’s nothing.”

“On the contrary, it’s a tie, unless the contours of the box deceive me.” He removed the paper. “As I thought. A tie. How very generous of you, Martha. I hope you didn’t pay more than a dollar for it?”

She had paid eighty-nine cents, but she had taken the precaution of having the clerk remove the price tag.

“I’d hate to think you were squandering money on me,” Charles said. “Let there be light, pull back the curtains, Martha. I want to examine this offering from the Greeks.”

Pale and angry, she crossed the room and opened the curtains. Charles was impossible. There wasn’t an ounce of gratitude in him. She had spent all of ten minutes selecting that tie.

“This is, Martha, a very important occasion. I can’t recall offhand that you’ve ever bought me anything before.” He rubbed the tie between his thumb and forefinger, feeling the texture. “Very nice indeed.” He turned it over and looked at the label. It bore the name of a nationally known firm who made one-dollar ties. “You’re incredible,” he said quietly.

“What are you talking about?”

“You make so many blunders and you make them in such an efficient, self-confident manner.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Like a child, always scheming and thinking you’re getting away with something.” He drew up his knee viciously and the box bounced off the bed.

She backed away, frightened and sincerely bewildered. She couldn’t understand why he was making a fuss. The tie was pretty, and what’s more, it looked expensive. She might have paid five dollars for it.

“The label, darling,” he said.

“What?”

“Not that I mind wearing dollar ties, I do most of the time, anyway. It’s your effrontery, because this is practically the first present you’ve ever given me. And more than effrontery, it’s your sly stupidity.”

“You can’t...”

“Sly, because you’ve no sense of human values, and stupid because you always overlook one or two details. You always think you can put something over on people, that no one is smart enough to catch on to you. And all the time you’re as transparent as glass.” He leaned back against the pillows. His voice was low but distinct. “You’d make a very poor murderer. They’d have you hanged within a month.”

There was a long silence. She said at last, in a bored way, “Well, that was quite a speech, Charles.”

“I have lots more material.”

“Have you?”

“Oh, yes. I’m gradually getting things straightened out, a detail here and there, a discrepancy — what the doctor said and what you said he said...”

“I don’t pretend to remember his exact words.”

“You haven’t the grace to pretend anything. For a whole month you’ve sat in that chair over there waiting for me to die.”

“That’s a lie.” And it was a lie. She didn’t want him dead. She had only thought, off and on during the years of their marriage, how pleasant it would be if Charles didn’t come home some night. That was natural, that was human, a lot of wives thought that about their husbands sometimes. It didn’t make her a criminal. Yet Charles treated her like one, exactly as if he’d read her mind and convicted her on her thoughts.

“That’s your secret, Martha. You don’t pretend anything. You haven’t even got sense enough to pretend you married me for anything but my money.” His voice had risen and his eyes glowed feverishly in their sockets. “Have you? Did you?”

She was startled by his fury, but in the back of her mind she felt a cold contempt for anyone who could lose his control so completely. She said, “I don’t believe you’re in any condition to talk.”

“I may never be in any condition to talk. You tried once and you’ll try again...”

“All this fussing about a tie. It’s disgusting.”

“Won’t you, Martha?” he shouted. “You will try again?”

“For heaven’s sake lower your voice. The servants will hear you.”

“I want them to hear, I want everyone to hear!”

Quietly, so he hardly realized she was moving, she backed toward the door and closed it. Then she stood against it, as if defying him to get up and push her aside and open it again.

“Open that door,” he ordered.

“Don’t be ridiculous. If you think I’m going to let an hysterical invalid make a fool of me in front of—”

“They’ll hear me anyway, I’ll see to it.”

“Have you gone completely insane, Charles? I’ve done nothing against you.”

He struggled to a sitting position and began to scream clearly and deliberately: “I accuse my wife of trying to kill me! I am perfectly sane. I have evidence. My wife...”

In two seconds she was across the room and had her hand over his mouth.

“Stop it. I warn you, Charles, stop it.”

He pulled feebly at her hand. Drops of sweat oozed out of his forehead and his screams were muffled into little animal grunts.

“I told you to be quiet,” she said. “You can’t fight me. I won’t take my hand away until you promise to be sensible.”

He was still for a moment and there was no sound but his labored breathing. Then, with a final spurt of strength, he sank his teeth into the palm of her hand.

She was too surprised to move. She felt her own warm blood and the thick frothy saliva from his mouth slide slowly down her wrist and touch the sleeve of her coat.

Filth, her mind shrieked. Filth, filth.

She stared in frozen horror at her hand.

Charles was smiling. “I can’t fight you, eh? Perhaps not according to the rules, but I do all right. Eh, Martha?” His mouth, smeared with her blood, was moistly red and voluptuous.

“Filth,” she said in a dazed voice. “You filth.”

She turned and walked blandly away, supporting her wounded hand with her good one, carrying it with tenderness and loathing as if it were her torn, bloody baby.

Confronted by the closed door she stopped, unable to comprehend that there was a door between her and escape, and that it must be opened before she could find water to wash this indescribable filth from her hand. She felt no pain, she seemed partially paralyzed as if Charles’s saliva was a poison that was swiftly destroying her nerve centers.

“Martha...”

“I must,” she said, “I really must — wash my hands. I must...”

“Turn around.”

She obeyed, slowly. Charles was still smiling, his rich, red mouth drawn back from his pink teeth, his eyes passionate and beautiful with fever.

“Did you ever put pennies in your mouth when you were a kid?” he said. “That’s how your blood tastes. Metallic.”

Her image began to waver before his eyes, to become larger and larger. White face, black dress, red blood. The colors bounced and jostled each other. Red face, black blood. She grew noisily, clinking like pennies, spreading into the corners of the room.

“Get out! Get out of my corners! Get out, get out!”

Chapter 5

The horror passed and she began to move with brisk economy. Holding a handkerchief against the palm of her hand, she pulled the sheet up over Charles. (How calm he looked now, as if he had purified himself by spitting out all his venom and bile on her.) She picked up the tie from the floor, replaced it carefully in the box and set it on the bureau. All that fuss about a tie, it was really disgusting. She would not permit herself to believe that he had any other reason for fussing. The sole reason was the tie, and she could fix that easily enough — she would simply never buy him another one.

She took a final look at Charles. Later, when he woke up, he would be apologizing all over the place, he would grovel as he usually did after he’d lost his temper. She would, not too readily, of course, accept his apologies and they would resume their life together as if nothing had happened.

As far as she could tell, no one had heard Charles’s insane accusations. In one way it was a pity. Whenever he acted up like this, Charles was pretty careful to let no one hear him except her, so that people were fooled into believing that he was an extremely amiable man. The servants adored him (naturally — he made no demands on them); Laura and her mother thought he was wonderful (he was, with them); and his friends were continually telling her how lucky she was (lucky to be alive).

It was extraordinary how he managed never to give himself away to anyone else but her. She even felt a certain detached admiration for him in this respect, but it was tempered by a deep uneasiness: Is there something about me that brings out all this venom, could it be me?

She opened the door and stepped into the hall. Laura was standing at the head of the stairs and something about her posture indicated that she’d been standing there a long time, deliberately listening. She was wearing her school clothes, a red, baggy sweater and a plaid skirt, and she had a notebook under her arm.

“I just got home,” she said. “I was coming up the steps and I heard Charley shouting. I just wondered.” She glanced away, hugging the notebook, balancing her weight on the edges of the soles of her saddle shoes. She was thin and dark, with straight thick brows and narrow eyes that had a disconcerting I-know-and-you-know-that-I-know expression. She practiced this expression in front of a mirror every morning when she combed her hair, and it was quite effective. “I just happened to hear him.”

“Stand properly; you’ll ruin your shoes.”

“Are we going away?”

“Whatever gave you that idea?”

“I heard — I just wondered.”

“Of course we’re not going away. Charles is ill, he’s under a strain and sometimes he gets peculiar ideas.”

“Can I go in and see him?”

“No,” Martha said sharply. “He doesn’t want to see anyone. And stand properly.”

“The gym teacher said it was good for you to stand on the sides of your soles. It strengthens the arches.”

“You may tell the gym teacher for me that it also ruins the shoes.”

“Well, you can always buy new shoes but you can’t buy new arches.”

“You’re getting too fresh,” Martha said.

In her own bathroom she washed her wound and poured alcohol over it. The bite wasn’t deep but she hoped it was deep enough to leave a scar. Scars were useful weapons.

When she returned to the hall Brown was there with Laura. Brown jumped when he heard her step.

“Mr. Pearson has had another bad spell,” Martha said. “I’m going to phone the doctor.”

Unhurriedly she descended the steps.

Laura and Brown exchanged glances.

“She’s got a bandage on her hand,” Laura said casually. “See it?”

“No.”

“I bet they had a fight.”

“You’re a crazy kid,” Brown said, frowning.

“As a matter of fact, I heard them. I heard every single word. I could tell, if I felt like it. I will if you’ll let me have your car on Saturday.”

“You nearly wrecked it last time.”

“It wasn’t my fault. I told you all about it.”

“Beat it,” he said roughly.

“It’s lucky I’m a liberal or I’d have you fired for the way you talk to me when nobody else is around.”

“Try it, canarylegs.”

A flush spread up along her neck to her cheeks. “I couldn’t be bothered. We’ll be moving out one of these days anyway.”

“You’re breaking my heart.”

“Wait and see.”

“I’ve been waiting.”

“You’re not the only one.” She intensified her knowing expression. “I never liked it here much anyway. It’s disgusting to keep a butler in this day and age.”

She saw Brown’s eyes narrow in anger and she turned with an air of victory and walked away.

“One of these days I’m going to pin your ears back,” Brown called after her. “If I thought they’d stop flapping long enough for me to catch hold of them.”

“Oh, really?”

She balanced her notebook on top of her head to improve her posture and glided solemnly down the hall.

Once inside her bedroom (done in red plaid wallpaper that she’d picked out herself) she took up her position at the vanity mirror. She spent a good deal of time here, trying to decide what she looked like. Sometimes she looked quite beautiful, a subtle haunting beauty that brought gentle tears to her own eyes, and then she would decide to be an actress. But other times she looked perfectly awful and she visualized herself in cap and gown, receiving her Ph.D. in front of an admiring throng: “She’s not pretty, no, but what a mind the girl has, one of the truly great minds of the century!”

Today she had a pimple on her chin and another beside her left ear, and she had just gotten a C in Lit. I, so she decided to become a psychologist. She narrowed her eyes and looked like a psychologist.

There, at least that was settled. She would be a psychologist, but for a while she’d keep it a secret. Last winter she had made the mistake of telling Charley she intended to become a missionary. Charley had laughed and laughed. Not two weeks after that she discovered that her inspiration, an aging Youth Leader from the Y.M.C.A., had a wife and two children and was not going to Darkest Africa or Darkest India but merely to another Y.M.C.A. A truly terrible blow, and she rallied from it only because she had to for the mid-winter exams.

Everything happens to me, thought the psychologist. Life is just one pitfall after another. One horrible, shattering disillusionment followed by another horrible shattering disillusionment.

But always she rallied, she survived. To look at her no one would ever dream what she had been through. There wasn’t a wrinkle in her face (pimples didn’t count, they could happen to anybody), and her forehead was as smooth and serene as a mountain lake. Life had beaten her but she came up smiling. She smiled, at the same time keeping her eyes narrowed so that she appeared to be squinting in strong sunlight.

Most infelicitous, she thought, frowning. A most infelicitous physiognomy.

She rearranged the mirrors to examine her profile. Her nose was nice, but the pimple beside her ear spoiled everything. It was no ordinary pimple, it was huge, it glowed, it was phosphorescent. She couldn’t bear it, she wished she were dead.

But, as usual, she rallied. She coated her face liberally with pancake makeup. It made smiling difficult, but who wanted to smile anyway? What was there to smile about? Oh, the horror, the disillusionment! Oh, the C in Lit., the Y.M.C.A. and the phosphorescent pimple!

My life is ashes, she thought. Just plain ashes.

Though Laura’s adolescent mind vacillated from one extreme to another, in her judgments and decisions about herself, she showed considerable maturity in judging other people. Nothing that went on between Charles and Martha escaped her, and years ago she had decided that she would never get married. Charles was all right when Martha wasn’t around. The fault must, therefore, lie in marriage itself. She remembered that her father and mother had been happy together, but she wondered now if it hadn’t been all a pretence for her sake. Perhaps her mother and father had felt exactly as Charles and Martha felt about each other but were better able to conceal it. It was a disturbing thought, and it worried her.

Sometimes when she was in bed at night all her worries would bunch themselves together and lie on her heart, heavy as lead. She had a recurring dream, a bad, shameful dream, in which Martha died and she herself was married to Charles. These dreams had begun when she was fourteen and whenever she had one she couldn’t bear to talk to Charles for days afterward. She would sit around, mute and stubborn.

Martha was puzzled. “What’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing.”

“Did something happen at school?”

“Uh uh.”

“Is there something you want and you don’t like to ask for it?”

“Uh uh.”

“Well, for heaven’s sake, what’s got into you?”

“I’m thinking.”

“She’s growing up,” Charles said.

She didn’t want to grow up. She wanted to be a little baby or an old woman or a dog or a horse or anything but Laura growing up.

Usually she got on very well with Charles. He seemed to understand that the house was too quiet and their mode of living too dull for a sixteen-year-old. He put himself out to be entertaining, deliberately creating noise and confusion. After dinner he would play the piano and sing very loudly to cover up his mistakes. Laura would sing with him, giggling whenever he struck a wrong note.

Now and then Martha came in, to empty Charles’s ashtray or pick up a piece of sheet music that had fallen on the floor. She didn’t try to stop the noise or even look disapproving. She simply ignored them both out of existence, as if she had gone suddenly blind, or deaf, or had moved into a vacuum where no sounds could penetrate and Charles was real and realized only through his ability to dirty an ashtray.

Once, when she came in, Charles stopped playing and swung around to face her.

“Martha...”

“Oh, don’t stop playing on my account, Charles.”

“We never have any fun together, do we?”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“Let’s go dancing tomorrow night. Buy yourself a new dress. We’ll have dinner at Chez Maurice and go around to the Embassy or some place afterwards.”

She had bought the dress, but the next afternoon she sent Laura to tell Charles that she had a headache and didn’t care to go out.

“But why?” Charles asked.

“I don’t know,” Laura said. “Maybe she has a headache.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“She was crazy about the dress. She took me with her to buy it. It’s awfully cute blue velvet with a slit in the skirt and a big white flower at the waist.”

“O.K. It’s all right. I’m getting too damn old to dance, anyway.”

That had been a year ago. The dress hung in a cellophane bag in Martha’s closet. From a little way off it looked brand new, but when Laura tried it on one day she noticed that there were smudges around the hem as if someone had worn it and danced in it, and the petals of the white flower drooped as if crushed between two bodies or bruised by a hand.

Someone had worn it. Not Lily — she wouldn’t have the nerve. Not Laura herself, because the dress didn’t fit her. So it was Martha. Maybe she put it on when she was alone in her room just to wear the thing out.

Or maybe, Laura thought with a shock, she even dances in front of the mirror holding a pillow the way I used to do when I was just a kid.

There was something frightening in this idea about Martha. It seemed to imply things Laura didn’t understand and to suggest sly secrets she didn’t want to hear. It left her with the same shameful feeling as her dream of being married to Charles.

She readjusted the mirrors again. The pancake makeup helped, and besides this was her best angle, three-quarters face. She looked pretty enough to be a chorus girl. She toyed with the idea of becoming the first chorus girl/psychologist in history. It would be hard, but at least she would get on the cover of Life Magazine, and never again would she have to get down on her knees and beg Brown to let her borrow his wretched little car. People would give her cars, also mink coats. Chorus girls needed strong arches, so she walked around the room ten times on the outside edges of her shoes.

Having thus rescued her life from the ashes and dusted it off, she proceeded out into the hall to look for Brown, a mean and stingy man, if there ever was one, and she wouldn’t be seen dead in his lousy car if she had one of her own.

From the landing halfway down the stairs, she saw the doctor’s car winding up the driveway. He was coming to see Charles, of course. Charley had fainted and Martha had a bandage on her hand.

She forgot all about finding Brown. She sat down on the windowseat, biting her thumbnail, realizing for the first time since she’d overheard the quarrel that it hadn’t been an ordinary quarrel. Charley was kicking them out — her and Martha and her mother. What terrifying, awful power men had. Charles had only to say “Get out,” and they were forced to leave.

But it was not Martha who left, after all. It was Charles himself. Dr. MacNeil explained it to Martha downstairs, after he had talked with Charles. He was puzzled, he said, he was at a loss. As Mrs. Pearson knew, he was an allergist and the study of allergies was, more than any other branch of medicine, closely related to the study of psychiatry.

Would Mrs. Pearson grant that Mr. Pearson showed some degree of neurosis?

Mrs. Pearson would be delighted to grant it.

Very well then, Mrs. Pearson would understand that this most unfortunate accident with the aspirin tablets would have a more devastating effect on the mind of a nervous and introspective man like Mr. Pearson than it would on an ordinary man.

Ordinary men do not become ill from aspirin, Mrs. Pearson pointed out.

How true. But suppose he did. Would not an ordinary man feel to a lesser degree exactly as Mr. Pearson felt, that his wife was responsible?

Was the doctor implying...?

No, the doctor was not implying. Mrs. Pearson could not have known that Mr. Pearson had developed an allergy to aspirin. He, himself, Mr. Pearson’s own doctor, could not make an accurate list of the things to which Mr. Pearson was sensitive. The list was continually changing, as was usual in the case of a genuine anaphylactic personality. The amount of histamine manufactured in Mr. Pearson’s system during the years he had treated him was enough to kill off the entire household.

Dear me.

Quite. Had Mrs. Pearson ever heard of the Freudian concept of the death-wish?

No, she hadn’t, she didn’t want to, and she wished he would go away and leave her alone. His eyes probed her like needles. He had a broad forehead and thick, black brows that moved with a life of their own. By contrast, his chin was round and fat and pink as a marshmallow, with a dimple in the middle as if a child had stuck a finger into it.

She concentrated on the dimple and said, “I didn’t let myself realize until today what Charles was actually thinking about me.”

“It’s hard for you, I know,” MacNeil said with professional sympathy. “But illness distorts the perspective of a man by narrowing his world, limiting it to one room and perhaps one person. In this case, you are the person. Whether it’s a matter of choice or necessity, I have always considered it unfortunate for members of a family to nurse each other during illness. Ordinarily family life produces enough friction under the best of circumstances, and when a man is ill his world, as I said, is narrower and more intense. His sensibility is exacerbated and leads him into extremes. He is both irritable and apologetic, both self-pitying and proud.”

“In a roundabout way, you’re advising a separation, aren’t you?”

“A temporary separation is vitally important.”

“I suppose it’s useless to try and reason with him?”

“You don’t reason with a delusion any more than you reason with a pneumonia virus. Your husband must be given time to heal. You, on your part, must realize more fully than you do now that he loves you very profoundly.”

She smiled dryly. “Charles can be very convincing sometimes.”

“Oh, he didn’t tell me that. It’s so obvious that he didn’t have to.”

“It’s not obvious to me.”

“You don’t want it to be.”

“He’s jealous and possessive. I don’t call that love.”

“He’s that way because he’s uncertain of you.”

“He has no reason to be. I don’t know what Charles wants of me. I always have the impression that he wants me to do something, say something, be something that I’m not.”

Warmth, the doctor thought, he wants some signs of warmth in your nature. Oh, well.

He rose, suppressing a yawn. He was tired of talking and the woman depressed him. She seemed immovable and cold as marble, and if any of his words had ever struck her, they had bounced off again without leaving a dent. At the same time he felt somewhat sorry for her. She could not help her frigidity. Perhaps with another man she could have had a happy, or at least, normal marriage. He wondered whether at some level of her mind she was harboring a guilt complex, or whether the explanation was simply that Pearson was not impotent but sterile.

He picked up his instrument bag from the floor.

“How does your hand feel now?”

“It’s all right.”

“Good. Take care of it. Human bites are often more dangerous than animal bites.”

He departed with the feeling that he had just said something profound.

After he’d gone she discovered that all his talking and pretending to consult her had been mere camouflage, that the arrangements for Charles to leave had already been made. It was Laura who came down and told her.

“I heard them talking,” Laura said.

“You shouldn’t eavesdrop.”

“I didn’t eavesdrop. Charley’s door just happened to be open and I just happened to be sitting on the landing. He’s going away tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?”

“To a cottage on the lake. It belongs to a friend of the doctor’s. Forbes is going with him because Forbes can cook. They’re going to take the Chevvy coupe. Charley said to leave the big car for you.”

“That was nice of him,” Martha said. She was oddly affected by Charles’s concern for her. Though he was ill, though he despised her and suspected her of the worst possible crime, he wanted her to be comfortable while he was away. At least that’s how it sounded at first. After she’d considered it a minute, she began to wonder uneasily if Charles’s irony was getting so subtle she couldn’t recognize it. Talking to him was so difficult these days. It was like walking through a room strung with invisible wires; you could be aware that the wires were there, but you couldn’t prevent yourself from stumbling over them if you moved at all.

The following morning MacNeil came again. He re-bandaged her hand and told her that Charles was going to leave in the afternoon. He spoke of the cottage vaguely as being on the lake but not too far from the city.

“Why aren’t you sending him to a proper nursing home if he needs attention? Forbes can’t look after him the way I did.”

“The hospitals and nursing homes are badly overcrowded,” MacNeil replied. “And Mr. Pearson perhaps doesn’t need as much attention as you thought he did. His main need is to get away from this house and from you, to put it bluntly.”

She saw Charles only once before he left. She was waiting at the front door to say goodbye to him when he came down the stairs with Forbes. From a distance he looked perfectly well, though he walked slowly and held onto the banister for support. At the bottom of the staircase he put his hand lightly on Forbes’s shoulder and they crossed the hall toward her, walking in step.

The interval before they reached her seemed interminable. She thought of saying something light to bridge the gap of time and mood, but when she finally spoke it was the wrong thing to say, and the wrong tone to say it in.

“Well, Charles,” she said heartily. “You’re all dressed up!”

He had on grey flannels and a tweed coat with a brown turtleneck sweater underneath. She couldn’t remember seeing him in such informal clothes before. They made him look younger and the bulky sweater helped to conceal his thinness.

“Am I?” he said.

Forbes, with a little nod to Martha, opened the door and went out.

“How are you feeling, Charles?”

“Fine.”

“I hope — get a good rest, won’t you?”

“Certainly.”

“Did you leave your address with Brown?”

He said flatly, “What do you want my address for?”

“Well, in case anything turns up.”

“Nothing will turn up.”

“It wouldn’t look right for me not even to know where you are.”

He regarded her quizzically. “No?”

“Why won’t you tell me where you’re going?”

“Because I don’t want to see you again for a long, long time. If you knew where I was, you might be tempted to run out and see me. Not for humanitarian reasons — merely to check up. You’re a great one for checking up on things.”

Forbes returned. “Everything’s ready if you are, Mr. Pearson.”

“I’m ready. Well, goodbye, Martha.”

“Good-bye.”

She raised her face perfunctorily for his kiss. He stared at her for a moment. Then he said coldly, “Aren’t you forgetting I bite, my dear?”

The door slammed.

She hurried into the living room and watched him from the windows. She saw Forbes help him into the coupe and lay a blanket over his knees, then Forbes got in beside him and started the engine. Before they drove off, they both began to laugh.

That was the picture of him she kept seeing over and over again — Charles looking quite healthy and young again in the turtleneck sweater, driving off to a place she didn’t know, laughing at a joke she couldn’t share.

Chapter 6

Time passed slowly for Steve. Each day dragged by on its club feet and fell exhausted into the grave of its brothers.

There were a hundred things he had planned on seeing and doing as soon as he returned; he had even made a list of them in a diary to while away the time in the English hospital. But now, when he took out the list and read it over, the things he’d written seemed pretty silly to him, futile excursions into the past. The past had been distorted or erased.

The city had never been bombed but it gave that effect. Time itself had been the bomb, annihilating the landmarks that he knew, destroying his friends and their houses and scattering their families. Some rebuilding had been done; his favorite bar was a supermarket, and the Star Building, where he’d worked as a cub reporter, had been torn down and risen from its ashes, a steel and concrete phoenix.

He paid a visit to the city editor one day. The city editor was the same man, but he had changed his style to match the new building. He wore a neat pin-striped suit, a tie and an efficient smile. The air-conditioned offices were dustless and sterile, and there wasn’t a single cigarette butt on the floor. Steve departed with a strong feeling of unreality.

Meanwhile he stayed on at the Neal Hotel. Once the symbol of elegance, the Neal catered now mostly to traveling salesmen and people like himself who wanted to avoid the five-day limit imposed by the better hotels. It was a depressing place, but it would do until he found an apartment. He had no desire to stay with his only relatives, a cousin and aunt who lived in the west end.

He had visited them out of politeness. It was the night after he met Martha on the street and he was feeling bitter. The long ride out on the streetcar depressed him even more.

They must have been watching for him, for as soon as he came in sight of the house Aunt Vi thrust the door open and shouted, “Steve!”

His cousin Beatrice stood behind her on the porch. She didn’t say anything, but she was smiling at him in a fixed, idiotic way.

He kissed them both, noticing and feeling ashamed of noticing, that Aunt Vi was a great deal fatter. Her plump prettiness had turned flabby and her soft chin had grown into jowls that sprouted coarse white hairs.

“Steve! My goodness, let me look at you!” She put her hands on his shoulders and turned him around, half-weeping. “My goodness. Here he is, Bea. Just look at him.”

“He looks the same to me,” Beatrice said. She seemed unable to stop smiling, and she was still blushing from his kiss. It was practically the only thing he remembered about Beatrice, that she blushed easily.

“I was hoping someone would say that,” Steve said.

“Oh, but you are the same.”

They were both looking at him, very intensely.

“Well,” he said in confusion.

His aunt was a widow, and she and Beatrice, who was nearly thirty now, had lived alone together for so many years that it was impossible to think of them individually or even as females. Vi-and-Bea might have been broken down into Vi and Bea, but no one had ever tried very hard. Beatrice was a nice girl, she dressed well and had a good job, but she wasn’t the type who got married without some parental maneuvering.

“You’re both looking swell,” he said cheerfully.

“I’m miles too fat,” his aunt said. “Can’t be helped. Did you bring it, like I asked on the phone?”

“Bring what?”

“The medal — your D.F.C.”

“Sure.”

“Bea, run over and fetch Mrs. Henderson, will you? Steve won’t mind.”

He glanced at her suspiciously. “Mind what?”

“I want Mrs. Henderson to see your medal. She’s been so miserable about the whole thing, always kidding Beatrice because she wrote to you so often, and you never answered.”

Without a word Beatrice turned and went down the porch steps. She had on a light green wool dress that clung to her hips, and in the late afternoon sunlight her brown hair had glints of red. She looked a lot better from behind, Steve thought.

He frowned, angry at the unknown Mrs. Henderson, and at Beatrice for minding, and at himself for not answering her letters. All the time he was away, she wrote to him once a week and every month she and Vi sent him a box of food and cigarettes. He knew it must have been Beatrice who packed the box, his aunt wouldn’t have taken the trouble to select and wrap the articles so carefully. Instead of paper and twine, the box was sewed up in heavy white cloth, and inside there was always a box of his favorite chocolates, homemade cookies and two cartons of Luckies.

“I told Mrs. Henderson,” his aunt said, “I told her, Steve hasn’t got a mother and father like a lot of boys have. He’s just got us, and it’s the least we can do to write him letters. It’s a small enough sacrifice, I told her.”

He waited in some trepidation for the arrival of the formidable Mrs. Henderson. She turned out to be a small, weary woman whose shoulders had a permanent sag. She brought her children with her, two half-grown boys who had been obviously cleaned and shined for the occasion, and were consequently ill-at-ease and silent.

The medal was passed from hand to hand, while Beatrice dispensed tea and chocolate cake. She avoided his eyes, and when the medal was passed to her, she barely glanced at it.

He didn’t know at what point, or why, his nerves began to crack, whether it was the change in Beatrice, or his aunt’s incessant talking, or the two boys surreptitiously filling their pockets with cake, or Mrs. Henderson’s melancholy voice asking him to tell them all about his experiences.

“I haven’t had any experiences,” he told Mrs. Henderson irritably.

“Well, my goodness, Steve,” his aunt cried. “You must of. They don’t give medals away like that every day, I can tell you.” She turned dramatically and faced Mrs. Henderson. “He nearly died. He was wounded here.” She pressed her hand against her breasts, while Mrs. Henderson reminded her none too gently that she knew where Steve was wounded, having heard about it at least a dozen times. Undaunted his aunt went on, “It’s the very worst place, so near the heart. He’s filled with bullets even yet, aren’t you, Steve?”

“Flak,” he said. He felt himself shaking, and the tea balanced on his knees began to rattle against the saucer. “Listen, Aunt Vi. I don’t want to...”

“Real bullets?” one of the boys asked, and his brother answered, “What do you think, you dumb cluck.”

Mrs. Henderson slapped them both absently, and told them to shut up and let the hero talk. In passing through her mouth, the word had absorbed acid.

“There’s nothing heroic about stopping a few pieces of flak...”

“Now, Steve,” his aunt interrupted. “There’s such a thing as carrying modesty too far, if you ask me.”

“Modesty is a wonderful thing,” Mrs. Henderson said with a significant glance at Aunt Vi. “There’s too little of it in this world, not mentioning any names.”

Beatrice rose suddenly and stood at the door. Everyone appeared to recognize this signal and to be accustomed to obeying Beatrice. They all departed abruptly, though the older Henderson boy hung back and whispered to Steve, “Gosh, I’d love a real bullet.”

Beatrice said, “Hurry up, Bobby. Your mother’s waiting.”

The boy left, and Beatrice began to gather up the empty tea cups. She had narrow white hands and delicate wrists that moved bonelessly as snakes.

“Can I help?” Steve said.

She shook her head quite violently. When she had piled up the saucers she took them out to the kitchen. She stayed out there quite a while. He could hear the water running into the sink, but there was no clatter of dishes. After a time, he followed her.

She was standing at the sink. She hadn’t even put the pile of saucers down yet, she was holding them in front of her in a careless, relaxed way, as if she couldn’t decide whether they were worth washing or whether she should simply let them drop. She hadn’t heard him come in because the water was making so much noise. Feeling like an intruder, he turned and went back to the parlor and picked up a magazine. When she returned she found him slouched in a chair reading and smoking, with one leg dangling over the arm of the chair.

She smiled at him, and he noticed that she had put on fresh makeup.

“I thought I’d better wash up the dishes,” she said. “They’re easier to do if you do them right away.”

“Are they?” He closed the magazine and let it slide to the floor. It had hardly landed before she was across the room and kneeling to pick it up. Her hair looked very clean and shiny and smelled faintly of flowers. He reached out and touched it. It felt soft but not so soft as he remembered a woman’s hair should feel. (He hadn’t touched a girl since he’d gone into the hospital and seen some of the v.d. cases.)

But still, soft enough, so he patted it. Good, kind, clean, sweet Beatrice, he thought.

She seemed annoyed by his touch. She rose briskly and slammed the magazine back on the table.

“Well, Bea,” he said. “How’s business?”

“Oh, fine.” She sat down opposite him, smoothing her dress carefully over her knees. “Same as usual.”

“I thought the old bas — tyrant would have made you vice president by this time.”

“It’s all right. You can say bastard as long as mother’s not around.”

They both laughed, but he knew he had offended her by changing the word to “tyrant.” It was like moving her back a generation.

She said crisply, “Remember the cartoon in Esquire years ago? ‘I may be an old maid, but I’m not a fussy old maid.’ Well, that’s me.”

She apparently expected him to say something reassuring about her age, but he couldn’t think of anything except a flat, “You’re not old,” so he kept quiet. He wondered why women became sensitive about their age after twenty-five, especially unmarried women like Beatrice. There were no special virtues or privileges attached to being twenty-five. Everyone who was thirty had been twenty-five for exactly one year. Women had so many queer emotional attitudes about unimportant matters. Here was Beatrice, with a good job, a house, the best of clothes and nice legs...

He looked again and thought, very nice legs. But the fact remained that they were attached to Beatrice.

“What are you frowning about?” she asked.

“Nothing. Just wondering what’s happened to Aunt Vi.”

“She’s probably arguing with Mrs. Henderson. She usually is. It’s her way of getting a kick out of life.”

“She’s quite a girl.”

He stifled a yawn and Beatrice said immediately, “Can I mix you a drink or something?”

“No, thanks. I’ve got to be going in a few minutes.”

“You just got here. It’s not even dark yet.”

“I go to bed pretty early.”

“We’ve hardly talked — or anything... But of course you need your rest, don’t you?”

The light in the room was quite dim and he couldn’t see her very well, but he had the impression she was smiling again. He wondered whether her smile was a nervous tic; when she couldn’t think of anything to do she smiled instead of lighting a cigarette or something like other people.

“You’re thinner,” she said.

He moved restlessly in the chair. “Oh, am I?”

“Mother and I were thinking if you — wanted to stay here, we have an extra bedroom and we wouldn’t bother you, and you’d get the right kind of food...”

She spoke very coldly, as if she were trying to make it clear that they didn’t give a damn if he starved, but they didn’t want to waste that extra bedroom.

“That’s awfully nice of you,” he said.

“We just thought, if you wanted to, you might as well stay here.”

“It’s swell of you...”

“Of course, it’s pretty far out, isn’t it, and you wouldn’t find it very interesting, living with two older women.”

“It isn’t that,” he said, not realizing until the words were out that he had refused her offer, and that she had known he was going to.

“It was mother’s idea,” she said. “She thought you might want a little home life since you’ve been away so long.” She got up and switched on a lamp, averting her face from the splash of light. “But I told her, if Steve wanted home life, he’d want his own, he’d get married. What ever happened to Martha?”

He had the impression from her careful, measured tones that she’d been waiting all the time to ask him about Martha.

“She got married,” he said.

“Oh. I hadn’t heard. I’m sorry.”

He laughed suddenly, and the noise seemed to jar the room. “There’s a home life for you. You can measure it by the ton. Maybe you know her husband. His name’s Charles Pearson.”

“I’ve heard of him. He has something to do with a trust company.”

“I didn’t know that. Oh, Lord.” He began laughing again. He didn’t know why, and neither did Beatrice.

She said anxiously, “I’d really like to mix you a drink.”

“Sure. Go ahead.”

“We’ve got Scotch and brandy.”

“Scotch.”

He went out into the kitchen with her and watched her while she mixed his drink. She had remembered exactly the way he liked it, with water and a twist of lemon peel. She fixed one for herself, too, though he knew she didn’t enjoy drinking and was doing it only to please him. He felt very grateful to Beatrice. When she handed him the glass, he said, “You’re a very nice girl, Bea.”

“I’ve been called that before. It’s an apology, not a compliment. What’ll we drink to?”

“How about to trust companies?”

“All right.”

Their glasses touched and he said, “As soon as I left, she must have figured me for a dead pigeon, and dead pigeons don’t do anybody any good. There never was one yet who had anything to do with a trust company.”

“I only met her a few times, but she didn’t strike me as being like that.”

“Well, I’m not trying to be fair to her. Why in hell should I?”

“She struck me,” Beatrice said, staring into her glass, “as being crazy about you. Why didn’t you get married?”

“We were engaged. I gave her a ring but she gave it back to me. She wanted to get married right away. I didn’t. I thought we were too young, and it was too risky.”

“She didn’t think so.”

“With Martha, it was a question of now or never. When I went away I told her I’d be back. She didn’t answer any of my letters.”

“Perhaps she understood you better than you understand yourself. You’re one of these men with a congenital fear of being — hooked.” She made the word sound obscene. “And now, of course, you can’t bear it to come back and find her happily married.”

“I’m bearing it fine,” he said flatly.

He finished off his drink and Beatrice, without asking, made him another.

“We don’t really have to stand around the kitchen,” she said. “Let’s go in and be comfortable.”

In the parlor she sat down again on the chesterfield and this time he sat beside her. She seemed embarrassed and kept pulling at the hem of her skirt as if she were half-afraid he would see her knees and half-afraid he wouldn’t. It was partly this gesture and partly the Scotch and his gratitude to her that made him intensely aware of her beside him, not as his cousin Beatrice, but as an anonymous female, warm, soft, comforting, smelling of flowers.

Without any intention other than to preserve this pleasant anonymity, he reached across her and turned off the lamp. Beatrice drew in her breath as if she were going to object, but she didn’t say anything. He wasn’t sure that she had moved, but he thought for an instant her body had come up to meet his as he reached across her. The idea excited him and he had to sit up straight and cross his legs because he was afraid his aunt might pop in suddenly. His aunt probably wouldn’t understand that he had no designs on Beatrice at all. It was just pleasant to be sitting so close to a woman and not have to be afraid of catching something if he kissed her.

“Nice here in the dark, isn’t it?” he said.

She stirred and sighed, “Yes.”

Quite naturally he put his arm around her and drew her head down to his shoulder. “I feel very, very good,” he said. “I feel like singing or quoting poetry or doing all the talking I couldn’t do in front of those people.”

“Go ahead.”

“Whenever I feel good, I want to make noises. I’m a very noisy guy.”

“Are you?” she said in a faraway, contented voice.

He turned his head and talked with his mouth against her hair. “You’re a very quiet girl.”

He must have been crazy to think Beatrice’s hair wasn’t soft. It was like cornsilk, or like the down on a baby duck. He had been given a real stuffed baby duck when he was a child, and for months he couldn’t bear to look at it. It disturbed him and he used to dream of it. In the dreams he himself was the one who’d killed the duck, and sometimes he woke up crying bitterly because he’d hurt the helpless thing; but other times he would feel triumphant and strong, contemptuous of the duck’s weakness and quite glad that he’d killed it. After a while he got used to the duck and didn’t feel anything about it, one way or the other.

He didn’t know why he had to remember the thing now, or why remembering it made him feel suddenly savage and enraged at Beatrice.

“For Christ’s sake,” he said, and pushed her head back as if he wanted to break her neck. He kissed her hard on the mouth. She put her hands on his shoulders and tried to thrust him away but the gesture only excited him more. In a moment she stopped struggling and fell sidewise. She lay in his arms completely motionless. Slowly he drew his mouth away. His eyes strained through the darkness trying to see her face, trying to make out whether this soft, limp, helpless thing was still breathing or whether he’d killed it.

“Get up,” he said brutally. “I didn’t hurt you. I didn’t do anything to you.” She didn’t answer, and he said, “For Christ’s sake, all I did was kiss you. You’ve been kissed before.”

She seemed to begin to breathe again, quite suddenly. It was just plain breathing, in and out, but the sound was sharp and sweet to him, and a little sad.

“Bea? I didn’t hurt you, did I?”

“No,” she whispered. “No, no, of course not.”

“I’m awfully glad.”

“You didn’t hurt me.”

He couldn’t tell anything from her voice. She might have been smiling or weeping or inviting him to kiss her again, or all three, but he no longer cared. He wanted only to get out of the house and never come back.

He got off the chesterfield and began awkwardly to straighten his clothes. His mouth felt wet and sticky and he wiped it off with his handkerchief.

“Steve...” Beatrice said. “Steve...”

“Mind if I turn on the light?”

“Why... why, no, of course not.”

He clicked the lamp on and looked at his watch first. “Gosh, it’s after ten.”

Beatrice was sitting up very straight, smiling again, and tugging at her skirt. Her hair was mussed and there was a rakish red mustache of lipstick on her upper lip.

“After ten,” she said. “Is it really?”

“Yeah. Doesn’t seem that late, does it?”

“No, it certainly doesn’t.” She put one hand nervously up to her face as if she wanted to hide it from him. “It seems — more like eight.”

“Yeah. Bea, I... I wanted to say I’m sorry. You know how it is.”

“Certainly I do.” Her smile was getting brighter and brighter. He couldn’t bear to look at her.

He said, “Thanks a lot for everything. And say goodbye to Aunt Vi for me.”

“Certainly I will.”

He was so anxious to get out of the house that he was slightly sick in the stomach, but he forced down his impatience and held out his hand to her. “Well, Bea, it’s been swell seeing you again.”

They shook hands, very heartily.

Beatrice rose and turned on the veranda light for him and told him to be sure and come again. She shut the door behind him, gently.

He didn’t know why a sense of guilt impelled him to stop at the bottom of the veranda steps and look in at her through the parlor window to see if she was all right. She was standing in the center of the room, just the way he’d seen her stand at the kitchen sink, still and relaxed, as if she had some immediate, but trivial, problem to resolve.

He walked away from the house. Though he moved fast his feet made hardly any noise against the sidewalk. He passed a couple of girls who stared at him curiously, and he realized that he was walking furtively, not on his tiptoes exactly, but with the heels of his shoes barely touching the sidewalk, like a man making a quiet getaway.

Chapter 7

He went to bed expecting to dream of the duck again. But when he woke up he couldn’t remember that he had dreamed. He knew only that he was glad to be awake, as if he had spent the night wandering, lost, through dark windowless places.

It wasn’t eight o’clock yet and normally he would have stayed in bed a couple of hours longer, thinking, dozing off now and then. But this morning he felt a sense of urgency. He must find a place to live. He had been home over a week now and he wasn’t the newly returned veteran anymore — there were lots of them newer than he was. He wasn’t a transient anymore either, he was here to stay, and a hotel room was no place to stay in. Everything about the hotel emphasized his own insecurity. It was a permanent, unchangeable backdrop for a thousand shifting scenes and faces.

In the mornings, especially, the place affected him. The chairs were lined up in the lobby, empty and imperturbable, neither dreading nor anticipating the hundred shapes and sizes that would descend on them during the day. The writing desks had been dusted and furnished with new paper and envelopes and a clean blotter. Yesterday’s blots, yesterday’s scribbled intimacies, lay forgotten in a rubbish can. The potted palms that flanked the marble pillars seemed never to need water, and never to grow or wither, as if they had some secret source of life.

Steve passed through the lobby as quickly as he could and handed in his key at the desk.

“Good morning, Mr. Ferris,” the desk clerk said.

“Good morning. Any mail for me?”

“The mail won’t be in for an hour yet.”

“Thanks.”

“Comes in around nine or a little after.”

“Yes, thanks,” Steve said. He knew this couldn’t be the same desk clerk who’d been on duty late the night before, that there must be a succession of clerks. But he couldn’t distinguish one from the other, they were as alike as the pillars in the lobby. It was as if they had acquired, through association, some of the permanent quality of the furnishings and of the building itself. They seemed impervious to wear and dirt, beyond nourishment like the palm trees, resilient like the chairs.

The desk clerk reached behind the counter and brought out a sign which said, “Mr. Humphreys.” He dusted it off with his handkerchief and placed it unobtrusively on the counter. There was a faintly sly air about this maneuver, as if Mr. Humphreys had known all along what Steve was thinking, and was now showing him how terribly easy it was to have an identity, after all; you just put up a sign.

“Is there anything you want, Mr. Ferris?”

“No, thanks. I was just wondering where to have breakfast.”

“I always go to Childs’.”

“You do?” He couldn’t help sounding a little surprised.

“For butter cakes. Butter cakes are my weakness.”

“I’ll have to try them,” Steve said. He had the feeling that Mr. Humphreys was deliberately setting out to dispel any illusions about himself. Having provided himself with an identity, he now strengthened it with a weakness.

“They’re practically indigestible. Sometimes I feel awful all day,” Mr. Humphreys said, with the merry air of a happy drunk confessing that liquor was killing him. “But they’re dandy while they’re going down.”

“Well, I’ll have to try them,” Steve said again. “See you later, if I’m still alive.”

Mr. Humphreys’s gentle laugh slid after him across the lobby.

Out in the street he stopped to buy a paper, then walked down a couple of blocks to the nearest Childs and ordered butter cakes. While he was waiting, he opened the paper at the classified ads. He was excited at the prospect of finding a place to live, a small, furnished apartment not too far out, with a kitchen, so he could throw a party if he felt like it. After he was settled he’d start on his book. The important thing was to get used to the idea that he was home, this was his town, and he was going to stay in it.

There was nearly a whole column of ads, Wanted to Rent. They started out with “Two hundred dollars reward for information leading to the rental of a five-room apartment or house,” and ended up with, “Service wife with small baby desperately needs place to live.” In between, there were six reward ads and a couple of whimsical ones, but most of them were just straight, like the service wife’s. Squeezed in at the bottom of the column were two apartments for rent, one-and-one-half rooms out in Strongville and an artist’s studio in the Village, which had to be seen to be appreciated and could be appreciated only by those able to pay $500 a month.

He closed the paper. He felt suddenly very tired, and when the waitress brought his butter cakes he ate them without tasting them. He knew it wasn’t physical tiredness, you couldn’t be physically tired after a good night’s sleep. It was something inside his head, something alive, that gnawed at and was gradually severing the vital link between wish and will; it was a conviction that whatever corner he turned, he would confront an obstacle too high to hurdle and too heavy to thrust aside, and whatever he wanted would be out of reach.

He faced the difficulty squarely — he wasn’t going to do anything about finding a place to live, and it was quite possible that he wasn’t going to do anything about anything if it cost him much trouble.

Sometimes, he thought, you get a plane with my kind of jinx. The machinery’s okay and everything’s oiled and there’s not a damn thing the matter with it except that it doesn’t fly right. Nobody wants to touch it and when the thing eventually cracks up, everybody’s glad of it.

The waitress brought his coffee. He sipped it, remembering the doctor at the military discharge center. He was a small man who gave advice out of the side of his mouth. Most of it was pretty shrewd, too, but the boys were too excited at going home to pay much attention and they all thought the doctor was a sourpuss for handing out a lot of gloomy predictions.

He recalled clearly what the doctor had told him: “Well, Ferris, we’ve got you on your feet again, from now on it’s up to you. You’re pretty cocky right now and eager to get home. That’ll last maybe a couple of days, maybe a couple of weeks, if you’re lucky. Then you’ll get a reaction. Yours will probably be a little worse than the others because you’ve been away longer and you haven’t a wife or family to go back to and you’ve been pretty well shot up. You’ll be tense and sorry for yourself and tired, but most of all you’ll be disappointed — the town’s different and so are your friends, and maybe the pool room where you used to hang around has been changed into a movie house. So you’ll go around saying that people over here never realized there ever was a war, and if you say it loud enough and in front of the right people, you’ll be quoted in the newspapers.

“You’ll say a lot of other things, too, none of them very original, but after a while this grousing period should wear off. That depends on you and what you do in the meantime. You can’t hold down a steady job for a while, but on the whole, you’re very lucky. You’ve got your arms and legs and your sight, enough money to keep going for a few months, and a college degree. About all I can do for you, Ferris, or for any of the rest, is to tell you what to expect and advise you to count your blessings. Don’t expect the key to the city; there aren’t enough to go around. And don’t expect that that little blonde that you treated one night to a chocolate soda at a drugstore in 1941 has been waiting five years for another chocolate soda. And don’t expect allowances to be made for you. That isn’t the way the world is made. A couple of million years ago no allowances were made for the fact that the dinosaur had too small a brain for his body. The dinosaur is extinct.” He smiled. “And a damn good thing it is, too. Well, okay, Ferris. Good-bye and good luck to you.”

They shook hands and the doctor went with him to the door. Before Steve left he heard the doctor beginning the same speech all over again with a different name: “Well, Meldrom, we’ve got you on your feet again...”

Steve finished his coffee and thought, it was a good speech. He wondered why it disturbed him to picture the doctor giving it over and over again, day after day: “Well, Smith, we’ve got you on your feet again...” “Well, McMahon...” “Well, Gilmore...”

Meldrom, Smith, McMahon, Gilmore, Ferris. Thousands of them, and Ferris no better than the rest, no more important. A very ordinary man with no special case of the jinx; not even worthy of extinction, like the dinosaurs.

He wasn’t special. That idea required some adjustment, but it was comforting, too.

He called for his check. The inertia that came and went suddenly and without apparent cause had disappeared. When he went out into the street again, he walked briskly, like a man with a destination.

He didn’t return to the hotel until after dinner. Though he’d been alone all day and hadn’t done anything important, he had the false contentment that fills the lull between decision and execution: I have decided, so I shall rest up today and act tomorrow.

He went through the lobby and paused at the entrance to the bar, his eyes wandering over the crowd. The tables were all filled and people were lined up two-deep at the bar. Under the dim lights they seemed a fine and merry crowd, but they were all talking at once and no one was listening. Their voices were high, desperate, confused, as if each one of them realized that he had so little time in this world that he couldn’t spend a second of it on anyone but himself.

“Chaos.” A voice spoke softly behind him. “A sort of cozy chaos, isn’t it?”

Steve turned. A thin, middle-aged man was standing a couple of feet behind him gazing at the people over Steve’s shoulder with cynical interest.

“Sorry. I seem to be blocking the entrance,” Steve said.

“That’s all right. Crowded, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“Didn’t you used to be a court reporter on one of the papers?”

“The Star,” Steve said.

“Been away, haven’t you?”

“For a while.”

“If you’re looking for a place to sit, I’ve got a table back there. Come and have a beer.”

There was no special reason to refuse, though he didn’t recognize the man. “Thanks, I will.”

“You’re name’s Ferris, I remember now,” the man said, narrowing his eyes. “You reported one of my cases. You got a byline on it.”

“I remember,” Steve lied. “I’ve forgotten your name, though.”

“Smith.”

They shook hands without enthusiasm. Then Smith led the way back to the booth. He had a cautious way of moving; he seemed to compress himself into the smallest possible space, his shoulders hunched together, his hands in his pockets. It was the walk of a man who had learned by experience to distrust not only the people around him but the very floor he walked on.

They sat down and Smith said, “What’ll you have?”

“Van Merritt.”

“Two Van Merritt,” he told the waiter. He settled back with a faint sigh. “I’m glad I ran into you. I felt conspicuous sitting here alone, and I prefer not to be, right now.”

“Working?”

“Keeping an eye on an old friend of mine. I don’t want him to notice me for a while.” The beer arrived and Smith drank a full glass before he spoke again. “Do you see the lieutenant over there on the left side of the bar arguing with his wife?”

Steve looked. The lieutenant was a broad, handsome man with clipped grey hair and an authoritative manner. The woman with him was short and plump. She wore a tight black dress and a great deal of jewelry that looked expensive. Her eyes were fixed glassily on the man as he talked.

“What about them?” Steve asked.

“I’m waiting to find out what they do next.”

“Why?”

“Because the uniform isn’t his, and unfortunately, neither is the wife. The lady’s real husband is very cut up about the whole thing.” Smith smiled in anticipation of his own joke. “Literally. He’s in an accident ward out at Western Hospital. When he’s conscious he claims his wife didn’t have a thing to do with knifing him. But it’s pretty clear from what he says in delirium that she did it, all right.”

Steve couldn’t resist another glance at the plump woman. “It seems incredible,” he said.

“Violence usually does, to the outsider. What makes the whole affair more poignant is that she doesn’t know her lieutenant is a phony and the phony lieutenant doesn’t know she used a knife on her husband. At least, he didn’t know an hour ago, but judging from the way his jaw is working now I figure she’s told him and he doesn’t like the idea. Wearing a uniform illegally is a few degrees removed from attempted homicide, so he’s probably informing the lady that this is where he came in.”

The woman leaned forward and put her hand on the lieutenant’s arm. She began to talk very quickly.

“As for the lady,” Smith said, “she’s a little upset, and not thinking clearly, so she’s very unwisely pulling the one about how she did it all for love of him. And Henley, being a sensible man, is thinking of plane timetables.”

“If he’s sensible, why the uniform?”

“He just likes uniforms, that’s all. Every couple of months he tries to enlist in some branch of the service and when they turn him down, he goes out and buys a uniform anyway. Then we pick him up, he pays a fine, and we get the uniforms. If there’s still a market for uniforms by the time we hold our next police auction, we should get a good price for them. He patronizes the best tailors.”

Steve laughed. “It sounds crazy to me.”

“Well, that’s because you haven’t lived long enough to develop any detachment. It’s a perfectly sensible arrangement. It makes Henley happy to throw away his excess money on uniforms, it makes the taxpayers happy when he pays his fines, and it makes us happy when we hold our auctions. Joy all around, see?”

Smith picked up his bottle, saw that it was empty and beckoned the waiter. Whatever he did, he did with a minimum of movement. It deepened the impression he gave of profound distrust, and of invulnerability. Watching him made Steve uneasy. He had the feeling that if he should suddenly pull a gun and threaten to shoot Smith, Smith would sit perfectly quiet, without surprise, as if he’d known all along what to expect.

Steve lit a cigarette to cover his nervousness. The story of the lieutenant and the plump woman was interesting, but he didn’t like the way Smith told it. He seemed to be enjoying it too much, as if he liked to see other people displaying their inanities and weaknesses because he had none of his own, like a teetotaller watching a drunken party.

“We don’t want Henley to get into any trouble,” Smith said. “That’s why I’m hanging around.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“The damnedest kind, woman-trouble. The lady might object if he walks out on her. My guess is, though, that she’ll take it quietly. She’ll fling herself on the mercy of her husband and he’ll be dope enough to take her back, and in a couple of years, she’ll try it again, maybe.”

“Can’t you bring her to trial?”

“Certainly. Then they’ll both swear she didn’t do it, and they’ll dream up a dark stranger in a mask and she’ll go home to poppa. The most we can do for poppa is to promise him a postmortem free of charge.”

The woman had stopped talking and was concentrating all her attention on the drink she held in her hand. The lieutenant turned suddenly and began to walk unsteadily toward the washroom. He looked very pale.

“Henley always had a weak stomach,” Smith observed calmly. “Come on. This ought to be fun.”

“No, thanks.”

“So few cases have any element of humor in them. You wouldn’t want to miss one, Ferris. Come on.” He got up.

Steve followed him to the washroom. They found Henley propped up against the wall, being sick. After a time he washed his face and hands.

Smith went over and said, “Boo!”

Henley jumped and began to look green again.

Smith said, “Where do you pick up your women, Henley?”

“Oh, my God, get me out of here,” Henley cried hoarsely. “All I want to do is get out of here. I’ve got to...”

“Well, don’t strain your voice. You can’t scream your way out. Use the door.”

“I tell you, I hardly even know her. For Christ’s sake, I tell you I hardly know her! I picked her up last week in a movie and took her out a couple of times and now she... she...”

He managed to get his handkerchief out of his pocket and wipe his face. He was shaking all over.

Smith said, “Sure, sure,” and winked at Steve.

“She wants me to run away with her, she says if I don’t, she’ll drag me into it. She might even say I did it, and if the man dies... A knife, that’s what gets me — a knife...”

“What did you expect her to use? You can’t slice people up with a fountain pen.”

“Oh, my Jesus! What am I going to do?”

“Walk out the way you came in.”

“She’ll see me. She’ll — she might...”

“What’s her name?”

“Doris.”

“Doris will be okay. She won’t try to stop you. Matter of fact, she might be pretty glad in the long run if you do walk out on her. It will give her a chance to go back to — what’s his name?”

“Arthur. She told me she was divorced. I’d never touch a married woman, you know me, I...”

“Arthur’s all ready to let bygones be bygones.”

“He is?” Henley sounded incredulous. “He must be crazy.”

“Well, it’s his funeral.”

Henley had stopped shaking. He took the cigarette Smith offered him, drew on it a couple of times and threw it away.

He said, “Do I look okay to go out on the street?”

“The uniform is positively stunning,” Smith said dryly.

“I’ll send them all back. I promise. I’ll never buy any more, that’s a promise, Mr. Smith.”

He began brushing one shoulder of his tunic vigorously with the flat of his hand. Smith watched him, smiling. A minute ago Henley had been afraid of death, now he was equally afraid of appearing on the street with a piece of lint on his uniform.

“Okay,” Smith said. “You look fine. See you later.”

He beckoned to Steve and they returned to the booth.

Doris was still at the bar. Someone had given her a seat and she sat with her plump legs twisted around the bar stool. She wasn’t watching for Henley to come back. She was playing with her drink, swishing it around and around the glass.

After a while she opened her purse and took out a compact. Very carefully she remade her face. Then she paid the check. Without waiting for any change, she slid off the stool and made her way to the door. When she passed Steve’s table he saw that she didn’t appear upset or nervous at all. Her face was blank and her eyes looked bruised and blind. She didn’t glance around the place for Henley.

When she reached the door she stood there for a minute, as if she’d forgotten how to open it. Then a couple of men came in and held the door open for her. She went out.

“Well,” Steve said. “I wonder what’s going to happen to her.”

“What’s going to happen to any of us?” Smith said. “We’ll continue to proceed on trust. Considering the intricacies of the human brain we are very trusting mammals. We have to be. In order to live for this next hour we have to trust the men who made this beer, these chairs, this building. I have to assume that you will behave at a fairly civilized level and that my apartment is not on fire, or if it is, that the fire department will arrive promptly. Which means I also have to trust the men who made the fire engine, and before that, the metal workers, and before that the blueprint engineers.” He smiled wryly. “Aren’t we lucky to be alive?”

“I suppose so.”

“As a policeman I’ve seen so many unnecessary deaths. If my own isn’t one of them by the time I retire, I have my prescription made up for a nice, long life. I’d stay away from cars, lakes, guns that I thought weren’t loaded, airplanes, and women with husbands.” He got up. “Well, I’d better go and check up on Doris.”

“Thanks for the beer.”

“Good night.”

“Good night.”

Steve drank another beer alone. Then he took the elevator up to his room. He lay down on the bed without undressing. He didn’t want to go to sleep because he had a lot of things to think about and going to sleep was final. It was burying an old day. In the morning it would be resurrected; it wouldn’t be a new day, it would be the same one, freshly painted and primped like an old floozy. Only the children, the near-sighted, the anemic, could fail to see last year’s grime beneath the cracking powder, and smell the sweet sickly decay beneath the perfume.

He turned over on his back and clasped his hands behind his head. The ceiling light was brown but immediately above his bed there were several black marks on it like the toeprints of a man’s shoe. He was too tired to feel much surprise that someone should have tiptoed across his ceiling, but he wondered how it could be done. Suction shoes? Stilts?

No, that wouldn’t be it. Perhaps the marks weren’t shoe prints. Something else than that? A fly swatter.

That was it, a fly swatter. Someone (a man? woman?) had stood on the bed and slapped at the ceiling with a rubber fly swatter.

He felt pleased with himself for figuring this out, but somewhat disappointed, too. It would have been interesting to go on thinking about someone tiptoeing across the ceiling. It would have excluded other thoughts.

But now he became acutely aware that the green lampshade was the color of Beatrice’s dress. (I’ll phone Beatrice, I’ll make it up to her, not that I did anything. I’ll take her out sometime; she is very clean and kind.) The light itself reminded him of the shiny pendant Doris had worn around her neck. (I wonder what will happen to her. She was not like Martha, but all the time I kept thinking of Martha.)

The shiny pendant began to waver, gently at first, then faster and faster until it spun and whistled and burst of its own energy, scattering stars of steel. He stood in a glass rain and watched the blowing bones, the leaves of skin, the twigs of hair.

Out of the bomb-hole in the earth Martha came. She didn’t see him, she passed by.

“Martha! Martha, it’s me!”

She didn’t hear him, there was too much noise. He followed, but he couldn’t catch her. He kept stepping on soft, warm, sticky things like little animals newly born and newly dead.

She didn’t look around, she didn’t see him doing all his wonderful tricks for her. He stood on his head, he clapped his hands, he pirouetted on his toes like a ballet boy, he took off his clothes, he jumped, he cleared a hurdle six feet high, he burned his wrist with a cigarette, laughing; he screamed and screamed.

Someone was pounding on the door. He got off the bed. He went over to the door and said, without opening it, “Who is it?”

“Everything okay in there?” a man’s voice asked.

“Yes.”

“Lady next door phoned down she thought you was being murdered.”

“I must have been dreaming.”

“Okay then.”

There was a sound of receding footsteps. He looked at his watch. It was two o’clock. His wrist was sore where he’d been lying on it and his throat was raw from shouting in his sleep.

He lit a cigarette and sat down in the chair beside his bed. He was shaking with relief that his dream was over. No bomb, no Martha, no burned hole in his wrist. He knew there wasn’t a chance that he’d resume the dream if he went back to sleep, but he sat in the chair for an hour before he finally undressed, put on his pajamas and went to bed.

Chapter 8

The next morning he woke up with a plan laid out in his head. Like most of the ideas that came to him early in the morning and that later turned out unfortunate, this seemed to be a good one. He would go and see the house that Martha lived in. Not Martha herself — he was no longer interested in her; she bore practically no resemblance to the girl he’d been engaged to. She was a matron now, she looked like one, she talked like one, she dressed like one, and she had that exasperating air of smugness found in the best matrons. It was a class he didn’t care for.

No, it was not Martha he wanted to see. It was the house itself. He liked houses, he was interested in houses. Once he wanted to be an architect; what was so funny about going to see a house instead of a woman?

Right after breakfast he took a cab out to Balby Point. On special dates with houses you couldn’t very well take a bus, so he sat back in the cab and watched the people on the streets who didn’t get ideas in the very early morning.

Balby Point was the section of the city where every Sunday afternoon the $4,000-a-year people drove around to see what kind of homes the $40,000-a-year people had built for themselves. Most of the houses were in the Colonial tradition, rambling, inconvenient, with unexpected steps and Hepplewhite furniture in the drawing room which haughtily denied the old gas stove in the kitchen and the broken spring in the maid’s bed. They were staunch, conservative people who considered that pampering a servant was the first step toward communism.

But there were a few modern American houses. People weren’t accustomed to them yet and they still looked more like magazine illustrations than places where human beings lived.

Steve paid off the cab driver at the corner of Gilchrist and Jane. (Pearson, Charles H., 132 Gilchrist Ave., Hum. 5-2366.) He began to walk slowly up the hill. There were only four houses on the street and he couldn’t miss the Pearsons’. It was at the top of the hill and it was the only house that had corner windows set in glass bricks. It was perfectly square and flat (they’ll probably have trouble with the roof leaking, I hope). He might have been seeing it from the wrong angle but the place looked a little cockeyed to him. He wondered whether it was wise to try and build a perfectly square house on a hilltop.

The garage was a couple of hundred yards from the house, with servants’ quarters built above it. There was room for three cars, but the doors of the garage were shut and there didn’t seem to be anybody around.

He stepped onto the driveway, his shoes scrunching against the white pebbles. The driveway, bordered by a low cedar hedge, swooped up the hill, jogged off toward the garage, and then up the rest of the hill in an erratic, but dashing, course to the front door of the house.

He stopped suddenly. Now was the time to go back. He had seen what he wanted to see, he had it out of his system. The house was just what he had imagined it to be, a rather badly planned modern. It was time to leave.

He leaned down and picked up a pebble from the driveway. He meant to throw it idly over the hedge for the sake of something to do or because pebbled driveways annoyed him. But when the stone left his hand, it swung viciously through the air and hit a window of the garage. The window cracked and its smooth face wrinkled as if suddenly overcome by age.

Someone shouted, “Hey! Hey, you!”

He turned and saw a man hurrying toward him across the lawn, lugging a garden sprinkler. The sprinkler hampered his progress but it didn’t seem to occur to him to put it down. He was tall and spare, with a bald head that glistened in the sun like an egg in isinglass.

He said, breathlessly, “Just what do you think you’re doing?”

Steve looked surprised. “Who, me?”

“You broke a window. I saw you.”

“Did I?”

“You can’t go around breaking windows.”

“I didn’t try to break the window. I was aiming at the door.”

“Well, what in hell are you aiming at anything for? This is private property. I’ve a good notion to report you. I’m the one that’s going to get blamed for that window.”

“Well, I’m sorry for that,” Steve said honestly.

“She’ll think I did it as sure as God made little green apples.” Brown threw the sprinkler on the lawn. “I get blamed for everything around here. If a couple of bugs get on her flowers, she thinks I had them imported especially from South America.”

“If there’s anything I can do.”

“Since Mr. Pearson left day before yesterday she’s been worse than usual. She goes around...”

“Oh,” Steve said. “Has Mr. Pearson left?”

Brown became cautious. “What’s that to you?”

“I’m an old friend of the family.”

“You are, eh? I’ve been working for Mr. Pearson for a long time and I’ve never seen you before.”

“You haven’t been looking in the right places. I’ve been away. My name’s Ferris.”

Brown studied him a minute in silence. “Ex-army, aren’t you?”

“Air Force.”

“I was a corporal in the last war. Funny thing. Some people can remember all their war experiences and tell them over minute by minute. But all I can remember is being confused and shot at.”

“That’s enough,” Steve said. “About this window I broke...”

“Forget it. I’ll tell her a boy broke it.” Brown grinned. “An ex-boy.”

“You don’t have to do that. I’ll tell her myself. Is she in?”

“She’s in, all right. She can’t go out. Mr. Pearson took the chauffeur with him and she doesn’t trust me with the big car.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Me, I should care.”

“Mr. Pearson on a holiday?”

“Yes. This way, if you still want to see Mrs. Pearson.”

Brown started up the driveway. He walked as if he owned the place, or, at least, as if he was pretty sure of his position.

Steve followed him. “Nice lawns.”

“Not bad.”

“Do you look after them yourself?”

“When I feel like it.”

He said nothing more until they were inside the house. “Mrs. Pearson’s in the front room. Go on in.”

“Thanks.”

Brown began walking away.

Steve said, “Don’t you think you’d better tell her I’m here?”

Brown grinned again, slyly. “Why should I? She’ll find out when you walk in.”

He disappeared, chuckling to himself. Steve was left in the hall alone with the conviction that he had just made a complete fool of himself. He had acted on a lousy impulse, he had broken a window like a kid, and he was in the house of a woman he didn’t want to see and who didn’t want to see him. Sweet Jesus, let me out of here, he thought, and began tiptoeing toward the front door. He had it halfway open when he heard Martha call out, “Brown, come here a minute.”

He got out and closed the door in a hurry. Then, without giving it a second thought, he put his hand on the doorbell and pressed it.

Martha opened the door herself. She didn’t say, “Hello,” she said, “Well!” There was a great deal of feeling behind the word, of exactly the kind he had expected.

He wanted to get it over with in a hurry, so he said, in a fast monotone: “I broke one of your garage windows. Some man saw me do it and didn’t want to be blamed. So I came to tell you about it myself.”

“Well,” she said again.

“Whenever I see a pebbled driveway I want to throw pebbles. It’s a compulsion neurosis. I’ll be glad to pay for the window. I guess that covers everything.” He added dryly, “In case you’re wondering whether I can afford to pay for the window, the answer is yes. At least, I can if it was just made of ordinary glass and not encrusted with rubies, diamonds and other precious gems. How much?”

Her bewilderment gave place to anger. “You have no business breaking windows. What were you doing here anyway?”

“Oh, hell, Martha, let’s forget it,” he said wearily. “No reason. Will five dollars cover it?”

“The money isn’t important. I only want to know why you came here.”

“Okay.” He leaned against the door jamb and put his hands in his pockets. “I was sightseeing.”

“Why?”

“I dreamed of you last night and when I woke up this morning I wanted to see the house you lived in.” He added carefully, “Not you. Just the house.”

There was a long silence. She said finally, “You always did do crazy things. If you really want to see the house, come in and see it.”

“Thanks.” He stepped into the hall.

“Of course it’s not looking its best right now. We decided to get the housecleaning done while Charles was away. He’s on a holiday, you know.” She spoke with nervous little pauses between phrases. “I... This is the hall.”

He gazed solemnly up and down the hall, nodding his head slightly in a professional fashion.

“The table over there and the lamp and ashtray on it are myrtle wood. Myrtle wood is very l-light, you know.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Well, it is.”

He went over and picked up the ashtray. “So it is,” he said soberly.

She glanced away in confusion. “The — prints on the wall are by Borein. Charles loves horses. At — least I think he does.”

“It seems to me to be an easy thing to check. If a man talks about horses, rides horses and associates with horses in a general way, he probably loves horses.”

Her mouth tightened, but she went on, in the manner of a guide in a museum. “The drawing room is in here. Do you want to see it?”

“I’d like to.”

She led the way into the room, walking with jerky little steps like a marionette. “The two davenports are built in. The slipcovers were designed by a friend of Charles’s, and the... I wish you’d go away. You didn’t come to see the house, you came to make trouble for me.”

“All right, I’ll leave.” But he removed himself only as far as the doorway. There he turned back again and said quietly, “I didn’t come to make trouble for you, Martha. I told you the truth. I dreamed of you...”

“Well, you shouldn’t. It’s — bad manners.”

“It is, isn’t it?” Steve said with a smile. “I’ll have to learn to stay awake. Aren’t you curious at all, Martha? Don’t you want to know what I dreamed about you?”

“No.”

“Oh, it’s nothing that would offend your pure ears. In the dream, you were ignoring me. That’s all.” He brought out a pack of cigarettes. “Would you like a cigarette?”

“No, thanks.”

“Do you mind if I have one? I’d hate to waste that myrtle wood ashtray. Where did Charles go?”

“Away.”

“You’re quite happy with him, are you?”

“Yes, I am. Very happy.”

“I’m glad of that,” he said with no conviction behind his words. “I had the notion that when I left, you were rather upset. I see it didn’t last long.”

“You are romantic.” She had recovered her poise. She was looking at him now with frank appraisal. “You really have no right to feel so bitter about me. I don’t about you.”

“That’s fine.”

“We can at least act civilized. Would you like some tea?”

“No, thanks.”

“Have you started your book yet?”

“No. I can’t start until I find a place to live.”

“It must be difficult.”

“Yes.”

“They say the housing shortage is very bad.”

“I’m not worrying so much. If I get stuck I can stay at Beatrice’s. Remember my cousin, Beatrice Rogers?”

“Yes.”

“She wants me to stay there. She has a house out in the west end.”

“Oh. She’s quite pretty, isn’t she?”

“Not exactly.”

“I remember her as being quite pretty. Did she ever get married?”

“No. She asked after you, by the way. She knows your husband slightly, I believe. Well—” he made a half-turn — “I’d better be going. Don’t worry about me bothering you anymore. I won’t.”

“You were no bother at all,” she said with false brightness. “I hope you find a place to live.”

“Thanks.”

“If you don’t, Charles and I might be able to help you. There’s an apartment over the garage. It’s vacant right now. Forbes is away. If you really can’t find anything — just as a temporary arrangement, of course — you might use it.”

“That’s very generous of you,” Steve said. The offer had come so unexpectedly he didn’t know whether it was serious or not. He glanced at her with suspicion. Martha was certainly looking serious. More than that, she was looking downright noble, and it suddenly occurred to him why. As soon as she’d found out that Beatrice had offered to take him in, she had to make the same offer.

“Very generous,” he repeated, but in a different tone.

She was sharp enough to catch the change in tone. She said flatly, “We intended to rent the place anyway, since we don’t know how long Forbes will be gone. Months, perhaps. It seems a shame to waste an apartment when they’re so scarce. I asked Brown yesterday to put an ad in the paper about it.”

Check with Brown, he thought. “May I see the place?”

“Certainly.”

She rang for Brown. When he appeared she said indifferently, “Show Mr. Ferris Forbes’s apartment. Did you put the ad in the paper?”

“Not yet, Mrs. Pearson. It slipped my mind.”

“It may not be necessary.” She held out her hand to Steve. “I hope you like the apartment, Mr. Ferris. The rent is fifty dollars a month.”

There was a deliberate warning emphasis on the Mr. Ferris.

“Very kind of you, Mrs. Pearson,” Steve said. “I’m sure I will.”

There was an outside flight of stairs at the side of the garage. Brown went up and unlocked the door.

“Come on in,” he said.

“All right.”

They entered a small square hall. The floor was of composition done in ivory and black half-circles. The walls and woodwork were ivory and out of each wall sprouted four transparent plastic horns.

Brown touched one and smiled a bit grimly. “Coat hangers. Can you beat it? It took Forbes, the man who lives here, a couple of months before he had them figured out. Look.”

He twisted the horn and half the wall swung out to reveal a shallow cupboard with several rows of shelves. The shelves were filled with bottles, nearly all of them empty gin bottles.

“I wouldn’t show this to everybody,” Brown said.

“Why pick me?”

“You don’t look like a Baptist.”

“I have an aunt who’s a Baptist.”

“Oh, we all have,” Brown said easily. “You wouldn’t let it affect you.”

“How do you know?”

“I can tell a hangover a mile away. You’ve got one.”

“Well?”

“Well,” Brown said and closed the wall again carefully, “this cupboard’s important to me. I want to rent this place to the right kind of person.”

“I thought Mrs. Pearson was renting it.”

“It was Mr. Pearson’s idea in the first place. Do you know him very well?”

“No.”

“Well, he’s got a wonderful social conscience. He’s always bothering about other people. For instance, he wouldn’t let this apartment stand vacant when he knew a hundred people would be glad to have it, especially veterans like yourself.”

“Kind of him,” Steve murmured.

“He wants everyone to be comfortable and to have enough of everything. This being impossible, it makes him nervous and he gets hives. I’ve known him since he was a boy and that’s what always happens when he gets nervous. He gets hives, on the skin or in the eyes or in his throat.”

Brown appeared willing and able to continue with a clinical report on Charles. Steve changed the subject. “Could I see the other rooms?”

“Certainly.”

They went into the main room of the apartment. It had the same kind of walls and floor as the lobby, but here there were several round, fluffy yellow rugs strewn around. The windows were wide, with Venetian blinds and red and ivory chintz drapes. There were two deep armchairs with slipcovers to match the drapes, and a cherry-red love seat.

“Bed pulls out of the wall,” Brown said. “Want to see it?”

“No. I get the idea.”

“Here’s the kitchen.” He pushed open a swinging door. “Take a look at it yourself. There’s not room for both of us.”

Steve glanced inside. “It’s fine.”

“Forbes cooked all his own meals.” Brown sat down in one of the armchairs and pulled out a package of cigarettes. He didn’t seem in any hurry to get back to his job, whatever it was. “Forbes was a good cook. I used to come over and eat with him sometimes, just to get away from the women. Over in the house they’re all women. A man gets pretty damn tired of women sometimes. There’s no friendship in them. They either want to marry you or lynch you.”

He sounded, suddenly, like a lonely old man mourning the loss of a friend.

“Well, thanks for showing me around,” Steve said.

Brown rose, twisting the key to the apartment in his hand. “Like the place?”

“Very much. But as a matter of fact, I was looking for something more permanent.”

“Suit yourself. If you change your mind, give me a ring.”

They went out and Brown re-locked the door. At the bottom of the steps he nodded goodbye, then he walked over and picked up the sprinkler again and started across the lawn.

When Steve returned to the hotel he found a telephone number in his mailbox. He called from his room, but as soon as he heard Beatrice’s voice he wished he hadn’t. He had no idea what to say to her, beyond asking her how she was.

She was, of course, fine. So was he. So was her mother. It was also very warm for this time of year.

After this interchange, came a long uncomfortable pause. Then Beatrice’s voice again, sounding natural enough, though a little playful: “Mother’s mad at you for walking out on her the other night. She says the only way you can make it up to her is by coming out to dinner.”

“I’d like to, but the fact is...”

“Oh, not tonight especially. Any night. We eat every night in this house.”

She giggled faintly and he knew he should have responded to the joke, but he said earnestly, “I’d like to come. Whenever you say.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow would suit me fine.” All his life he’d been accepting invitations like that, right off the bat. But a minute after he let himself in for something, he always began planning ways to get out of it. The more distant the invitation, the more time he had for planning. Usually he ended up by going anyway, and having a very good time.

Tomorrow, he thought. If I get on a plane tonight I could be in New York by tomorrow, or Florida, or Arizona.

He said, “What time do you want me to come?”

“The earlier the better,” Beatrice told him.

“I’ll be there.”

“That’s grand, Steve.”

Another silence, longer this time and more personal, somehow, the kind of pause that occurs between lovers which nothing will fill but a passionate declaration of love or hate.

“Hello?” he said. “Hello? Bea?”

“Yes.”

“I thought we’d been cut off.”

“No. I was just wondering whether you like steak.”

“Certainly I like steak.”

“We’ll have that then, if we can get it.”

“Good. See you tomorrow.”

“Good-bye, Steve.”

“Good-bye.”

He hung up but he kept his hand on the telephone as if he intended to call her right back and say he was sorry he couldn’t make it tomorrow, how about next year?

He didn’t call her back but the invitation nagged him for the rest of the day. He kept picturing Beatrice in the butcher shop, flanked by rows and rows of raw porterhouse, testing each one delicately with her long white fingers.

He went to bed early that night. When he dozed off he discovered that Beatrice had an embarrassing habit of removing her clothes in butcher shops. Quite a crowd gathered around. He told them all that Beatrice didn’t know any better, she was just a child.

The telephone woke him up. He picked up the receiver guiltily, afraid that Beatrice had in some obscure way divined that he was dreaming about her. But it was only the kitchen calling to see if his was the room that had ordered the cornflakes.

He said, “No,” and hung up again, wondering who in hell would want cornflakes at eleven-thirty at night.

There was a party going on in the room next door. One of the women had a shrill and continuous laugh, and someone kept thumping against the wall in time to the radio.

Usually he enjoyed hearing other people have a good time but tonight it just kept him awake. He even considered phoning a complaint down to the desk, though he knew he couldn’t do that any more than he could have refused Beatrice’s invitation to dinner or denied Brown the opportunity to show him the apartment. He seemed to have lost the ability to make any definite and immediate decisions. Though he was deeply suspicious of Charles’s “social conscience” and Martha’s offer of the apartment, and resented the patronage implied in it, he hadn’t been able to refuse outright. He had simply walked off, leaving the whole thing up in the air, giving himself a chance to change his mind. Perhaps it was weakness of character, lack of will. Or perhaps he no longer wanted anything badly enough to cause trouble to get it.

If I really want quiet, I can phone down to the desk. If I don’t want to see Beatrice again, I can ring her up and tell her so. If I want a decent place to live, I can move into the apartment tomorrow. Just three simple, straightforward telephone calls will do the trick. Forget about hurting Beatrice’s feelings, forget about Martha, don’t let a noisy party spoil your sleep.

Next door the party broke up suddenly, and someone turned off the radio.

That left two calls. Or, if you stopped to reason it out, one would do. He didn’t have to go to Beatrice’s house tomorrow, he could just move out of the hotel without leaving a forwarding address or telephone number. Beatrice could surely take a hint.

The plan began to grow in his mind. It seemed to him reasonable and sensible, not like a lot of crazy things he had done in his life on impulse. There were objections, certainly. But there always were in everything anyone planned. What did it matter how or why he got the apartment? Getting it was the important thing. To hell with Charles and his hives and his social conscience and his wife. He, Steve Ferris, was the person to be considered.

He went to sleep, secure in the knowledge that for once he had come to a decision in cold blood, without reference to anyone’s feelings but his own.

When he checked out of the hotel the following afternoon, he left his forwarding address and his telephone number, and he called Beatrice from a pay phone in the lobby. He told her he was terribly sorry he couldn’t come for dinner; he had found an apartment and was moving in right away.

She didn’t seem at all disappointed. She understood perfectly, she said, it was perfectly all right.

“I really am sorry,” he repeated. “Tell Aunt Vi, will you?”

“Oh, I will. Where are you moving?”

Without hesitation he gave her his address and his phone number, and accepted an invitation for dinner the following week. By next week he could be in Mexico, Cuba, Buenos Aires.

Chapter 9

When he arrived at the house he went around to the back door to get the key to the apartment. Brown let him into the kitchen, murmuring something formal in the way of greeting. He was more subdued in the house than he had been in the apartment. Steve thought it must be the woman’s influence.

The woman was introduced as Mrs. Putnam, the cook. She stood at the sink watering a windowbox of green stuff that looked like parsley. She was very short, with wide sloping shoulders like a man’s, and a drawn delicate profile. She acknowledged the introduction with a pained fleeting smile.

“What’s that stuff?” Steve said. “In the windowbox.”

“Parsley.”

“I thought it looked like parsley.”

“It is parsley.”

“Well, what do you know,” Steve said. He didn’t care what was in the windowbox, he wasn’t even consciously trying to make Mrs. Putnam like him. But whenever he met a woman, no matter what her age or appearance might be, he couldn’t resist trying to personalize their relationship right away.

Aware of Mrs. Putnam’s relentless back, he turned to Brown again.

“Do I pay the rent to you or Mrs. Pearson?”

“I’ll handle it.”

“All right.” Steve took fifty dollars from his wallet. Brown gave him a receipt and a key ring with six or seven keys on it.

“It’s Forbes’s key ring,” Brown explained. “One of the keys belongs to the apartment. The others you can ignore. Are you going to do your own cooking, Mr. Ferris?”

“I might make a stab at it.”

“If you find yourself starving to death, come over here for a meal. Mrs. Putnam won’t mind.”

“Pleased, I’m sure,” she put in.

“Thanks very much,” Steve said. He was pretty sure that Brown had extended the invitation merely for the sake of finding out how good a friend he was of Martha’s. A good friend of Martha’s wouldn’t want to eat in the kitchen with the servants. He added carefully, “I’ll take you up on that.”

Brown looked a little surprised, but he didn’t say anything.

Steve finished unpacking in ten minutes. He had only a few clothes, two new suits, his old service underwear and socks, a camera, a portable typewriter, the shaving kit Beatrice had sent him last Christmas, and a leather writing case with a snapshot of Bea and Aunt Vi sitting grim and indivisible on the front porch of their house. In the envelope folder there were other pictures. Most of them were members of his squadron, but there were a few whose origin he couldn’t even remember: a couple of Land Army girls giggling straight into the camera, some pigeons in Trafalgar Square, a castle, a plane with a missing wheel, and a dreary transient-looking building labeled “Home Sweet Home.” At the bottom of the pile there was a creased snapshot of Martha. She was leaning against a big oak tree. She wore a light summer dress and the wind was blowing the skirt and her short yellow curls. She was laughing and holding down the skirt of her dress with both hands.

He took the picture and put it in his wallet. He didn’t want Brown to come across it and recognize her. Brown was the kind of man who might like to snoop into other people’s things in an innocent way.

There was a chest of drawers built into the wall. He put all his stuff into the top drawer and left the others empty. Using just the one drawer made him feel better. It emphasized the fact that he needn’t stay if he didn’t want to, or if anything happened. He could pack in three minutes and be out of here.

He closed his suitcases and put them in the closet. Then he strolled around the apartment, looking into cupboards, turning the stove off and on, seeing if the bed was comfortable, examining the books Forbes had left in the bookcase. He sat down again and took out the key ring Brown had given him. The keys were labeled with bits of cardboard: Ignition Chev. Door Chev. Ignition Cad. Door Cad. Apartment. House B door. Garage.

Seven keys. And that wasn’t half the number Brown had on his own key ring. Well, the more money you had, the more you had to lose and the more you spent on locks and keys. He remembered the house Martha used to live in. It had two doors, too, but neither of them was ever locked because someone had lost the keys years ago. Anyone could walk into the place any hour of the day or night, but nothing was ever stolen.

He separated the garage key from the others and went down and unlocked the side door of the garage. He climbed in behind the wheel of the Cadillac. He would have liked to take it out on the highway and test its speed. He started the motor. It had a nice steady hum that rose to a roar when he stepped on the gas. He let it roar for a minute, enjoying the feeling of being behind the wheel of a car again, instead of a plane or a jeep.

Idling the motor he looked at the dashboard. It had been carefully dusted and polished, the gas tank was full, and even the clock was still running. Illuminated by a shaft of sun that streamed in from the open door of the garage, its hands pointed to 4:20. He checked it with his watch and found it was exactly right. He pictured Forbes coming down here just before he left, to give the car a last once-over and say goodbye to it like an affectionate mother. And then, as a final touch, winding the clock, as if to make sure of leaving behind him for a time some trace of his existence in the mechanical moving hands.

4:22. He could see the clock all right, but the shaft of sunlight had disappeared. Someone had closed the garage door.

So quickly that the action was almost a reflex, he leaned forward and shut off the ignition. Then he opened the car door and got out.

He said, “This is a pretty big garage. It would probably take quite a while to fill it with carbon monoxide, but you’d better open that door anyway.”

The girl put one hand up to her mouth. “Oh. Oh, I never thought of that. I just didn’t want people to — well, you know how people spy on people.” She kicked the door open with her foot, keeping close to the wall. It was clear that she thought of herself as keeping a rendezvous and intended to squeeze the last ounce of drama from the occasion.

“You don’t remember me,” she said.

“Certainly I do. You’re Laura.” He would never have recognized her in a crowd, though. She was at least six inches taller. Her black bangs were gone, and her hair hung straight and smooth down to her shoulders.

“Come on, let’s sit in the car,” Laura said.

He didn’t budge. “Why?”

“Well, I haven’t seen you for years. I want to hear all about everything. I heard Brown telling Martha you were coming, so I skipped a psychology lab. They’re not very interesting anyway, just finding out your hot and cold spots, et cetera.”

“It sounds fascinating.”

“Well, it would be if you didn’t have to remember it.” Her voice trailed away and she moved her hands in a fluttery, embarrassed way. “Are you... aren’t you surprised to see how grown-up I am?”

“Yes, I am,” Steve said. “Very.”

She seemed satisfied with that, and became more at ease. “Are you going to live here?”

“For a while.”

“That will be fun.”

“For whom?”

“I only meant, it will be fun to have someone to talk to sometimes. I get so bored.”

He noticed that she had put on a thick layer of lipstick. When she talked she barely moved her mouth, as if she were afraid of smearing the lipstick or getting some on her teeth.

“I’m sorry you get so bored,” Steve said wryly.

“Have you got a cigarette?”

“I have, yes.” He raised the engine hood of the car and looked inside, hoping she would take the hint and leave.

“I’d like one.”

“Look,” he said. “Aren’t we starting off on the wrong track? You can’t hang around garages smoking cigarettes. You’re getting to be a big girl now. People might get the wrong impression. You know how people spy on people, don’t you?”

She flushed and backed away. “You don’t have to be so mean about it. And you don’t have to say it’s for my own good, either. If you knew how dull things are around here, how damned bloody dull!” She started to emote, but remembered the lipstick in time and changed her expression to one of boredom. “Now that Charley’s gone, it’s worse. We don’t even talk anymore, nobody has anything to say. I might just as well crawl into a corner and die. And no one would care, no one! Why can’t I have a cigarette?”

“It will stunt your growth.”

“I haven’t grown for a whole year.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake.” He banged down the hood of the engine. He took out a package of cigarettes and tossed them at her. “I hope you turn into a pygmy.”

“I haven’t any matches either.”

“Okay.” He flung a packet of matches in her direction. “You’re sure there isn’t anything else I could offer you? A martini? A Scotch and soda?”

“You don’t have to be sarcastic. A lot of girls my age smoke and drink. You’re behind the times.”

“Apparently.”

She lit the cigarette expertly. “As soon as people get to be twenty-five they start to get stuffy. No matter how nice they were to begin with. They don’t want other people to have a good time because they can’t anymore. Old age is a terrible thing. It makes everyone so sour.”

“Am I sour?”

“More than you used to be. You haven’t even smiled, for instance.”

“Haven’t I? Well, watch this one.” He smiled at her, very broadly.

She flung the cigarette on the floor and stamped on it, grinding it to shreds with the toe of her shoe.

“I guess I’ll go back now,” she said without raising her head.

“It would be better.”

“Do you ever get so... so discontented and — sad...?”

“Everyone does.”

She walked out slowly, as if she half-hoped he might call her back and explain everything to her.

He returned to the apartment, a little disturbed by the meeting. He had never been particularly fond of Laura. He had tolerated her because she happened to be Martha’s younger sister and because, at eleven, she wasn’t any more obnoxious than other eleven-year-olds.

But he found the new Laura rather pathetic. Sixteen, and suffering from growing pains, and passionate and conflicting desires. She wanted to live intensely or to die, to have a wonderful time or be a martyr; she wanted the excitement of a grand passion or the austerity of a nun’s cell. All extremes were possible, were even necessary to her in order that she might convince the world, which was gradually encroaching on her, that she was not an ordinary girl, but Laura, set apart and destined for extraordinary things.

Steve felt great sympathy for her, because he remembered his own adolescence. He’d been all appetite and acne, diffidence and conceit. His wrists grew overnight while his coat sleeves insidiously shrank. He blushed when any girl spoke to him, but with the utmost confidence he related all kinds of improbable sex experiences to his friends and listened with complete gullibility to theirs.

He had met Martha when he was seventeen and in high school. She was two years younger than he was, but with the worldly precocity of certain females she seemed already grown up and ready for the responsibilities of marriage and children. Their first date together was a dance at the school. Neither of them could dance very well, so they sat most of the evening on one of the benches lined up along the gymnasium wall and studied the other dancers with desperate intensity.

They danced the last number together, “I Love You Truly.” She was as tall as he was and their knees bumped every now and then as they waltzed the length of the floor. The gymnasium had, as it always did at the dances, a strong odor of sweat and unwashed feet, but Steve didn’t notice.

He leaned close to Martha. “You smell swell,” he told her.

“It’s only perfume,” Martha said.

She was very direct like that, when he first knew her. She was never coy, she didn’t feign interest in anything merely to please him. Later on, when he was in the university and she was a stenographer with a contracting firm he took her to a few football games. She didn’t like or understand football and so she didn’t watch the game. But afterwards she would describe all the people who’d been sitting near them, particularly the girls. She thought that since they were college girls they were worth noticing, and, occasionally, copying.

Now and then they discussed, seriously, the idea of marrying for money, he, some rich old dowager who would eat herself into the grave, and she, some elderly man with a weak heart. They decided that money was very important, and even if the dowager and the elderly man required a few years to die, the money would be worth waiting for.

But the day he got his first job as a cub reporter, he paid the down payment on a $75 diamond ring. When he gave it to her he was very happy. He thought it was wonderful to be only twenty-one and have a job and be engaged to the prettiest girl in the world. In the ensuing months, some of the wonder wore off. Though the circumstances remained the same, he began to interpret them differently. There he was, only twenty-one and already tied down to one woman and holding down a job that wouldn’t support them both. His own immaturity and the scornful attitude of his older, more sophisticated friends did nothing to help him.

Neither did Martha. She was very anxious to get married and showed it. When she met him in the evenings, she was starry-eyed, but in a few minutes she’d start talking about budgets and how much she’d saved and how much he could save if he really wanted to. He was always a little shocked that she could look so dreamy and moonstruck while she was talking about lunch allowances and necessary expenditures. The second quarrel came easier than the first, and after that there was a whole series of scenes, and they both realized that they couldn’t go on in this way. They must do something, break apart or get married, or become lovers.

They became lovers on the sofa in Martha’s parlor while the family slept upstairs. Silent and terrified, she lay down on the sofa, listening for sounds that would warn her if the family woke up. They didn’t, though they remarked off and on during the next few months that Martha was putting on weight, and how marvelous she looked with a little extra color in her cheeks and flesh on her bones.

Though he, too, noticed the miraculous physical change in Martha, he knew she was suffering from a feeling of guilt. When she was with the family her eyes shifted in a furtive way and she was unnaturally talkative and noisy, like a bird which makes a great racket over an empty nest to distract attention from its real one.

Alone with him, she was moody. Sometimes she cried, or she was cold and silent, or talked in a cynical, brassy way about their relationship. And because his own guilt echoed hers, he grew enraged with her. Most of the time he was with her they quarreled but when he wasn’t with her he felt strangely protective and responsible for her. He tried to figure out the cause of the situation, what was at fault — nature for maturing the female more rapidly than the male and having her ready for the responsibilities of marriage when she was still very young — or the economic system which forced the male to postpone marriage; or just the plain biological instincts which didn’t recognize the necessity for the ritual of marriage.

He thought a great deal about it but he always came to the same conclusion. He didn’t want to get married because he couldn’t support a wife. The present was precarious and he couldn’t depend on the future. To double the burden would be to double the risks.

He left early in the year 1941. She took it very calmly, giving him back his ring in a matter-of-fact manner. He refused to take it. He argued, and lost his temper. He told her he loved her, he was coming back, he wanted her to wait for him.

“You may change your mind,” she said, and dropped the ring casually into his pocket. “You couldn’t stand being tied down.”

The last he saw of her she was standing on the porch of the house. The snow was falling and he couldn’t tell whether she was crying or not because the snow kept melting on her eyelids and her cheeks.

He had one letter from her. It came before he left the country, while he was still at the camp in Florida. It was a crisp little note to the effect that it was “bad taste” for him to continue writing to her. Their engagement was broken and “people” were beginning to think it was funny for her to get so many letters. She didn’t want any “talk.”

People, bad taste, talk. She’d always been very conscious of them and now her consciousness had doubled, nourished by her feeling of guilt. She had sinned and she had enjoyed sinning, and though no one found out about it, she was incapable of acting natural any longer. She must satisfy her conscience by appeasing the whole world.

If she had given any indication that she wanted him back, he would have come running. He missed her a good deal. In the regimentation of his new life, his ego took a beating that her presence could have softened for him. Quite a few of the boys at camp were married and their wives lived in the town. Most of them were cheerful, good-looking girls who sat and drank beer with their husbands on Saturday nights. They didn’t appear nervous or irritable, the way he’d expected women to be who knew their husbands were going to leave them shortly and stood a good chance of never coming back.

The more he saw of wives, the more taken up he was with the idea of marrying Martha and bringing her down to camp. One night, after a shattering experience in a new fighter, he phoned her. While he was waiting for a chance at the phone, he planned what he was going to say: Listen, Martha, I was wrong, I was a chump. Martha, let’s get married. You could come down here and I could be home a couple of nights a week and over the weekends. There are lots of wives here. They’re a swell bunch, you’d like them. How about it, darling?

The phone rang and rang but nobody answered.

It was after that that her letter came and he realized he was just pipe-dreaming. She would never marry him; or, if she did, she would never forget his initial reluctance. It would come between them for the rest of their lives because her pride would never entirely heal. He sailed for England without seeing her.

He looked out across the lawn to the house. He wondered if Martha was there now, thinking over the same things as he had. What had she felt when she met him on the street? Surprise and resentment, that was obvious. Perhaps a sudden desire for revenge, too, using Charles as the weapon. The empty apartment might be merely a part of a preconceived plan she had for getting back at him; it would help to assuage her vanity, to be in a position to do him favors and make him feel obliged to her.

He didn’t actually believe she had such a plan, but its possibilities annoyed him. For a moment he thought of packing and leaving right away, just in case. But the rent had already been paid and he couldn’t afford to throw away fifty dollars. Nor could he afford to turn down favors.

He thought of at least a dozen reasons why he should stay, but the real one hadn’t yet occurred to him — that he wanted to be near Martha.

Chapter 10

He saw Brown walking across the lawn and stepped back quickly from the window, as if he’d been doing something he shouldn’t and didn’t want to be caught.

When Brown came in, Steve pretended he had just finished unpacking.

“All settled?” Brown said.

“Yes.”

“I saw the kid come out to the garage. She probably wanted to look you over, eh?”

“Probably.”

“She’s a good kid in some ways.”

“She seemed all right.”

“I have to pin her ears back sometimes, but I’m kind of fond of her. She’s a little irresponsible. I wouldn’t want anything to happen to her. If you know what I mean.”

“Oh, I think I do,” Steve said dryly.

“Well, that’s fine. I hope you don’t mind my mentioning it.”

“Not at all.”

“If she makes a nuisance of herself, don’t tell Mrs. Pearson. Just tell me and I’ll handle it.” He added without any change of tone, “We eat in about half an hour. You’re welcome to eat with us. You haven’t any groceries.”

“Thanks, I’d like to.”

“If you’re sure you wouldn’t mind eating in the kitchen...”

“I wouldn’t.”

At dinner Brown remained unnaturally silent. They all served themselves and ate in the breakfast nook off the kitchen. Besides Brown and Steve himself, there was Mrs. Putnam and a maid called Lily. She was about Beatrice’s age. She had a very bad skin and she was on a diet. Mrs. Putnam was plainly outraged that anyone could be such a fool as to believe that the skin, which was outside, could be affected by food, which went inside. Lily remained cheerful but obstinate. Having paid a doctor five dollars for the diet, she intended to stick to it until death itself intervened, which, Mrs. Putnam asserted, it shortly would.

But the wrangling was not unpleasant. It was carried on in the family style — everything that was said had been said before and would be said again. It gave Steve a comfortable feeling of continuity, as if he were a child who’d been away visiting for a time and had come back to the family to find everything the same.

When the two women got up to wash the dishes Steve said, “A friendly town, this, don’t you think?”

“So-so.”

“Take this invitation for dinner tonight. I consider it a very friendly gesture.”

Brown grunted in reply.

“It makes me wonder whose idea it was,” Steve said.

“Mine.”

“Hands across the lawn, eh?”

“More or less.”

“You’re quite sure that it wasn’t Mrs. Pearson’s idea before it was your idea?”

“She only suggested that it would be nice for us to be neighborly. Food’s a good way of doing it, so here you are.”

“Here I am,” Steve said. The plan was very neat, very typical of Martha. In order to show him that she had no intention of acknowledging their friendship, she had persuaded her servants to “be neighborly” with him.

He went quietly back to the apartment to think it over. He could go directly to Martha and ask her what her game was, but he didn’t trust his own temper and nothing would be gained anyway. Martha would be pure, innocent and on the side of the angels. A subtler approach was necessary. He could never bludgeon Martha into admitting anything, but she could be tricked.

He phoned and told her that since he didn’t intend to start his book right away, he’d be glad to drive her any place she wanted to go.

She sounded pleased. “That’s nice of you. I don’t like to trust Brown with the Cadillac, he’s too careless.” She paused. “As a matter of fact, I wanted to take some flowers to the hospital tomorrow morning.”

“What time?”

“Nine.”

“I’ll have the car ready.”

“I hate to impose on you. I can easily get a cab.”

“You’re not imposing,” he said quickly. “I’ll be delighted.”

The next morning he had the car at the front door fifteen minutes early, but he didn’t have to wait for her. She came out almost before he had a chance to put on the brakes. She wore her glasses and the same kind of black suit she’d worn last time he saw her. She was carrying an armful of tulips, holding them rather cautiously as if she were a little afraid there might be insects on them.

He climbed out of the car awkwardly.

“Do you want to sit in the back seat, or do you want to slum?”

She hesitated, flushing slightly. “I’ll slum.”

She opened the front door for herself and got in.

“Where to?” Steve said.

“St. James Hospital. I thought I’d take some flowers over to the wards. We have so many.”

He started the car without answering her. He drove a couple of blocks in the direction of the hospital, then pulled over to the curb and cut off the ignition.

“Why are you stopping?” Martha said.

“I want to talk to you.”

“Well. I... hope you find the apartment comfortable?”

“It’s fine. Everything is fine, but I still wonder what’s going on behind those glasses.”

“Stop talking about my glasses. If I have to wear them you shouldn’t...”

“I had a nice dinner last night in the kitchen. I wanted to thank you.”

“You’re welcome. Can we go on now?”

“I’m not in a hurry. Are you?”

“I knew there was something fishy about your offering to drive me,” she said angrily. “If you have anything to say to me, say it and get it over with. I’m busy.”

“Would you like a cigarette?”

“No!”

“A bit shrewish this morning, aren’t you, Mrs. Pearson?”

An old man with a cane walked by very slowly, as if he were using the cane merely as an excuse to give himself time to stare at them.

“You might at least pick a more private place,” Martha said, “if you want to talk to me.”

“It’s pretty hard to get you in a private place, Mrs. Pearson.”

“Start this car.”

“I will when you tell me what you have in mind about me.”

“I have nothing in mind about you.”

“You always were a great little planner and I just wondered whether you’d been having any plans lately.”

“Why should I have? I suppose you’re just conceited enough to think that I’ve spent the past five years thinking about you.”

“I don’t give a damn what you’ve been thinking the past five years. The point is, what are you thinking now?”

“I can see it was a mistake, my trying to help you,” she said. “It seems to have given you the impression that I have some obscure motive. Well, I haven’t. I was only trying to be kind and to show you I didn’t bear any grudge against you.” She sounded very sincere.

“Okay,” he said wearily. “I’m sorry I went off the deep end.”

He drove her to the hospital and sat in the car smoking while she was gone. She came out again in half an hour and he took her straight home. She didn’t speak a word, not even when he apologized again. He let her off at the front door.

“Couldn’t we talk decently together sometime?” he said.

“What about?” She went into the house without looking at him.

He spent the rest of the morning wandering restlessly around his apartment. He tidied up a little and made some coffee and started to read a novel Forbes had left behind. It was a very bad novel. He decided he could do better, so he got out his typewriter and put a blank sheet of paper in it. By noon the paper was still blank. Hungry and embittered, he walked six blocks to the nearest drugstore and had a sandwich and a malted milk.

When he returned, Brown was clipping the hedge along the driveway. Brown waved to him cheerfully and put the clipper down, as if the appearance of Steve was an unexpected but satisfactory excuse to stop work.

“Hi,” Brown said. “What have you been doing all morning?”

“Nothing.”

“Bored, eh?”

“You said it.”

“It’s bad to sit around and be bored. Take me. When I’m bored I get outside and do something.”

“Such as?”

“Well, maybe I clip the hedges or mow the lawn. Why don’t you wash the car or something?”

“It isn’t dirty,” Steve said.

“It’ll pass the time.”

Pass the time. That’s what he’d been doing for five years, passing the time, waiting, the way the others were waiting, to go home again. And now that he was home, he was waiting still, but this time he wasn’t waiting for anything.

What a waste, he thought violently, what a stinking waste.

He said, “The hell with washing the car.”

“All right. I just mentioned it because it would give you something to do.”

“You don’t seem anxious to think of anything to do yourself.”

“That’s different,” Brown said. “I’m inclined to be lazy. I don’t mind doing the same things over and over again. That’s because I know I haven’t got anything to set the world on fire with. Maybe you have, I couldn’t say.”

“Maybe I have.”

“Well, let’s wait and see if it lights up and goes bang.”

Steve was silent. His chest felt constricted, as if someone had tied a knotted rope around it and every knot drew blood. He hunched over to ease the pain.

“Anything the matter?” Brown asked.

“No.” He was pretty sure now that what the doctor had suggested was true — the pains weren’t caused by his injuries, they appeared only when he was challenged and couldn’t meet the challenge and needed an excuse for not being able to meet it.

“I think,” he said finally, “that I’ll wash the car.”

“Dear Charles,” Martha wrote. “You still haven’t sent me your address so I presume that means you don’t want to hear from me. But I can write anyway. I will give this letter to Dr. MacNeil and you don’t have to read it if you don’t want to. I have no news or anything to tell you, but I wanted to say that I am very sorry...”

She paused, the pen seemed to grow limp in her hand. “I am very sorry...” I am very sorry I met you.

She stared out of the window of her bedroom at the flowers, the hedges, the rolling lawn. It didn’t look like grass from here, but like sheets of velvet. Her eyes softened, as if her mind had slipped away for a moment to lie down on the velvet and dream.

I am sorry, sorry.

She turned away and stiffened her fingers around the pen.

“...that we have drifted so far apart that you can believe me capable of anything. I loved you, Charles...”

Someone was walking around the side of the garage. Steve.

“...and I thought you loved me. MacNeil told me you still do. If you do, why do you keep on being suspicious of me? I’ve never done anything to deserve it.”

Not walking, exactly. Gliding. He had always walked like that, as if he were keeping time to music no one else could hear.

She fastened her eyes to the paper. “I really tried to be a good wife to you. I don’t know where I went wrong. If I knew my mistakes I could correct them. Perhaps there was too great a difference between our environments. I wasn’t brought up the way you were.”

When she looked out again, Steve had disappeared. He’s gone, she thought in sudden panic, he won’t come back. She must rap on the window and call out to him.

“You must realize, Charles, how hard I tried to accustom myself to a new way of life and how humiliating it was sometimes. We didn’t have any money, you see.”

We, not my father and Mother and Laura and I. But we, Steve and I. She hesitated, trying to decide whether to stroke the sentence out. Charles had such a sly way of guessing at things, he might wonder about the “we.” But if she stroked it out, he would wonder even more. She could see him bending over the paper, trying to decipher the crossed-out letters one by one, his face white with suspicion.

She laid down her pen and reached down and opened the window. Summer sounds filtered in through the screen, the jangle of insects, the throbbing hysterical screech of tree toads. A spider minced elegantly across the window ledge. A housefly paused a moment on the screen. In the fall he’d be slow and sleepy, wanting only to be let alone to drowse like an old man; but now he was alert, quickened with spring, and she had only to wave her hand a little and away he fled, lightly, contemptuous of her ponderous movements. Where are you going? Ah, I’m not going anywhere. You have to go somewhere. Not I!

She followed him with her eyes but he darted up, up, going nowhere.

She heard the hum of a motor and saw the car backing out of the garage. Steve climbed out of the car and began uncoiling the garden hose. He was wearing a pair of shorts, nothing else.

She put the letter to Charles back in the box of notepaper. Then she went downstairs and out across the lawn.

He didn’t see or hear her coming. The splutter of water from the hose was too loud, and he was intent on his work.

She said loudly, “Steve.”

He jumped and turned. The stream of water missed her by inches.

“Oh, sorry.”

“Turn it off.”

“All right.”

He shut the water off and put the hose down. When he bent over the muscles of his back moved like snakes under silk. There was a brown mole beneath his left shoulder blade.

He stood up straight again and faced her.

She stepped back. “Who told you to do that?”

“Nobody.”

“I... your costume is a little informal, isn’t it?”

“So is the job.”

“The neighbors might see you. It wouldn’t make a very good impression.”

“I don’t see any neighbors.”

“Are you... are you arguing with me?”

He shook his head. He seemed docile, but he was watching her in an oddly insolent way.

“If you really want to wash the car,” she said, “you’d better put on something more suitable. A raincoat and rubber boots, perhaps.”

“Perhaps.” A trickle of sweat ran down from his neck and disappeared in the little clump of hair in the middle of his chest. He scratched himself without self-consciousness. The hair looked moist and silky.

“You’re deliberately thinking up ways to annoy me.”

“No, I’m not,” he said earnestly.

“It looks like it. You should know that people who live in this section of the city don’t go around in shorts.”

“I’ve never been around such class before. It’ll take me a while to catch on.”

“I’m sure there’s a raincoat somewhere that you can wear.”

“And rubber boots? Oh, goody.” Without changing his expression he added, “Remind me to slap your puss some day for that section-of-the-city crack.”

He walked away.

“You come back here,” she said.

He went into the garage without answering. After a moment’s doubt she followed him.

“You can’t talk to me like that,” she said. “Not if you want to stay here.”

“My rent is paid. You’ll have to give me an eviction notice. You probably didn’t think of that angle when you hatched your fancy little idea for getting back at me.”

“You can’t stay if I order you to leave.”

He smiled. “These legal niceties are too subtle for your brain, Martha. No, I think I’ll stay for a time. I want to investigate life in the upper brackets. Anything for a laugh, I always say.”

There was a long silence.

“Well,” she said at last, “I’m glad you’re having a good laugh.” The garage was murky after the bright sunlight, and she could scarcely see him. “Am I that funny?”

“You’re a scream, darling.”

“Well. Thank you.”

“That’s all right. When people ask me, I tell them.” He spoke quietly and without emotion. “Do you want to see something, Martha? Come here.”

She didn’t move.

“It’s just a picture,” he said, “of a girl who looks a lot different now. I’ve carried it around with me for years.”

He came toward her holding out the picture.

“I don’t want to see it.” But she looked anyway and saw herself laughing into the camera.

“Pretty, isn’t she?” Steve said. “I was crazy about her. I still am.”

“Don’t. Don’t talk like that.”

“It’s all right. I was talking about her, not about you. I wouldn’t touch you with a ten-foot pole.”

She stepped forward, raising her arm as if to ward off more words. He caught her wrist and held it.

“Don’t worry, I wasn’t going to hurt you,” she said contemptuously.

“I wanted to be sure,” he said. “You’re a pretty big girl, you could pack a pretty big wallop.”

“You’ve probably been slapped by quite a few women.”

“Not so many.”

“Let go of me.”

He stared at her a minute. Then he held up her wrist between his thumb and forefinger and let it drop suddenly.

“You’d better start thinking about that eviction notice, Martha, because I think I’m going to stick around for a while.”

“Why?”

“Because you don’t want me to. Besides, I like it here. The atmosphere is so friendly.”

“I’m so glad you like it.”

“Let’s put it this way,” he said, turning his head away and speaking in an impersonal manner. “I want you to have your little revenge, if that’s what you can call it. I want you to get everything off your chest. Then we’ll start over.”

“We’ll...? I don’t know what you mean.”

“Yes, you do.”

Her eyes narrowed. “You’re preposterous!”

“And don’t bring up the subject of Charles. I don’t give a damn about Charles. I wouldn’t walk a block to see Charles wearing nothing but his hives.”

“I warn you, you’re not going to mess up my life again. I’m perfectly happy and I’m going to stay that way.”

“I see. Everything’s just dandy between you and Charles, is it?”

“Yes.”

“And when he gets better, he’s going to come home and you’re going to be right there at the door to welcome him and take up where you left off?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe you’ll change your mind.”

“Why should I?”

“It’s funny, but I have the impression that you don’t like him very much.”

“I love him very much.”

“Say it again.”

“I love him very much.”

“Again.”

“Damn you,” she said quietly.

When she reached her room she felt exhausted and in pain, as if someone had stripped off a layer of her skin and exposed the raw stuff underneath.

“Charles,” she wrote. “I am afraid. I want you to come home.”

Chapter 11

The next day the doctor went out to see Charles. He asked very few questions. He let Charles talk for nearly two hours, about his childhood, his mother, Martha, any little incident that occurred to him. It was only when Charles appeared too tired to continue talking that MacNeil inquired about his physical symptoms.

“Migraine still bothering you, Pearson?”

“No, it’s gone.”

“Good. Forbes looking after you all right?”

“Yes.”

“He tells me you’re eating well.”

“I am.”

“You’re feeling generally pretty good then?”

“I’m fine,” Charles said without conviction.

He hadn’t any pain, but a numbness had settled in his limbs. He lay for hours in a deck chair on the porch, muffled in sweaters and blankets, watching the lake. The constant motion of the water seemed to paralyze him, he hardly breathed. In his shroud of blankets, with his staring eyes, he looked so much like a dead man that Forbes would come out now and then to reassure himself.

“Mr. Pearson, you want your cap?”

A fretful stir under the blankets. “What?”

“Do you want your cap?”

“Cap? No. Nothing.”

A little ashamed of his apprehensions, Forbes would go back into the cottage and resume reading his book on herb cookery. Reading about food relaxed him. He was no longer young and he felt the strain of being with a sick man all the time — not the physical strain, for Charles didn’t require much care, but the mental strain of never quite knowing what to expect. Though he liked Charles, he didn’t have the sentimental fondness for him that Brown had and he had pretty well made up his mind that when the time came for Charles to return home, he wasn’t going along. He hadn’t told Charles, but Charles seemed to have guessed it as he guessed a great many things. Forbes didn’t know whether it was intuition or whether Charles simply was more observant than ordinary people.

While Dr. MacNeil was there, Forbes stayed inside the cottage, trying not to eavesdrop. But as soon as the doctor left, Forbes went out to the porch again. Charles was sitting with an unopened letter lying in his lap.

“Anything you want, Mr. Pearson?”

“No, thanks. Just leave me alone for a little while.”

“All right.”

Charles looked at the letter with resentment because it had intruded on his privacy. She had followed him even here — she had no decency, no sense...

“Dear Charles.” How strangely incongruous her writing was, he thought. Timid, fearful little letters bunched together as if for protection. The capitals were hardly larger than the other letters. He wondered why he’d never noticed this before and whether it meant anything.

When he finished reading the letter, he looked out over the lake again. “I am afraid, I want you to come home.” The sincerity of the words was obvious. Even her writing had changed at this point; it was larger and so erratic that it seemed each letter must have been made by a different person.

Afraid? Naturally she was. She was afraid of gossip, of her reputation. It was not her fear that was extraordinary, it was her confession of it, and, above all, her appeal to him. She never appealed to him for anything. She might make a request, but if he refused, she took his refusal as final, she didn’t coax or become coy or tearful. It was one of the traits he admired in her, yet it was also the one that hurt him most — she didn’t consider it worthwhile to manage him or jolly him along or even to quarrel with him. The face she presented to him was invulnerable: You can’t help or hurt me, Charles. There seemed to be no way of getting at her, or penetrating the layers of coldness which protected her from any emotional involvement with other people, even her own husband. This was her stock-in-trade, a complete lack of reaction which made people feel inadequate and ineffectual.

She is invulnerable, Charles thought, because I can get no reaction from her but a cold acceptance of cold facts. And the invulnerability is not so much a particular quality in her, but the particular quality in other people which makes human reactions necessary to them. Few of us can realize we are alive unless we read it in the faces of others. A smile, a frown, a lifted eyebrow, a kiss, an exclamation — these are the signs, and not our own heartbeats, that we are alive. So what people like Martha do is to strike at our instinct for self-preservation and make us afraid. We are both afraid, Martha.

But why the sudden confession? Had she simply wakened up one morning and realized that she was getting nothing from life and that her youth and beauty were slipping slowly into the past? She had never before given any sign of such a realization. She spent her days as if she had already lived her life and was merely marking time until the end. She worked in the garden, she dusted books and emptied ashtrays, she went to an occasional movie with Laura or out to dinner with him. She didn’t enjoy going out to dinner, she was always ill-at-ease and ate scarcely anything. This had puzzled him, for at home she had a good appetite. It took him some time to discover that she was shy about eating in public. No, it was more than shyness, it was a kind of shame, as if she hated to let other people know that she, too, was subject to the demands of the body.

Or perhaps it was merely that she wasn’t accustomed to eating in restaurants. “You must realize, Charles, how hard I tried to accustom myself to a new way of life and how humiliating it was sometimes.”

That much was true. She had worked hard and persistently but she had worked to make herself into the kind of wife she thought he should have, not the kind he wanted. Once, at the beginning of their marriage, he had intimated that he liked her the way she was and didn’t want her to change.

She had looked at him in bewilderment and disbelief. “But I’ve got so much to learn. I don’t want to disgrace you.”

He laughed. “Where on earth do you get your ideas, Martha? From Henry James?”

She knew who Henry James was, but she hadn’t read him. The scene, which had begun with a declaration of love, had ended up with her reading aloud from The Ambassadors.

Lord, he thought, I should have grabbed her. I should have smacked her over the head with the damn book and made love to her.

Instead, he had gone to sleep. When he woke up, she was still reading, and though she must have known he’d been asleep she didn’t say anything about it. She ignored it in the way you ignored the social lapses of a guest — a belch, a yawn, a dropped dish. Yet he had the feeling that her behavior wasn’t prompted by good manners but was intended, instead, as a denial of intimacy.

She treated him, most of the time, with a formality that made him too conscious of the difference in their ages. The difference was only nine years, and shouldn’t have mattered. But it rankled with Charles. His sterility made him oversensitive and overcritical of himself, and he worried constantly over the fact that he had married a healthy woman so much younger than himself and couldn’t even give her any children.

His attitude toward her became more and more apologetic. When he went to her room at night he always knocked at the door and waited for her permission to come in. If she intimated that she was tired or had a headache, he left immediately without kissing her good night, feeling that he had blundered in some way and that she despised him for being sterile.

On the occasions when he did stay, however, she was helpful and cooperative, so cooperative that it was months before he understood that she was modest to the point of morbidity, that it was agony for her to undress in front of him. He couldn’t understand why anyone with so beautiful a body should be ashamed of it.

“You’re lovely,” he told her. “You’re perfectly lovely.”

“No, no, I’m not.”

“You’re the most beautiful woman...”

“No.” She closed her eyes and turned away from him.

“Stay like that a minute,” he said. “You remind me of a painting I’ve seen. It’s a Venus by Velasquez, in the National Gallery in London.”

“Don’t be silly, Charles,” she said sharply.

The next day he bought a reproduction of Velasquez’s Venus and took it home to her. She liked the picture, but told him flatly that it was absurd of him to think she looked like that.

The picture helped, however. Martha seemed a little less embarrassed in front of him, and not so brusque when he paid her compliments. She still didn’t believe them, but he got the impression she was more ready to be convinced.

He should have kept on trying, of course, not to get her over her self-consciousness but to make her more conscious of herself as she really was. It struck him as ridiculous that what vanity she had was hung on qualities she hadn’t. She was perfectly willing to admit that she had a good brain and a strong character.

“I don’t believe in physical beauty,” she told him. “It’s ephemeral.”

He began to laugh, he couldn’t help himself.

She was instantly suspicious. “What’s so funny?”

“I don’t know. Everything, I suppose.”

“That was the right word, wasn’t it? Ephemeral?”

“Yes. Oh, Lord, yes.”

“Well?”

He couldn’t explain why he was laughing.

She was at least consistent in her attitude. Her clothes were sober and functional, and when Laura entered college and began wearing the regulation baggy sweaters and saddle shoes, Martha approved. She said she thought the younger generation dressed more sensibly than her own.

Though she wasn’t overtly affectionate toward Laura, she was very proud of her. Laura had brains; Laura was going to have all the opportunity that she, Martha, had never had; Laura was going to make a name for herself in the world (whether she wanted to or not, her tone implied).

Amused and a little awed by her determination, Charles had talked it over with Laura.

“Well, that’s all right,” Laura said. “I intend to, anyway. Be somebody, I mean.” She added casually, “I may as well, since I’m never going to get married.”

“Why not?”

“Oh, marriage makes people old. Look at you and Martha. I mean, what do you get out of it?”

He intended to pass it off with a smile, but he found himself saying soberly, “I don’t quite know.”

“I mean, you and Martha are certainly a Horrible Example. Of what happens when people get married.”

“Are we? Go on.”

“No, I won’t. You’re getting mad.”

“I am not. I swear on my honor I am not mad!”

She refused to talk about it anymore. She merely said, in her most bored voice, “You’re kind of a good egg, Charley.”

He felt overwhelmingly flattered. “You’re not so bad yourself.”

“Do you think, when I get older I mean, that I’ll be as pretty as Martha?”

“I think it’s very likely.”

“I don’t. I keep getting these ghastly ickies. One after another. It makes me sick to my very core.”

“I presume my advanced age has affected my eyesight, but I can’t see any ickies.”

“You would, if I washed my face. Naturally I don’t go around advertising them.”

Charles smiled. “In spite of these grave obstacles in the path of beauty, I think you’ll do all right.”

“Now you’re kidding me.”

“No, I’m not. And I hope... well, I hope that some day you’ll be very happy as well as pretty.”

She gaped up at him. “What a funny thing to say. As if you were on the verge of crying or something.”

“I hope not,” he said.

It was only a month or so after that, early in April, that he came home with an agonizing headache and went straight to bed.

Martha came up to see him. “Brown told me you have one of your bad heads.”

“Pretty bad.”

“Why don’t you take the stuff the doctor gave you?”

“It wouldn’t do any good.”

He turned away and closed his eyes to indicate that he didn’t want to talk.

She went on, anyway. “How can you tell, if you never try anything? Mother had some headache tablets but I know you wouldn’t take them. It’s just as if you enjoyed having a headache.”

“Oh, for God’s sake.”

“Don’t swear. It’s so childish.”

“All right, all right. You win.”

She brought him a glass of water and two tablets, which he swallowed. She still didn’t go away, so he pretended he was asleep. She pulled the covers up to his shoulders and kissed him on the forehead.

Then quite suddenly she jabbed him viciously in the stomach with her fist. He screamed and she threw sand in his mouth. He doubled up with pain and she thrust a knife between his shoulder blades. And all the time her face never changed expression. It was exquisitely gentle and remote, her voice was a love-whisper: “Oh, Charles, does it hurt? Oh, I’m sorry if it hurts, Charles. We’ll try this instead,” she said and slit his eyelids expertly with her thumbnail.

“Wake up, Mr. Pearson,” Forbes said. “It’s time for lunch.”

“I’ve been dreaming,” Charles said, but he wasn’t sure where the dream had begun.

“You shouldn’t go to sleep in the sun without something over your eyes, sir. It’s hard on them.”

“I don’t think I’ve been asleep. I don’t think so.”

The letter had fallen on the floor. He leaned over and picked it up with an odd feeling of pity and revulsion and love. My wife, he thought. Martha...

Forbes moved the chair out of the sun and brought out Charles’s lunch on a tray. While he ate, Charles thought about Martha. The letter made her seem closer, and more real to him now than she had seemed all the time he was seeing her every minute of the day. Absurd as it was, he couldn’t help thinking that at any moment she might come out to the porch. She would walk right over to him and kiss him on the mouth. Her hair would be down her back, windblown and smelling of the sun. He would be indifferent, even brutal:

“Beat it. Can’t you see I’m trying to eat?”

“Oh, Charles, please! I’m afraid. I’ve been so lonely for you.”

“Well, you’ll have to wait until I finish my lunch.”

Pipe dream, he thought, a nonsensical little pipe dream. But he was breathing faster, and when Forbes came out again, Charles was surprised to find he’d eaten everything on the tray without knowing it.

He settled back in the chair once more. He thought, why couldn’t it happen? Why can’t I make it happen? I know her better now. I understand her. If I can keep hold of my nerves, if I can stop myself imagining things about her...

He saw himself arriving home, very fit and strong again, secure in the knowledge that at last he understood her difficulties and her weaknesses and that his understanding meant he could control her. Her sense of guilt, of insecurity, her self-consciousness, he would help her overcome them all. He would be harsh, if necessary, and tender; he would continue to love her but he would remain independent and detached.

He realized now that Martha was a more simple person than he was, and that he had made an error in imagining into her nature the complexities of his own.

When MacNeil came out again three days later he was amazed to see how well Charles was looking and how vigorously he moved around the cottage.

He told him so, and Charles smiled and said, “It must be the fresh air.”

“It must be,” MacNeil agreed. He was pleased but a little uneasy at the sudden change.

Before he left, he spoke to Forbes alone. “Anything special happen around here?”

“No,” Forbes said. “He’s just been sort of mooning around like this.”

“Mooning?”

“You know — as if he had a lot of nice things to think about and thought about them.”

“Odd,” MacNeil said. It was more than odd, it was downright suspicious that Pearson, who was an incurable worrier, should suddenly forego his worries in favor of a lot of nice things to think about.

“He said something about going home pretty soon,” Forbes said.

“He’s only been here a week.”

“And this morning he phoned his office and had a talk with his secretary. Business details.”

MacNeil thought of Mrs. Pearson’s letter. He would have given his right hand to read it, but he reminded himself sternly that it was none of his business. Besides, Pearson might tell him about it eventually.

When he had gone, Charles went down to the beach and lay on the sand. Martha went with him. She wore two dabs of cloth for a bathing suit and when she lay down beside him, she put her head on his shoulder. They stayed like that without moving or talking until he said, “Come on upstairs.”

“But what will people...?”

“To hell with people. Come on upstairs.”

So they went upstairs.

How simple it was. How simple they were. Children of nature.

I must not kid myself, he thought, becoming suddenly aware of the sand gritting against his shin and the cool wind blowing off the lake. I must not drug myself with fantasies.

But the warning didn’t seem to mean much. The words were such cold, cruel words to use on such charming children of nature.

During the night he awoke, wet with sweat and exhausted. Forbes heard him moving around and came to the door of his bedroom.

“Anything the matter, Mr. Pearson?”

“No,” Charles said. “I’d like a drink of water.”

“Sure.” Forbes went and got the water. He was still dressed. Though it was after two, he hadn’t been to bed yet. He thought it was odd that Charles didn’t notice this and comment on it.

But Charles didn’t appear to be noticing anything. His eyes were bright and empty-looking, and his face had an exalted gentleness about it that reminded Forbes of an uncle of his who had got religion. The uncle had seen the light and was always gazing at it, blind to anything that lay between it and himself.

“Anything else, Mr. Pearson?”

“What?” Charles blinked and his eyes came suddenly into focus again. “Good Lord, you haven’t been to bed. What time is it?”

“Ten after two.”

“Don’t you ever sleep?”

“Not in the country. There’s too much noise.” Forbes hesitated. “No — human noise, I mean, that you can stop or reason with. In the city when you hear a streetcar, that’s all right. You know somebody’s running the streetcar, somebody human. But when I listen to that damn water...”

Charles looked up in surprise. Forbes talked about himself so seldom that it was difficult to consider him as an ordinary human being, with doubts and weaknesses. He seemed always the same — a sturdy, brown-skinned little man, impervious alike to change, weather and emotion. Built like the best watches, Charles thought, shockproof, water-resistant and anti-magnetic.

“...when I listen to that damn water,” Forbes repeated, “it makes me think that I should be believing in something — God or hell or the pixies.” He smiled but there was malice behind his eyes. “Do you, Mr. Pearson?”

“I don’t quite know.”

“It just struck me you did.” He edged toward the door. “Do you want your light out now?”

“All right.”

“Good night, sir.”

“Good night.”

Charles stayed awake in the dark. He tried to think of Martha but her image wouldn’t come so easily this time, and the noise of the lake began to bother him.

I should be believing in something.

Chapter 12

The next afternoon MacNeil called at the Pearson house. He could no longer restrain his curiosity. Every free minute that he had, he found himself speculating about the Pearsons. The sudden improvement in Charles worried him. Extreme and sudden changes were not unusual in anaphylactic personalities, but the cause could generally be traced, and in Pearson’s case there didn’t seem to be a cause. His wife’s letter, perhaps. Or the fresh, pollen-free air. But neither of these was sufficient, MacNeil thought, to account for the almost psychopathic dreaminess in Pearson’s eyes. “He’s been sort of mooning around,” Forbes had said. Yet there was secretiveness, too, in Pearson’s expression. MacNeil tried to remember where he had seen just such a look, and he finally placed it. It was when he’d come across one of his own sons in a dark corner of the tool shed attempting to button his trousers very quickly.

“Good God,” MacNeil said, and pressed the front doorbell long and viciously.

He hadn’t considered this angle recently because he’d become accustomed to thinking of Pearson as a sick man. Yet, the very fact of his sickness might be, MacNeil decided, the basis for his present state. Pearson, as an invalid, had had no relations with his wife for some time. Now that he was getting stronger, he wanted to have. He couldn’t, of course, go to bed with a woman who, he believed, had tried to kill him, so his mind made the necessary adjustment. She hadn’t tried to kill him, she was innocent, he had wronged her. Pearson had, in fact, changed the sets for a new scene.

The door was opened by Mrs. Pearson herself.

They exchanged polite but wary greetings. She told him she was just on her way out to visit a friend, but she’d be very glad if he’d come in.

“I won’t stay a minute,” he said. “I was just passing and thought I’d drop in.”

She went into the sitting room and he followed her. She was jumpy, but he noticed with professional interest that she looked very well. Her eyes were bright and clear and there was a good color in her cheeks, though she seemed to have lost weight in the past week. He wondered whether it was diet or worry over Pearson or the effect of the dress she was wearing. He didn’t ordinarily pay attention to women’s clothes, but he was so used to Mrs. Pearson’s dowdy black suits that the dress struck his eye immediately. It was some soft, honey-colored material with a wide red belt and bands of red around the shoulders.

“How is he?” she asked directly.

“I saw him yesterday,” MacNeil said. “He’s getting along fine. You haven’t anything to worry about.”

“Did he get my letter?”

“I gave it to him.”

“And he didn’t say anything?”

“No.”

She appeared to be relieved at that. “I wrote him a rather hysterical letter. I’m glad he didn’t pay any attention to it. I was feeling depressed that day.”

“You had reason to. If there’s anything I can do...”

“Oh, no. I’m all right now, thanks.”

He smiled. “That’s understatement. You look amazingly well.”

“I do?” Her hand jerked up to her throat.

“A bit nervy, perhaps,” he said. “I could order you a sedative, if you like.”

“I never use drugs. I’m perfectly healthy.”

She looked it, too. There was good sturdy stock in her, MacNeil thought. It would be part of her appeal to the aesthetic Pearson, and perhaps part of the antagonism between them.

“Besides,” she added, “you came here to talk about Charles, didn’t you?”

“So I did.” He was embarrassed by the rebuke. “But you’re important, too, you know. There are usually two people involved in a marriage.”

“Our marriage is no concern of yours.”

“It is, as it affects your husband. In addition to being my patient, he asked my advice.”

“Charles and I are both intelligent people. If there’s anything wrong between us, we’ll work it out for ourselves.”

She stood up. She was half a head taller than he was, and he looked up at her with pleasure. On the purely physical level, she was a magnificent woman. What a shame that she was wasted on Pearson, just as Pearson was, in another sense, wasted on her.

“I hope you do work it out,” he said, ignoring her obvious wish that he leave. “I had a case last week which is similar to Mr. Pearson’s. Perhaps if I told you about it, you’d understand your husband’s difficulties more fully.”

“Tell me then.”

He began to pace up and down the room. “The patient is a woman about your age, an only child, unmarried, lives with her father and mother. One night last week her father brought a young man home to dinner. The girl became violently ill when she drank her coffee. Though she has a long allergy history, she never had any reaction to coffee previous to this. Now she can’t even bear the smell of it. I questioned her about it; she’s intelligent and tries to help. The only explanation she could give was that she took an immediate and intense dislike to the young man her father had brought home. That’s all right as far as it goes. But why the dislike? And if it was immediate, why didn’t she react to something served at the beginning of the meal? Why, in fact, was it necessary to react to anything? Of course, I can theorize. She wanted attention, for one thing. She was attracted by the young man and tried perhaps to attract him in turn. Unsuccessful in using ordinary measures, she resorted to extraordinary ones — she became ill.

“But the explanation may be much more complex than that. The girl’s abnormally sensitive and self-critical. When she failed to interest the young man, her vanity was wounded and she may suddenly have loathed herself for trying. ‘I dislike you’ so frequently means, ‘You make me dislike myself.’ Her reaction to the coffee would then be an expression of self-hate and a mild form of self-destruction. So there are three levels of explanation. The first, she had a simple allergic reaction. The second, she wanted to attract the young man’s attention. At the third and deepest level, she killed herself.”

“It sounds far-fetched to me,” Martha said.

“Any interpretation may be wrong, or far-fetched, as you call it. But the death wish is a fact; it’s very strong in some people.”

“Do you mean Charles?”

“It seems probable, don’t you agree? It’s been nearly two months now since he went into anaphylactic shock after the aspirins. These things don’t usually linger on. Anaphylactic shock is quick; either it kills or it disappears rapidly. There’s nothing organically wrong with your husband. Even his sterility, as far as we’ve been able to ascertain, doesn’t seem to have a physical cause. If we could find one, we’d have an easy and pat explanation for his mental problems — that they are the result of his sterility.

“I don’t know. I’m feeling my way. I’m not a psychoanalyst, which is what he needs. But I’m hoping that I can... not cure his neurosis, which I believe is impossible, but direct it into more constructive channels. Briefly, he’s got to have something to live for and to pin his hopes on.”

He saw her glance toward the door. “I hope I’m not keeping you from your appointment?”

“No, of course not,” she said politely.

“I have to leave now anyway.”

“I’m sorry. I can’t tell you anything about Charles that might help you. As a matter of fact, I really don’t know him very well.”

If there was irony behind the remark, it didn’t show in her face or voice. It appeared to be a simple and unashamed confession of ignorance. MacNeil thought of his own wife and her rather exasperating habit of telling him she could read him like a book. He thought, somewhere between the two extremes...

When he went out, he met Laura coming up the front steps. She was skipping like a little girl but as soon as she saw him she stopped, rearranged her bones and proceeded into the house with awesome dignity.

“What have you done with your hair?” Martha said.

“Like it?”

“Not very much. It’s like a sheepdog’s.”

“Steve says it makes me look like Lauren Bacall.”

“Whoever she may be.”

“Oh, she’s gorg, simply gorg! Of course, Steve was just kidding me.”

“It’s more than possible,” Martha said coldly. “I suppose you’ve forgotten I told you not to go over there and bother him.”

“But he likes me to!”

“That makes no difference. We can’t have people talking.”

“Why should they talk? I mean, he’s an old friend, isn’t he? We’ve known him for ages, it would be plain silly not to...”

“For heaven’s sake, will you shut up!”

She hadn’t intended to say it like that. She knew it would be awkward to antagonize Laura. She continued, more reasonably, “I’m sorry I have to be harsh with you, but you’ve really got to learn a few of the conventions. You sometimes forget that you have certain responsibilities now. You can’t do exactly what you like. You may enjoy talking to Steve, but it just isn’t done.”

“Why not?”

“Because I said so. I hope you’re not going to be difficult.”

“I don’t see why I should be being difficult just because I want to talk to somebody once in a while. Somebody with a little life in them, for a change.”

“That’s not a very nice thing to say.”

“It’s the truth, though. You’re always telling the truth for no other reason than that it is the truth. But you don’t like it when somebody does it to you! A lot of people could, too.”

Martha was disturbed by her vehemence. Laura wasn’t easy to handle; in a quiet way she managed to break most of the rules laid down for her. But this open defiance was a new step. It was as if her contact with Steve had made her realize she was a woman, and as a woman, she had certain rights. She no longer had to submit to being bossed by another woman.

Laura took advantage of the silence. “It’s not that I have a crush on him, or anything, which is probably what you’re thinking. It’s just that he makes me feel good. I mean, even when he’s making cracks, he makes me feel...”

“Steve has quite a success with women, especially young girls. If I see you talking to him over there again, he’ll have to leave immediately!”

“But why?” Laura cried. “Why?”

“I can’t take any chances on your reputation. You’re only...”

“What about your reputation? You talk to him.”

“Only because I had to.”

“In the garage?” Laura said. “I saw you.”

“What of it?”

“I was coming home from class and you were leaving the garage and he was there.”

“Please keep your voice down. I was leaving the garage, certainly. For some extraordinary reason he had started to wash the car. His costume was inappropriate and I had to tell him so.”

“I know why you don’t want me to talk to him,” Laura said. “You’re jealous.”

“You’d better go up to your room before I lose my patience with you.” The girl didn’t move. “Do you understand me, Laura? You’d better go upstairs and think over what you’ve just said. When you realize the complete irresponsibility and stupidity of your remark, you may come down and apologize.”

“If you think you’re going to make me apologize, I may as well do it now.”

“I don’t want you to do it now. Think it over.”

“All right. I’m sorry.” She was on the verge of tears already, fumbling in her skirt pocket for her handkerchief.

“Surely you’re not going to cry, Laura,” Martha said, but the tears and the handkerchief had appeared simultaneously.

She put her arm around Laura’s shoulders. She felt suddenly worn out, as if there were a number of things fighting each other inside her, draining her vitality.

She said in a ragged voice, “What on earth is the matter with you, Laura?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s Steve, I suppose.”

“I... I guess so. I think he... he’s marvelous. I’m the one that’s jealous.”

“I see.”

“I’m perfectly crazy about him. I’ve never felt like this before, never.”

Martha stroked her hair. She was smiling but her eyes were bleak and bitter. It was not Laura who stood crying in the hall, it was herself, Martha. “Oh, you’ll get over it, Laura. Spring is awful when you’re sixteen.”

“But I won’t get over it! This is it. Lots of girls get married when they’re sixteen.”

“You won’t, I hope. In the first place, he hasn’t asked you, has he?”

“No, but I haven’t had a chance yet to get him interested in me. I mean, he hasn’t even seen me in my new blue suit, with my hair up, or anything.”

“And you want me to give you a chance to get him — interested in you?”

“Oh, Martha, would you? I know he likes me, I feel it. No matter what he says about me being just a kid, I know he’s just doing it to protect himself against me. I mean, he’s so cynical and sarcastic, but I feel so safe when he’s around, as if he’s looking after me. Oh, I can’t explain it to anyone!”

“You’re doing very well. Go on.”

“And he does look after me. He even wants me to give up smoking because he’s afraid it will stunt my growth. It’s a little thing like that that makes me realize he cares for me, even if he doesn’t show it.” Laura’s eyes were shining, still moist from the tears. “Oh, Martha, did you ever feel like this about Charley?”

“I was older than you when I met Charles.”

“Well, about anyone, ever?”

“I suppose so; I don’t remember.”

“But you couldn’t ever forget a thing like this,” Laura cried. “You couldn’t in a million years!”

“Yes, you can. You’d be surprised how easy it is to forget, though I suppose you’re too young to believe that.”

“Age hasn’t anything to do with it.”

“I expect you won’t believe anything I say about it at all, for a while anyway. Later on, when you’re calmer, we’ll discuss the matter.”

“We have discussed it. There isn’t anything more to discuss,” Laura said. She took a step back, an expression of shock crossed her face. “You don’t think you’re going to change this with words, do you?”

“Please be...”

“You do think it, I can tell by your face. You think you’re going to talk at me, say things about Steve — about love... As if you knew anything about love! You and Charley... you... you hate each other!”

Martha said, “I’ve taken enough from you today. Go upstairs.”

“And everybody knows it! You can’t even hide it!”

Flushed with triumph she started for the stairs.

“Just a minute,” Martha said. She reached out and grasped Laura by the sleeve of her sweater. The sleeve stretched grotesquely into a wing. “It’s all right, don’t bother, there’s nothing to say.” She let go suddenly, and the wing deflated into a flabby sac of wool.

“You’ve ruined my sweater.”

“No, I haven’t. It will be all right when it’s washed.”

“No, it won’t. You’ve ruined it!” She let out a little sob of rage and ran toward the stairs.

Martha walked slowly back into the drawing room. “I won’t get over it. This is it. Lots of girls get married when they’re sixteen.”

Silly, ordinary words. There were probably very few girls that age who hadn’t said them, and very few older sisters who hadn’t sneered at them. There was nothing unusual about the situation at all; nothing to get excited about. This was just another in the series of crushes that filled out Laura’s emotional existence. The difference was that this time the man was Steve Ferris.

She thought of all the nights she had dreamed that Steve was dead, and had awakened with her breasts taut and aching, and a terrifying gladness surging inside her: “So there. That’s what you get. That’s what you deserve!” But gradually the gladness would dissolve and she was left empty and alone in the darkness.

Sometimes Charles would come padding into the room in his slippers and stand beside her bed looking down at her uncertainly, a little shyly.

“Did you call me, Martha?”

“No.”

“Oh. I guess you were dreaming.”

“Yes.”

“Well. Well, good night, Martha.”

“Good night.”

“If you want anything — call me, won’t you?”

“Yes. Thank you, Charles.”

“Well. Good night, Martha.”

But he could never leave right away, briskly. He lingered at the door, he came back to find a cigarette, he brought her a glass of sherry to soothe her. And all the time she’d lie rigid beneath the covers, waiting, her mind screaming: Please go away. Get out. I know what you want but I can’t, Charles. I can’t. Oh, please, I can’t. It isn’t my fault, anybody’s fault, but I can’t!

“Well, guess I’ll turn in now.”

“Good night, Charles.”

“Sure there’s nothing else I can bring you?”

“No, thank you.”

“I’m sorry you had a bad dream.”

“That’s all right.”

“Good night, Martha.”

“Good night.”

Even then her suspense wasn’t over. He would drift away so slowly, as if he hoped she might change her mind and call him back. It was only when she heard him getting into bed in the next room that her muscles would relax. She would lie trembling, loathing herself and Charles and Steve and wishing all of them dead.

Once Charles left but came back to her room again in five minutes. In the five minutes he had altered. He was no longer shy or ineffectual. His eyes were wild and there were patches of sweat on his pajamas. He strode over and turned on the lamp beside her bed.

“Wake up!” His voice rasped and he breathed as if he’d been running. “Wake up, you bitch.”

She sat up, holding the covers over her.

“Look at me!” he shouted. “Look at me!”

She looked, but said nothing.

“Do I have to go to a whorehouse? Do I have to get down on my knees and beg you?” He was shaking uncontrollably, and he kept looking down at himself as if he were fascinated and repelled by what he saw. “Do I have to go to a whorehouse?”

Without speaking she pushed away the covers and slid off the bed. She went over to him and pressed her body hard against his.

“Charles, Charles,” she said.

He pushed her away, half-heartedly. She clung to him, clasping her arms around his neck and kissing him passionately on the mouth. She felt a rare, impersonal pity for him because he was helpless and it was so easy to help him.

Charles jerked out the lamp plug with his foot and pity dissolved with the light. Wordless, in the dark, Charles had lost his identity and become a hard, insistent body which fitted into her own. She felt her breasts swell and become erect as if all power to think and be alive had concentrated there, leaving her mind free to doze and dream in some warm, soothing fluid that moved gently back and forth. In the fluid were gentle, anonymous faces and elegant languorous bodies weaving like sea grass; flashes of color like green from an eye half-closed, and gold like a fish.

The fluid drained off with a spurt, leaving her senseless for a moment. Then she became aware that her breasts were bruised and aching, her nightgown lay torn on the floor, and she was soaked in sweat, whether her own or Charles’s she didn’t know.

“Charles, wake up. Please wake up, you can sleep in your own bed, Charles.”

But he was already asleep. He lay on his side, naked and somehow helpless again. He had his hand up over his eyes as if to shield himself from a blow, and though he slept, his face had nothing of peace or satisfaction in it. There were bitter little lines around his mouth, as if even in sleep he could not forget that he had had to fight too long and too hard for his victory.

“Charles, won’t you please wake up?”

He didn’t stir, but she fancied that he groaned. The pity returned, and with it an agonizing sense of failure and futility.

No, you do not have to go to a whorehouse, Charles. You can stay home with me. I try to be as professional as possible.

Oh, God. Oh, God. It is four o’clock in the morning.

She got up and covered him, not knowing whether she did it because she didn’t want him to catch cold or because she could no longer stand the sight of him lying there naked.

Four o’clock. She heard the grandfather clock in the hall mourning the hour, preaching the imminence of doom and then stepping down from the pulpit with a final, solemn “A-hem!”

Silence again. She could not even hear Charles’s breathing, and when she put on her bathrobe and went to the window, she could see nothing stirring in the blackness outside. Everything had died quite suddenly. This was her punishment because she was a bad woman: to sit alone and alive in a dead world.

This was her punishment, it was just. She accepted it. She sat there until daylight. She had always been terrified of the dark, but she sat quietly and did not turn on the light.

How long ago was that? she thought. Two years? Three? She couldn’t remember and it was not important, anyway. She and Steve and Charles, they had had their chance and they had, all three of them, made a mess of their lives. The only one who mattered now was Laura.

I must protect Laura, she thought. I can’t let her make the mistakes I did. I’ll have to get rid of Steve.

Chapter 13

Mrs. Shaw was peeling a tangerine. It was not a very important task but she gave it all her attention. Important things were no longer demanded or expected of her, and this state of affairs suited her. It left her free to concentrate on little things; she could waste a whole hour, if she wanted to, on peeling a tangerine, separating the sections with delicate precision, and laying them in a row to count. Ten, of course. There always seemed to be ten sections. So orderly, tangerines were. Except for the pits. The number of pits varied. Still, that didn’t matter much. It would have been nice, though, if they hadn’t, so she could say to someone, “Guess how many pits a tangerine has?”

She ate each section slowly, relishing not the fruit itself, for it was dry and fibrous, but the exquisite sensation of having nothing more to do after it was eaten than to eat another. A wonderful feeling. How Harry would have enjoyed it if he were still living. They had both worked so hard, harder than other ordinary people, because they were both muddlers and they’d had to work that much harder just to get along.

She was never bored alone in her room, though the girls often told her she must be. They were continually urging her to go out for a walk, to see the shops, to take in a movie. They didn’t understand that she was not idle up in her own room. She thought things. She plucked threads from the past, a grey one here, a red there, and wove them together. She had had a full and happy life, but it had never seemed, while she was living it, to have a pattern. Now, of course, she saw that it had. The grey and red threads blended, harmonized. Rather like a tangerine, she thought, always ten sections but an unknown number of pits.

She felt pleased with herself, as if she had, without help from anyone, discovered an important scientific truth. Maybe some day she would say to someone, “Guess what scientific truth I discovered today?”

No, it would probably be better not to say it. It would shock the girls. They would think she was losing her mind. They were both, really, incapable of appreciating the importance of a tangerine, and what was still odder, they were easily shocked. Especially by me, she thought. They made up their minds years ago what I was like, and if they found I wasn’t like that after all, they would be shocked, or perhaps even hurt.

One must be very careful with such decisive, positive people. They were so vulnerable. Like glass, they couldn’t bend.

But it was nice that they were cleverer than Harry or herself. Harry had been clever enough, but he wasted it on little things. Once he’d invented something to stop windows from rattling, a wedge-shaped piece of rubber with a handle. It worked very nicely, but Harry lost interest in it because he said if people could afford to buy something to stop windows from rattling, they could probably afford to have their windows re-fitted. It was one of the few times in his life that Harry had sounded bitter. He had taken all the wedges and thrown them into the trash box. Without them, the windows rattled a great deal, but she was too wise to bring the subject up. They rattled for ten years and she became quite used to the sound eventually.

She finished the last section of fruit and scooped up all the pits in her hand. Twenty-one. She was reluctant to throw them away, recognizing dimly that in some way these pits were alive and capable of growth. So of course they wouldn’t like to be thrown away. In the end, she removed, from its red velvet box, the diamond clip Martha had given her and put the pits in it instead. Then she placed the box carefully in one of her bureau drawers. If there had been a pen handy, she might have labeled the box, “Pits. The day I discovered number of sections in tangerines. June 10.”

But the label wasn’t necessary. She wouldn’t forget. The bureau was cluttered with boxes, odds and ends of ribbon and colored bits of wool, two robins’ eggs (hardboiled, as a preservative), pressed flowers and waxed maple leaves, and empty match folders. Each of these meant something to her, each was a patch of brightness, a thread of color from her life. She didn’t want to cast any of them aside; she couldn’t see the necessity for it. It was such a big house, there was so much room, why should it not be used?

“But it’s so untidy,” Martha had said.

Her mother hadn’t replied because the only reply she could think of was the truth, that untidiness didn’t bother her, she rather enjoyed it.

She closed the bureau drawer and moved toward her lounge. She was already settled on it before she remembered that she hadn’t put the diamond clip away. She should, of course, get up and do it right away. But she felt no interest in it. The clip was hers, Martha had given it to her, but it didn’t belong to her in the sense that the tangerine pits did. It even pleased her to see it lying there neglected on the table, while the pits lay snugly in the red velvet box.

But imagine trying to explain that to Martha! Dear me. Imagine, for that matter, trying to make Martha understand that she didn’t want expensive gifts from her, that she felt guilty about accepting them because the money was not Martha’s, but Charles’s.

She remembered the day Martha had given her the pearl earrings. She’d never owned or wanted to own earrings, but Martha insisted that she wear them down to dinner to show Charles, and to save trouble, she did.

She didn’t wait for Charles to notice them. She said at once, “Well, Charley, how do you like the earrings you just gave me?”

Charles smiled. “Fine. I have good taste, haven’t I?”

She was reassured by his smile. It was a little ironic but friendly, too, as if he couldn’t help the irony — that was for the whole world — but the friendliness was for her alone.

He caught her eye now and then throughout the evening. He seemed to know that the earrings pinched like the devil and gave her a headache. He always knew things like that. At first, she couldn’t understand how he did it but when she became better acquainted with him she realized that it was because he was extraordinarily sensitive. He was continually putting himself in someone else’s place. He understood other people’s triumphs and weaknesses and humiliations because they were his, too. He knew how she felt about the earrings because he knew how he, himself, would have felt under the circumstances.

Yes, Charles was a good man. It was easy to see why so many people were devoted to him. Yet it was easy, too, to see Martha’s side of the problem. Charles’s introspections bewildered her, his charm of manner made her feel graceless and awkward. She was impatient with his poor health and annoyed by his humor, because she believed that it was directed — and it usually was — against her.

There was a knock on the door. Mrs. Shaw slid off the couch with desperate agility, grabbed the diamond clip and said, “Come in.”

When Martha entered she was pleasantly surprised to find her mother taking an interest in things again, actually trying on the clip in front of the mirror.

“Do you really like it?” Martha said.

“It’s beautiful,” her mother replied, with truth.

“I’ll keep it for you in my wall safe. Where’s the box?”

“I thought we could wrap it in a silk handkerchief instead. I read somewhere that that was better.”

“Did you?”

“In a magazine.” Oh, dear me, she thought, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.

She hoped that Martha wouldn’t pursue the subject, and Martha, for a change, didn’t.

She said instead, “Do we know anyone with young men in the family?”

“Young men?”

“Besides the Randolphs, I mean. The Randolph boy has buck teeth. Besides, he’s only fifteen. Laura wouldn’t be interested. It’s time she met some young men.”

“She does, doesn’t she? At school and places like that?”

“That’s different. We would give a party for her here if we knew whom to invite.”

“A party?”

“Don’t look so astonished. Other people give parties. There’s room in the drawing room for a small orchestra.”

“But...” Mrs. Shaw said, and stopped right there. No use saying “But” to Martha. If she decided on a party, a party was inevitable. It was also inevitable that in some way or other the party would go wrong. Martha would bustle around for days, shopping, cleaning, harrying the servants, coaxing the flowers, and then at the last minute, something essential would be missing.

“It would do Laura good,” Martha said. “It would take her mind off — things.”

“What things?”

“She’s been studying too hard.”

“Oh,” Mrs. Shaw said, surprised that Martha was taking the trouble to lie to her. It must be serious, she thought. What’s Laura been doing? Smoking on the sly? Drinking? Falling in love? That must be it, or Martha wouldn’t have talked about “young men.”

“A party would be nice,” she said.

“I think so, too. It’s such an ideal time to have it, when Charles is away. The noise might bother him.”

“I’m sure it would,” said Mrs. Shaw, knowing perfectly well that Charles didn’t mind noise.

“We could have Hunter’s do the catering. And what’s the name of those people who engrave invitations? Franklin’s, I think. I’ll have to ask Brown about orchestras.”

“Why don’t you ask Laura? She’d know more than Brown would.”

“I suppose so.”

Laura was, however, the last one in the house to hear about the party. Her mother told her when she went in to say good night.

“Martha’s giving you a party.”

Laura was at the vanity doing her hair up in pin curls. She held a bobby pin clenched between her teeth and it made her voice sound tight.

“Why?”

“She thought you’d like one. She’s going to a lot of trouble — an orchestra and engraved invitations...”

“Engraved invitations?” Laura turned violently. “I’d sooner die!”

“Well, my goodness!”

“I’d sooner plunge a knife into my heart! Is she trying to make a fool of me? That kind of party — my friends would howl. It’s a goon trap.”

“Oh.”

“When you’re an absolute goon, when you’re utterly, completely drippish, that’s the kind of party your family has to give for you because it’s the only way you’ll ever get anybody to dance with you. And I’m not a goon, I’m not!”

She turned back to the mirror to seek confirmation. Her image was not reassuring. Her hair was half up and half down, and the special anti-wrinkle cream she had spread around her eyes to stave off the onslaughts of old age was oozing down her cheeks like tears of oil.

She spoke again, more uncertainly. “I mean, when I’m all fixed up I’m not. And my new blue suit on.”

“My goodness, of course you’re not a goon.”

“She doesn’t have to catch any boys for me! Lots of boys think I’m a — pretty solid dish.”

“I’m sure they do.”

“Not that I’m interested in boys. They’re too young for me. I was only proving a point.” She grabbed a strand of hair and twisted it viciously into a pin curl. “What’s more, Charley said I’m going to be just as good-looking as she is when I get older.”

“What have you got on your face, dear?”

“Stuff. For my crow’s feet. Guaranteed.” She leaned forward and somberly examined in the mirror the skin around her eyes where, according to the manufacturers of the cream, she might reasonably expect to find the first hideous signs of old age.

“Laura?”

“What?”

“It’s just that Martha doesn’t understand about — goon-traps. I didn’t myself, I never even heard about them before. But I see now what you mean. And if you explain it to Martha, I’m sure she’ll see, too.”

“Oh, will she? Maybe she won’t want to. Maybe there’s nothing she’d like better than to make me out a goon because she’s jealous.”

“Martha has no reason to be jealous of you.”

“Oh, hasn’t she?” Laura began picking up the rest of the bobby pins, one by one. She looked sober and self-contained again. “Well, let her give the party, if she wants to. But I won’t come. I just won’t be here, that’s all.” She would run away. Driven from her home by her jealous sister, she would flee into Steve’s arms where she would find peace. She wished she had had a few more chances to entice Steve, in order to make her reception more certain. Still, it couldn’t be helped. She might never get another excuse for fleeing, so flee she must. It was too bad she had to leave before her $2.95 dimple-making machine, guaranteed, arrived from New York. But you can’t have everything.

“Now wait, Laura,” her mother said.

“I’m going to bed.”

“Well, what kind of party would you like? Martha tries her best, but she can’t be expected to read minds, you know.”

“It’s damn lucky she can’t.”

“Don’t swear, dear. What is your idea of a party?”

“Well,” Laura hesitated. “Just a coke sesh. You know, the gang coming in and some new records and maybe hot dogs to eat.”

“Then that’s the way you’ll have it.”

“Honestly? And no chaperones? Please, no chaperones?”

“No chaperones,” Mrs. Shaw said with a conviction she did not feel.

“When? When can I have it?”

“Any time. Tomorrow night, if you like.”

The fleeing would have to be postponed, which was perhaps just as well. It would give her time to try her new suit on Steve, and maybe dimples, too, if the machine arrived tomorrow.

She dashed across the room and kissed her mother’s cheek. “Honestly, you’re quite human!”

“I’ve always taken that for granted,” Mrs. Shaw said, but she was very pleased. She realized that Laura and her friends used old words in a new way, and to be called “human” was a high compliment. “Now go to bed. I’ll see Martha right away.”

“Promise?”

“Cross my heart.”

“Will you be firm, really firm?”

“I’ll be extremely firm.”

“You’re terrif,” Laura said, and went serenely off to bed.

Her mother found Martha downstairs in the drawing room. All the lamps in the room were lit, and Martha was standing off in one corner, studying each piece of furniture, each light, like a stage manager.

Mrs. Shaw hesitated in the doorway. Some of her boldness had already deserted her. It was not that she was afraid of Martha but that she felt sorry for her. For Martha was planning, there was no doubt of it. She was planning not merely the details of the party itself, but who should be there and where each of them would sit, and what questions would be asked and what answers given. And in her plans, everything was perfect. The girls were well-dressed and pretty, with Laura the prettiest, of course; the boys were handsome and attentive. Everyone was gay and laughing, with Laura the gayest, the best dancer, wearing the most exquisite dress and capturing the best-looking boy. Everything was perfect, in Martha’s plans.

Her mother watched her with pity. Only someone who was bitterly unhappy and dissatisfied could spend all her time planning perfection. If she loved Charley, Mrs. Shaw thought, if she had a life of her own...

“I was just wondering,” Martha said abruptly, “about Laura’s dress. It should have a high neckline. Her collarbones stick out too much.”

She had to tell her then. She explained, very soberly, about the hot dogs, the goon-traps, the new dance records and no chaperones.

Martha didn’t argue. “Why, of course. If that’s what Laura wants.” She didn’t even appear surprised, as if she’d known all along that her plans would never work out. “It’s getting late, isn’t it?” she said.

“Nearly eleven.”

“I think I’ll go to bed.” She turned out the lamps, one by one. Her voice came again through the darkness.

“I wonder how many hot dogs.”

Chapter 14

He saw Laura walking up the driveway with her arms full of parcels and tried to duck into the garage before she saw him. But he was too late.

“Hi!” she yelled.

“Hi, Squirt.”

She took the words as encouragement and quickened her step. He waited for her, uneasy. Laura was all right, but he never knew what to expect of her. She was at the crazy age where imagination overrode fact. Everything was subjective, words, people, even the weather. So if he called her “Squirt,” she might take it as a compliment, and if he’d said “Beautiful” she might just as easily think he was being ironic.

“Why aren’t you at school?” he said.

“Martha said I could skip my classes on account of the party tonight.” She lowered her eyes and strummed the string of one of the parcels. “I’d like you to come.”

“That’s very nice of you, but I’m afraid your sister wouldn’t approve. Anyway, I’m having company.”

“Who?”

He laughed. “None of your business, Squirt. I didn’t ask you who was coming to your party, did I?”

“That’s different. You know I’m not interested in just boys.”

“You better run along.”

One of the parcels fell from her arm. Instead of picking it up, she gave it a little kick with her foot.

“Who’s the company?” she said.

He grinned at her without answering.

“Is she pretty?”

“Yeah.”

“Blonde or what?”

“What.” He picked up the parcel and handed it to her.

“I don’t believe it,” she said, and marched away to the house.

He didn’t think Beatrice could be described as “pretty,” but she was at least “company.”

When she arrived, a little after eight, she was looking very attractive. She had on a tight blue wool dress and her hair was piled up on her head. It made her look harder and more sophisticated than she was.

“Hello.”

“Hello, Bea.”

He held the door open for her and she walked past him, looking around the apartment with polite curiosity.

“It’s nice. No wonder you want to stay.” She stripped off her gloves and packed them neatly into her handbag. “Mother couldn’t come. She has a headache.”

“That’s too bad.”

“At least, that’s her story. Mother always manages to get a headache when she sees a chance of getting me alone with some unsuspecting male.”

She smiled, not in the least self-consciously, but frankly, inviting him to smile with her.

He did. “The description hardly applies to me. I’m very suspecting.”

“Besides, we got that part of it settled the first night, didn’t we?”

“Did we?”

“I hope it’s all right if I left my car in the driveway. There were a lot of others parked there.” She walked over to the window rapidly as if she could hardly wait to see the other cars again. “Is Mrs. Pearson giving a party?”

“No. It’s the kid sister. Laura.” He followed her to the window, wishing that she were gone and that he had the courage never to see her again. It was hopeless for two people to be together, when one of them wanted desperately what the other couldn’t give. No matter how smooth the surface talk, underneath it you could hear the whisperings of frustration, humiliation and even despair. Perhaps Beatrice felt like that right now, while she talked coolly about cars and watched the lighted doorway of the big house with bright benign eyes.

“I didn’t know Mrs. Pearson had a sister,” she said. “How old is she?”

“Fifteen, sixteen. You can tell by the kind of cars the kids came in. Half of them are hot rods, old jalopies hopped up to go like hell.”

She seemed to be thinking that over.

“Sixteen,” she said at last. “That’s very young.” She turned suddenly and looked at him, not directly into his face the way ordinary people looked at other people. He realized with a start that she was staring right at his mouth, straight into it, feeling every crease of his lips and pore of his tongue with her eyeballs. His mouth jerked at the corners and went stiff. It disowned him; he wasn’t the boss anymore; it was some separate and complete thing that Beatrice had claimed for her own and might even take home with her to perfume and fondle in the dark.

“Sixteen,” she said. “You know what I’d do if I were sixteen again, Steve?”

“Would you like a drink?”

“Yes, in a minute. Don’t you want to hear what I’d do if I were sixteen?”

“Yeah, sure. I can listen and drink at the same time, though.”

It was only a few steps to the kitchen, but when he got there he was breathing as if he’d been running away from something. He took down a bottle of Scotch from the cupboard, handling it with fear and with hope, as if his escape wasn’t complete yet, but the Scotch might help him keep on running.

She didn’t stop talking. Her voice sounded rather dreamy, and she didn’t raise it to compete with the clink of glasses and the rattle of ice cubes. She didn’t seem to care whether he heard her or not.

He made a great deal of noise with the ice trays so he wouldn’t have to listen, but every word came through clear as a bell. She might as well have been standing beside him whispering in his ear.

“I’d try to be beautiful,” she said. “I mean I’d really try. I’d work at it. I guess that sounds silly to you, that anyone could be beautiful by working at it. Especially me. Or that anyone would want to do it enough to make a full-time job of it. But that’s because you don’t know what it does to a woman, not to be pretty. It’s queer how early the realization comes to you, when you’re just a baby, really, when people say, ‘She’s a bright little thing,’ instead of ‘Isn’t she cute?’ And once you know it, the thing starts growing inside you like an ulcer, and you have to give it a special diet so it won’t ache. The build-up, soothing-syrup diet. Every compliment, every glance, every whistle, you mull over and cherish and spread it around like butter, and pass it out wholesale to your friends or anybody who’ll listen.”

“I can’t hear you,” he shouted. “Would you mind speaking a little louder?” He jerked the top off the soda bottle viciously. Would you mind, Beatrice, going home or falling out of a window or stepping neatly in front of a ten-ton truck?

“Of course I could never have been pretty, I know that. But there were little things that would have helped. Two of my teeth are crooked. Did you ever notice?”

“No.”

“I could have had them straightened. Perhaps I could even have changed my nose, and learned things — how to be... to be that way. You know the way I mean. I don’t seem to be like that at all. If I were, you wouldn’t look at me the way you do, as if you wished I’d go away or I’d never been born.”

The drinks were ready. He stood, holding them and staring at the cupboard door. There was nothing he could say to Beatrice that would make her feel any better, nor anything Beatrice could say that would change him. So there it was. Hopeless. It was also pretty damn silly. He began to laugh, and in a couple of seconds she appeared in the doorway.

She was quite composed. “Need any help?”

“No, thanks.”

He handed her her drink. She took it, smiling. He noticed for the first time that her two front lower teeth overlapped a little.

“They’re not very crooked,” he said. “Anyway, that’s not the kind of thing that matters.”

“I guess not.” She sipped her drink. A couple of drops fell on her dress but she didn’t pay any attention. “Steve.”

“Yeah.”

“You’re a soft man, aren’t you?”

“Whatever that means.”

“Well, you didn’t want me to come here tonight but you couldn’t say no.”

He looked angry. “Why in Christ’s name couldn’t I say no?”

“Because that’s the way you are. I know how you feel about me, Steve. I embarrass you. I even think that some of the time you hate me. No, don’t interrupt — it’s really perfectly natural that you should.”

A car rattled down the driveway, with the engine wide open and the horn blowing. They both listened, as if it were very important.

“All right,” he said finally. “Where were we? I hate you, which is really perfectly natural. Go on.”

“It happened to me once, too, so I know. There was a man who wanted to marry me. He wasn’t very attractive but he was clever and dependable and steady, just the kind of man I should have married. The point is I couldn’t stand having him around. Every time I looked at him I hated him because he wasn’t you.”

“And?”

“And I’m not Martha.”

“That’s a nice, simple explanation from a nice, simple girl. Now, how would you like to forget the whole thing? Where are your gloves?”

She was puzzled. “In my handbag. Why?”

“You go and put them on and get your coat and go outside.”

“But why?”

“Then you can knock on the door and I’ll let you in and we’ll start all over again. We’ll spend a nice, quiet, civilized evening getting plastered. No explanations, no character-probing, and no words over four letters. Okay?”

“I’ve never been plastered,” she said thoughtfully. “It might be interesting.”

“Yeah, it might.” Too interesting, he thought. Women like Beatrice couldn’t drink very well. No matter how much liquor they had, they never wanted to go home or pass out like gentlemen; they stuck around and got maudlin or weepy and told tiresome stories about their childhood. Oh, well.

He reached for her glass. Someone was walking along the driveway and he listened, the way he always did, to figure out who it was, half-hoping it was someone coming to see him.

A swift, heavy step. Brown, maybe. Maybe Brown was getting thirsty again.

“Are you expecting someone?” Beatrice said.

He laughed to cover up his annoyance. “No, I wasn’t. I’ve been away for so long, there isn’t anyone to expect.”

The doorbell rang. So it wasn’t Brown. Brown just knocked a couple of times and walked in.

“Aren’t you going to answer it?” Beatrice said, a trifle acidly.

“Sure. Sure, I am.”

“If it’s anything personal, I can always hide behind the door and put my fingers in my ears.”

The bell rang again. Avoiding Beatrice’s eyes, he went out and crossed the living room. He heard Beatrice shut the kitchen door very softly behind him. The gesture irritated him. It made him feel furtive, as if he were dodging the police instead of merely having a drink with his own cousin.

He opened the front door. Martha was standing there. She had on a long black dress with sequins on it and a little black sequined hat. As if to counteract the sequins, she’d put on her glasses.

“Anything I can do for you, Mrs. Pearson?” he said.

“You can send Laura back to her party.”

“I’d be glad to, if I could.”

“People are beginning to wonder where she is.”

“You, of course, knew right away.”

She was furious, but she was controlling herself pretty well. She even attempted an appeal to his better nature. “She’s only sixteen, you know.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“I think I’ll take her back with me right now.”

“By all means.”

Neither of them moved. The room was silent.

Suddenly she raised her voice. “Laura! You’re to come back to the house with me right now, do you hear?”

His throat felt tight with anger. “You’re pretty sure she’s here, naturally. Naturally you’re always sure of everything, Mrs. Pearson.”

“She’s here. I saw her.” She didn’t get shrill, as he expected. She just quivered, her whole body quivered, so that every sequin was winking at him like little wise eyes. “You’re so shameless and stupid, you haven’t even sense enough to pull down the blinds.”

“Maybe that’s because I don’t expect people to be outside peering in and minding my business for me.”

“Laura’s my business.”

She brushed past him. Her eyes swept the room.

“Try the second drawer on the left in the bureau,” he said. “It was a tight fit but I managed to squeeze her in.” His mouth was dry and dusty, as if he’d been eating ashes. “Of course, she’s only sixteen, you know. Some of these sixteen-year-olds are very supple.”

“Laura!”

She spotted the closed door of the kitchen and headed for it. He darted across the room and reached the door first.

“Allow me,” he said, and opened the door.

Beatrice was drying the glasses with a dish towel. The Scotch and the ice trays had been put away and the sink wiped off.

“Hello, Martha,” Beatrice said soberly.

Martha drew in her breath. “Hello — Beatrice.”

“I haven’t seen you for ages.”

“No.”

Beatrice folded the dish towel carefully and put it on the rack. “I thought I’d better clean up before I left, Steve. I hate a messy kitchen, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” Steve said.

“Well, I guess I’ll run along. I promised Mother I’d just stop long enough to say hello and see how you were. I’ll tell her you’re just — the same as usual.”

“Do that.”

“Thanks for the drink. And don’t bother coming to the door with me.”

“I’ll take you down to your car,” he said.

“No, please.”

He followed her into the living room and picked up her coat, while she put on her gloves.

“Ready?”

“Don’t come with me,” she said and turned abruptly. She was gone before he realized it.

He heard the clatter of her heels on the steps, then the crunch of pebbles on the driveway and the impatient snarl of an engine.

Martha came slowly out of the kitchen. She didn’t appear embarrassed or disturbed. She was pale, that was all.

She said, “I suppose you expect me to apologize.”

“That’s the last thing in the world I expect.”

“It was a natural enough mistake. Knowing you, and realizing how easily Laura can be taken in, I thought the woman I saw was Laura.”

“Maybe you ought to get new glasses.” He began walking toward her. “Maybe I ought to smash those for you to make absolutely sure you get yourself some new glasses.”

He reached out and jerked the glasses off her face. The frame caught in her hair and he had to give a sharp pull, but she didn’t change expression.

She said, “My, how strong you are!”

He crunched the glasses in his hand. A piece of broken lens dug into his hand. The pain and the wetness of blood made him feel better.

“Don’t,” she said. “Steve, don’t!”

He unclasped his hand and the shattered glasses fell on the floor. The blood began to slide along his fingers and drip off the tips.

“That’s what I’d like to do to you,” he said. “Take you in my hands and squeeze you until you squeak like a raw oyster. I’d like to do that to you because you just made a mistake about my character, if you can call it that.” He held his hand up and watched the blood fall off the ends of his fingers. “Let’s get it straight now. When I want a woman, I don’t look around for a pair of bobby socks. I’m quite a big boy now. I need quite a big girl. Like you.”

He wanted to strangle her and make love to her and sit down and bawl like a kid and put a bandage on his hand and shoot himself.

He sat down, holding his head with his good hand.

“Steve.”

“You better go home.”

“You’re bleeding. You might have cut an artery.”

That one was too silly to answer, so he just closed his eyes and waited for her to go home.

“Charles bit my hand once,” she said. “You can still see the marks.”

He said nothing.

“Do you want to?”

“No, thank you.”

He heard the swish of her dress against the floor as she walked toward him. He opened his eyes. She stood in front of him, holding out her hand with the palm up.

“See?”

He saw the little scars. “It must have hurt.”

“Not awfully.”

“Did I — hurt your head?”

“No.”

“I love you.”

“Yes, I know.”

He couldn’t see her face, only her hand that looked so small and sad with the little scars on it. He got up suddenly and walked away from her.

“Do you want to hear about how I love you?” he said.

“Yes.”

“It’s not a nice kind of love. I don’t want to marry you or even live with you. I don’t want to have children by you.”

She didn’t make a sound, and he had to turn around and look at her to see why not, or just to look at her, he didn’t know which.

She had sat down in a chair and was watching him gravely, not acting injured or surprised, the way another woman might.

He said deliberately, “I don’t want to look after you when you’re sick or see you first thing in the morning or...”

He went back to her and knelt down and put his head against her knees.

“I’m lying,” he said.

“Yes.”

“You’ve been lying, too.”

“Yes.”

Her mouth moved against his cheek. He felt her breasts against him, the nipples erect and straining against her dress as if they had lives and longings of their own and must be considered.

Let us consider your breasts, my love, my beloved.

“You are my beloved,” he said. “My beloved.”

He felt a great power rising within him, a power without violence, a strength that disdained challenge. Her mouth was no mouth to be bruised, it was a flower that breathed and obeyed his will. It opened for his tongue and closed softly over the lobe of his ear.

“Shall I turn off the light?” she said.

“No. No, I will.” He switched the lamp and went back to her. He stood behind the chair where she was sitting and very gently he took off her hat and began to pull the pins out of her hair while she sat with her hands over her breasts as if they ached.

Her hair loosened and slid over his wrists like silk.

Slowly. He had waited a long time, and there was no need to hurry now. He didn’t have to pull up her skirts or rip off her clothes. He could afford to wait.

“Come here,” she said, in a stifled voice. “Come here, Steve.”

She stood up and he walked around the chair and stood up against her. He was just a little taller than she was and they exactly fitted.

“Steve...”

In the dizzy dark, the room rose, floated, held down only by threads of whispers, words muffled against the curves and hollows of bare flesh. He spoke not to her, but to her breasts and her hips and her belly. She could listen if she wanted to, but these were what he spoke to. She listened, memorizing his shoulders with her mouth.

“You’re my wife. Aren’t you? Aren’t you my wife?”

“I’ve never loved anyone else, anyone else at all.”

They moved together, in time to music only they could hear.

No need, no need to hurry...

He let out a sound like a groan of anguish, a crow of triumph.

They lay together on the bed.

“Did you?” he said.

She stretched dreamily like a cat. “Yes.”

My beloved, my wife... My wife and I exactly fit...

He smiled idiotically up at the ceiling and went to sleep.

When he woke up he was sweating. She had piled some blankets on top of him and put a pillow under his head. His clothes were hung neatly over the back of a chair and his shoes were side by side with his socks draped over the toes. But she was gone.

He got up and turned on the light, his eyes searching the room for a trace of her. But there wasn’t even a hairpin or a sequin from her dress or a fragment of her glasses.

He looked down at his hand and saw that she’d even washed off the caked blood. He had a sudden desperate sense of loss and loneliness. She should have left something of herself, something...

It was after two o’clock but he put on his clothes and went outside.

The party was over; the cars gone; the house dark.

Chapter 15

It went on like that for a week. He got up late in the mornings and spent the rest of the day sitting around waiting until it was dark enough for her to come. He had no ambition and no desire to do anything, to start his book, or to contact some of his old friends or even to take a walk. He read a little, but usually he sat thinking about Martha, staring out between the slats of the Venetian blinds until his eyes went out of focus. Even when he looked away at something in the room, the slats remained before his eyes, like prison bars going the wrong way.

His thoughts at the beginning of the day were pleasant: she was beautiful, she belonged to him, every single pore of her skin belonged to him, she was his wife.

If, at that point, he could have gone over and talked to her or she could have come to him, he might never have reached the second stage of thinking. It was then that the question marks came to life in his head, sharp and cruel as fishhooks: What about you and Charles, my dear? How often did you go to bed with him? Sleep with him afterwards? You have a double bed, of course? Of course. Oversize, custom-built, Beautyrest mattress and guaranteed silent springs.

Bloody little fishhooks.

Was he any good in bed? Did you have the light off or on? Were you naked or did you have to tickle him a little with a fancy nightgown and some phony perfume? I like the way you smell without perfume. Your sweat is clean and sweet as a baby’s. Does Charles ever say things like that to you? What does he say? Tell me what he says, tell me all about Charles. Five years is a long time with a man. You can make a hell of a lot of love in five years, can’t you? Did you?

“No, I didn’t.” She answered that one calmly. “We didn’t get along that way very well.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t love him, I guess.”

“I read once that some women close their eyes and think about some other man. Did you think about me?”

“No. I didn’t think about anything at all.”

She didn’t seem to resent his questions or try to get out of answering them. She was patient; she didn’t point out to him how unreasonable it was for him to be wildly jealous, she didn’t once remind him that he had walked out on her.

Nor did she ask any questions. That struck him as funny.

“Aren’t you interested?” he said. “I might have had a couple of dozen women. Don’t you want to hear about them?”

“No. It would only make me feel bad.”

“I want you to feel bad.”

She smiled, rather sadly. “You’ll always have some woman crazy about you. I mustn’t let it bother me.”

Her smile and her calmness enraged him. “Goddamn it, I’ll make it bother you.” He put his hands on her throat. It was warm and vulnerable, and the pulse beat against his thumbs like tiny hearts.

His hands dropped abruptly. “I used to have a baby duck when I was a kid,” he said. “Stuffed, of course. It always used to bother me.” He gave a little laugh. “Your neck reminded me of it, it’s so soft.”

It was like that every day. He’d start out feeling good about her, and then the questions would start and the resentment and finally the violence that ended in love-making. Confused, unreal, unreasonable days, with Charles in the background, a silent, motionless shadow, but one that might start moving toward them at any hour. She said she’d heard nothing from him, she didn’t know when he was coming back or what he would do when he came back.

Toward the end of the week he went over to the house for lunch. They all acted surprised and pleased to see him.

“Welcome, stranger,” Lily said.

“What you been living on?” Mrs. Putnam said. “Air?”

“I’ve been going out for meals,” he lied.

The two women believed him. “My cooking’s not good enough for you, eh?” Mrs. Putnam said.

“Too good. I might get fat.”

Yes, both the women were innocent, he didn’t have to worry about them. It was Brown who had to be convinced.

“You don’t look so good,” Brown said. “You look pooped out.”

“I am.” Let Brown make something of that if he liked.

Brown liked. “Maybe you’ve been staying up too late nights, eh? I see your light on sometimes three, four o’clock in the morning.”

“I have insomnia. I get up and read now and then.”

“I used to have that kind of insomnia myself,” Brown said solemnly. “It hasn’t bothered me for quite a few years.”

Steve raised his eyebrows politely. “Is that so?”

“Not since I took up philosophy, in fact. Philosophy is a substitute for a number of things.”

“I’ll have to try it.”

“Brown’s an old windbag,” Mrs. Putnam stated. “He don’t know anything about philosophy. He just makes things up as he goes along.”

“Women don’t understand these matters,” Brown said with a wink at Steve.

“Oh, don’t we?”

“Women are not stupid, you understand. No, I’d be the last man on earth to claim that women are stupid. They are simply reluctant to learn.”

Mrs. Putnam’s feelings were hurt. She didn’t offer anyone a second helping and she sipped her tea in silence as thick as dough.

Steve changed the subject. “Has anyone heard when Mr. Pearson’s coming back?”

“Not exactly,” Brown said, with a wouldn’t-you-like-to-know grin. “I just heard he was getting along fine, the country air is doing him good.”

“It’s getting away from her that’s doing him the good,” Lily said.

“Don’t gossip,” Mrs. Putnam warned her.

“That isn’t gossip, it’s...”

“It is so. It’s biting the hand that feeds you.”

“She don’t feed me, he does.”

Steve lit a cigarette, feeling suddenly a little weak and sick. He wasn’t used to full meals anymore, that was it. Or maybe it was the reference to Martha and the malice in Lily’s voice and the talk about biting hands. Charles had bitten Martha’s hand, but no one mentioned that. Whatever was said was in Charles’s favor. He had no faults, he was the god of the backstairs.

“Nobody seems to like Mrs. Pearson very much,” Steve said.

The women exchanged glances.

“I do,” Brown said unexpectedly. “I didn’t used to but I do now. She’s got a lot of guts. I’m not saying anything against Mr. Pearson; he’s a good guy. But...” He looked sharply at Lily, defying her to interrupt. “...he’s not easy to live with. For the people who work for him, sure. But not for a wife.”

He felt intensely grateful to Brown for defending her. He wanted to shake hands with him and congratulate him on his perspicacity and have him over for a drink.

“I admit she’s improved,” Mrs. Putnam said. “The trouble is, she hasn’t got enough to do. She should have a couple of kids or some dogs.”

“Or a lover,” Brown said.

Mrs. Putnam told him he had a dirty, dirty mind and there wasn’t a moral bone in his body, and ten chances to one, he was a Communist, not a philosopher at all, just plain Communist.

In the midst of the argument that followed, Steve got up and went outside.

The air was still, the noon sun hot on his face. He looked up at it, squinting, a little surprised to find that it was still there though he hadn’t noticed it for a long time. He hadn’t been noticing anything, the day of the week or the weather, but now everything struck him at once. It was Saturday, and the end of spring. The smell of moist earth and lilacs hung in the air like wisps of the past and hints of the future.

I’ll get Martha, he thought. We’ll go for a walk in the woods and lie in the sun and I’ll pick some flowers for her hair. Trilliums or violets.

No, it’s too late for trilliums or violets.

Mushrooms, then. We can gather mushrooms and bring them home and I’ll cook them for her.

You’d both croak, buddy. You don’t know a mushroom from a toadstool.

We can lie in the sun, anyway.

If it doesn’t rain.

I’ll protect her from the rain. I’ll give her my coat and my shirt, and I’ll...

Give her your pants, too.

He began to move slowly toward the garage. It was no use, no use trying to pretend they were an ordinary couple in love, or that they could do ordinary things like lie in the sun. The sun had nothing to do with them. Their lying was done at night. They met like thieves in the dark, they talked in whispers like murderers, they fled before the dawn like ghosts.

The smell of lilacs soured, the budding trees were an insult. Deliberately, with every step he took, he dug his heels into the ground, leaving behind him the scars of his feet, a trail of bruised grass.

As soon as she came that night, he told her about the trilliums, laughing to show her how funny it was.

“Trilliums,” he said. “Can you beat it?”

She put her head against his shoulder so that every time she blinked, her eyelashes brushed his neck like feathers.

“I like flowers,” she said seriously. “The woods, too.”

“I don’t think you have a sense of humor, my darling.”

“I haven’t.” He felt her frown against his neck. “I would like to have. Charles always thought I was funny when I didn’t think I was.”

“Good old Charles. I haven’t thought of him for all of three minutes, so you have to bring him up.”

“I’m sorry.”

“That’s all right.” He waved a greeting into the air. “Why, hello, Charley! Come on in. Glad to have you with us. Sit right here on my lap.”

She raised her head so she could look into his face.

“Now was that funny?” she asked. “I mean it. Was it?”

“Moderately.”

“Oh.”

“Not my best effort, though. I do better in blackface.”

“You sound very bitter tonight,” she said. “Is anything the matter?”

“What a question!”

“I’d like to know. I thought you were... I want you to be as happy as I am.”

“Are you happy?”

“Very.”

“You don’t mind being furtive, skulking around in the dark to meet me?”

“I’m not furtive,” she said clearly. “I don’t feel that way.”

“What excuses do you give your mother or Laura for going out every night?”

“None. I just walk out.”

“Leave them wondering.”

“If they want to wonder, I can’t stop them.”

“You can’t stop Brown, either.”

She smiled slightly. “Oh, I haven’t tried to fool Brown. I knew I couldn’t. He may write and tell Charles, of course, but I don’t think he will. I think in his queer way Brown wants everybody to be quite happy, even me.”

“The legal profession has a fancy name for what we’re doing — adultery. You are an adulterer, my darling. A happy adulterer.”

She didn’t smile. “That’s right.”

“You don’t give a damn what people think.”

“No.”

“And a couple of weeks ago you were so respectable, you even wore a hat and gloves when you took a bath. The change makes sense, I suppose, but how or why...”

“I feel more respectable now,” she said. “I have you back.”

“And I’ve made an honest woman of you, I suppose?”

“Perhaps you have. That’s how I feel, anyhow.”

That’s how she looked, too. Proud and contented, as if she’d be quite willing to go on like this forever.

Well, I’m not, he thought, I won’t.

“Brown isn’t going to tell Charles,” he said. “You are.”

She was silent.

“You intended to tell him, didn’t you?”

“I don’t know. I hadn’t thought that far ahead.”

“I have.” He tried to sound patient, but there was a rough edge to his voice. “I called you my wife. Do you think I’ve said that to every woman I’ve crawled into bed with the last five years?”

“How many women?” she asked. “Many?”

“Enough.”

“Ten?”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake!”

“Twenty? Surely not twenty?”

“You’re changing the subject.”

She averted her head. “I can’t tell Charles because I don’t know where he is.”

“I’ll find him for you. I’ll even escort you there.”

“No. No, I’ll find him. It’s just that — I don’t know what to say.”

“Ask him for a divorce. If he wants to know why, tell him that, too.” Her shoulders were trembling and he tightened his arm around her. “You’re not scared, are you?”

“No.”

“If you are, I’ll come with you. I’ll be exhibit A.”

“I couldn’t stand that,” she said. “I really couldn’t. You’re so much — sturdier than Charles.”

He didn’t ask her what she meant. He had a feeling that he’d be better off if he didn’t know.

Chapter 16

She had a confused, endless dream that night, in which she watched a sea monster cruise along the lake shore, holding its head out of the water with contemptuous dignity. It was dusk and she’d broken her glasses; she had to wait and wait until it got close enough for her to see. It was a shock but a relief, too, to see that the monster wore Charles’s head.

“It’s only Charles!” she cried to the people on the shore, with their half-strange, half-familiar faces.

It was getting dark and they all vanished suddenly, burying themselves in the sand and crouching behind rocks.

“Charles, stop a minute! Listen to me! I want a divorce!”

Grey and ponderous as a battleship, the monster moved away into the black water.

She went home. She stepped on some of the people hiding under the sand. She apologized profusely, but they never let on they were there.

Her alarm rang at eight.

She rose hastily, impelled by a sense of urgency whose cause she didn’t recognize. It was as if her muscles knew in advance what her mind would remember later, that there was something difficult to be done and they must be prepared.

She crossed the room with eager steps and pulled open the drapes, as if she could hardly wait to see this new day. The sun was shining like a congratulation. A swarm of bees did a noisy, dizzy dance for her alone, and the dream drowned of its own weight. The people dug themselves out of the sand, shook themselves and stretched and began to make human sounds.

Her mother coughed, Laura was taking a shower. Brown whistled his way down the stairs, Mrs. Putnam brought the milk in.

She phoned the doctor before she went down for breakfast. When she told him she wanted Charles’s address, he gave it to her without asking any questions or showing any surprise. He seemed to have been waiting, in fact, for her to call and to be acting under Charles’s instructions.

Perhaps Charles has found out already, she thought, and he’s waiting for me. Brown might have written to him or told Forbes. She knew Forbes phoned the house now and then and talked to Brown — there were some collect calls from Green Village on the phone bill. Brown didn’t mention them and she didn’t ask. It was somehow annoying to ask Brown anything. He always answered truthfully and the truth was always blameless. Only his face lied. It invited you to believe in intrigue. His eyes had plots in them, spies and secret formulae lurked in their corners. Behind his smile grew vast scandals and his eyebrows twitched with revolutions. Untraceable poisons rolled on his tongue and his hands fondled a homemade bomb. You felt cheated when he opened his heart to you, and you saw it was as fat, pink and innocent as a baby.

No, Brown hadn’t told, and he wouldn’t.

“Have you got that?” Dr. MacNeil asked.

“Yes, thanks.” She read it off to him as she’d written it. “Turn left at the main intersection of the village, drive two miles, turn right, the third cottage.”

“That’s fine. I think you’ll find him in good spirits.”

“I hope so,” she said, wondering why he should suddenly be so friendly, so anxious for her to see Charles.

“Oh, you will. He’s taking a more reasonable attitude now. He’s had an opportunity to think matters over.”

“What matters?”

“The general situation,” MacNeil said blandly.

She thanked him for the address and hung up.

Neither Laura nor her mother had come down for breakfast yet. Brown was in the dining room setting out halves of grapefruit at each place.

“Good morning,” she said.

“Good morning, Mrs. Pearson.” His little eyes slid from her face to the grapefruit and back again, as if they were saying, “Guess what’s in the grapefruit this morning. Give up? Curare! I just had a shipment from the chief of an Amazon tribe.”

She smiled involuntarily, and he smiled in return. They seemed to be sharing some huge, inscrutable joke not meant for other people.

“I’m going out to see Mr. Pearson this morning,” she said. “You can call me a cab right after breakfast.”

“Mr. Ferris would be glad to drive you.”

“I don’t want to impose on him.”

“I’m sure he wouldn’t look at it like that.”

“I prefer a cab.”

“Certainly, ma’am.” He rubbed the side of his jaw pensively. “Any particular color?”

“Pink,” she said, and bit decisively into a piece of grapefruit.

The cab arrived at nine and Brown escorted her out. She was very surprised when she saw that the cab was pink. Brown waited, with childish glee, for her to remark on it.

“It’s pretty,” she said.

“The only pink cab in town.” He nodded his head mysteriously, implying the rest: a couple of friends of mine who happen to be gnomes painted it up for me in a jiffy.

She was almost ready to believe that he’d said it and that it was true. The driver looked like a gnome. He wore an oversize pink and grey checked cap under which his sad, delicate little face crouched in hiding from a world which did not understand him. His voice was high and sweet as a choir boy’s, and his hands touched the gears, thin and elegant as spiders.

“A beautiful day,” he said. “A really beautiful day.”

“Yes, isn’t it?”

“This is my very own cab.”

My very own. I painted it with my own tiny hands with a watercolor brush and I drive it up and down the treble clef.

She leaned back and closed her eyes, forcing silence on the gnome and blotting out the beautiful day. Each turn of the wheels brought her closer to Charles, but she could not even conjure up a picture of him or plan a single sentence to say to him. The most she could do was censure herself, and that only in a trite and rather absent way: This is a bad situation and you are a bad woman. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. There will be a terrible scandal, innocent people will suffer, not just you...

But I won’t suffer, she thought with amazement, and I don’t think I’m a bad woman. I’m not ashamed of anything except marrying Charles and making a mess of it.

She could view their marriage with detachment now that it would soon be ended. The fault had been mainly hers. She had had something to conceal from Charles, and the very act of concealment had aggravated her sin, the way layers of face powder cover up acne but make it spread and itch. She had married Charles at a time when she was filled with resentment against all men because one man had seduced her (rather easily, she admitted), and then left her.

It was not the loss of her virginity that bothered her so much as the fact that she had lost it for nothing, and in such a sordid, ordinary way. She remembered the squeaking couch in the parlor at home, the careful shifting to avoid the broken spring, and the darkness torn now and then by her father’s gargantuan snores, or her mother calling, “Martha, you better come to bed now. It’s late.”

Her mother always called in the same kind of voice, kindly, but a bit absent-minded. Almost as if she knew what was going on downstairs, Martha thought, but felt she had neither the right nor the strength to interfere. Her parents were similar in their attitudes. They were not morally loose, their lives were blameless and dull; but they had a certain laxity of purpose. There was nothing clean-cut or definite about their thoughts or their plans. They never wanted one thing consistently or badly enough to go after it. Their weak acceptance of whatever came along had puzzled Martha when she was a child and enraged her when she became older. By the time she was fifteen, her life was already in sharp contrast to theirs. She was relentlessly ambitious and puritanical. She moved like a steamroller, in a straight line, crushing everything that was in her way. She harried her mother about her housekeeping and her father about his occasional and harmless drinking bouts. She looked after Laura, she washed and ironed her dresses, and brushed her hair and sent her off to school starched, prim and respectable.

She worked hard and late, without amusement and almost without reward. Though she was branded a bluestocking at school, her marks were invariably mediocre. She was not popular. Some of the boys admired her from a distance and sent her mash notes, but she rejected them with scorn. She had some of the usual, wild schoolgirl crushes on her male teachers and assorted movie actors and orchestra leaders, dark and romantic men that passed her on the street and dark and romantic men who stared at her from the windows of cars or buses. Just one long deep look and the crush was born and was lifted tenderly from her heart into her diary: “I feel so wonderful today, diary, because I finally saw Him. I don’t even know his name, but in my secret heart I call him Mr. X. Names are not important anyway. When two people just look at each other, they should both know.”

The parade of Mr. X.s marched briskly into oblivion, their scent lost in the musty odor of ink, while the silverfish slithered across their tracks.

Before she married Charles, she cremated them all in the furnace. She left the furnace door open and watched the record of the years turn to dust, the forgotten men and giggling girls, the tears that had long since dried and the triumphs that no longer mattered. She clanged the iron door shut on her dead secrets, she washed the smoke grime carefully off her hands, and began her life with Charles.

The gnome stirred, he was restless, he wanted to talk. He did think it was a crying shame she wouldn’t talk, he was so terribly bored.

“We should be in Green Village in five minutes,” he said. “You can feel the lake breeze already if you put the window down more.”

She didn’t answer, wasn’t even polite enough to open her eyes. Vulgar, she was. Insensitive. He could tell it to look at her. Cow of a woman. Cow breasts.

He glared at her, but his viciousness was once-removed, in a mirror, and besides, she wasn’t looking.

Charles had been very much in love with her at first. He could not do enough for her. He built the house exactly as she wanted it, and it was he who suggested that her family come to live with them, in case she might be lonely. When they did come, he put himself out to make them feel at home. He charmed her mother with his wit, and bought Laura’s heart with an adroit mixture of almond nougats and Saturday matinees. He entertained them, he played the piano and sang and told them stories. It was only when they were alone together that Martha couldn’t endure him. He changed abruptly, as soon as a closed door separated them from other people. He became humble, almost embarrassed. He followed her around, begging for attention like a dog, smiling at her in a radiant, incredulous way as if he were just that minute on the point of convincing himself that she was really his wife. She could not read a book without feeling his eyes watching her, or his hand touching her shoulder or stroking her hair. She would read on, grimly, while he forged invisible chains around her with quiet, gentle skill.

“Come to bed, Martha.”

“Do you mind if I finish this chapter?”

“Of course not. Can I get you anything? A drink? Cigarette?”

“No, thanks.”

“Is it a long chapter?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t looked.”

“If it is, I’ll put another log on the fire for you.”

He put the log on, he mixed her a drink, he placed a lighted cigarette between her lips. Then he sat at her feet, his head resting against her knees and his fingers spanning her ankle.

“What tiny ankles you have... Your legs feel cold, do you want a blanket?”

“No, thanks.”

Her ankle twitched, trying to escape its chains.

“I’ll bring you one. I don’t want you to catch cold.”

“Can’t you leave me alone, Charles?”

There. She had kicked the dog. He was hurt but he didn’t cringe. He was a thoroughbred, and retreated with dignity.

“I’m sorry, darling. I guess I’m a nuisance.”

“No, you’re not. It’s just that I want to finish this chapter.”

She finished a great many chapters that way, but she couldn’t remember any of them. She remembered only the drinks, the logs, the cigarettes, the blankets, and how they gradually ceased.

Laura outgrew Saturday matinees, and almond nougats gave her acne. Her mother retired to her room to relive her life without mistakes.

Green Village.

“It’s not a bad little town,” said the gnome. “I wouldn’t mind living here myself.”

Of course he would mind, really. In a small town people got to know you too well and too quickly. You couldn’t turn around without someone getting suspicious. A couple of the boys had taken a cottage here once and they didn’t last a week. The neighbors complained that the boys went around naked with the blinds up and spanked each other quite hard. They said they could hear the spanking sounds at all hours of the night, and it kept them awake.

Dirty minds, thought the gnome.

The pink cab skimmed like a butterfly beneath the dowager bosoms of maple trees and the scrawny spinster-arms of pines.

It stopped where she directed, just out of sight of the cottage. She walked down the path alone. The sun was still shining but the wind was damp and chilly.

The cottage was like a thousand others around the lake, square and ugly and insubstantial, as if the builder knew that some day the lake would destroy it anyway, and not too much money must be spent on it. A pair of bathing trunks that she recognized as Charles’s was hung over the railing of the back porch. From an open window came a faint smell of cooking, but she could see no one in the kitchen.

She walked around to the front of the cottage. The ground, spongy with pine needles and moss, muffled her steps. No one heard her, no one knew she was there. She could retreat now, she didn’t have to stay...

She turned the corner and saw Forbes.

He was sitting on the porch in a rocking chair, smoking a pipe and watching the water. The rocking chair groaned rhythmically like a broken sax.

He removed the pipe from his mouth and tapped it against the porch railing.

“Forbes?” she said.

He moved his head toward her, slowly.

“I thought there must be someone coming,” he said. “I heard a car.” His eyes shifted back to the lake. “Mr. Pearson’s in swimming.”

She followed his gaze and saw Charles’s head bobbing like a ball on the waves.

“The water looks cold.”

“It is.” He made no attempt to rise or be polite. “He shouldn’t be in swimming, he’s not strong enough. Somebody should stop him. I can’t.”

His voice was cold, condemning. It pointed at her like a finger.

“Do you mean I should?” she said.

“You could try. You’re the one he’s doing it for.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“All these daffy new antics of his, the raw carrots, and cold baths, and swimming in water like this. I guess they’re for you. I don’t know who else.” He tapped the pipe again. “Or else he’s trying to kill himself. It’ll probably amount to the same thing in the long run.”

“Aren’t you being a little insolent?”

“Well, frankly, I don’t think so. I’m just talking natural, for a change. I can afford to. I don’t work for you anymore. I don’t work for anybody. I’m not staying here for pleasure, either. That bloody lake makes me sick and the mosquitoes are eating me up.” He pulled up one of his pant legs and scratched a bite with savage satisfaction. “I’m sticking around because I hate to leave any guy in the lurch. Especially one who hasn’t anybody he can trust.”

She wheeled away from him and called in a sudden piercing scream, “Charles! Charles!”

“He can’t hear you,” Forbes said dryly. “He’s wearing earplugs.”

She ran down to the edge of the lake, staggering under the added weight of sand in her shoes. He must have seen her, for he began to swim toward shore with short, feeble strokes of his arms.

When he reached the shallow water he stood up and took out his earplugs and shook the water out of his hair. He appeared not to notice her, to be giving himself time to adjust his manner.

“Hello, Charles,” she said, thinking how surprising it was that she’d forgotten the way he looked when his face was as familiar to her as her own.

He came shivering out of the water. When at last he looked directly at her, she saw that he was smiling in a shy, sweet, hopeful manner.

“Martha. Well, Martha.”

“You’re chilled. It’s too cold for swimming.”

“Is it?” He laughed. “I don’t care.”

“Put my coat over your shoulders,” she said brusquely. “Here.”

“No. No, it’ll get wet.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“All right then.”

She draped her coat over his shoulders. It reminded her of the times she had covered him when he’d gone to sleep naked on her bed, and she never knew whether she did it to hide him from her sight or to keep him warm.

They started to walk, rather solemnly in step, back to the cottage.

“You look wonderful, Martha,” he said. “What have you been doing?”

Chapter 17

When he was dressed again, they sat side by side on the porch, talking.

“Why did you come?” he said. “Because you wanted to see me?”

“Why, of course. But...”

“I’m fine. Don’t I look fine?” He smiled at her, his lips, still blue with the cold.

She nodded. He didn’t look fine at all, but he seemed a great deal stronger than he had been.

“I eat a lot,” he said. “Raw things. You know, like carrots.”

“Forbes told me.”

“Forbes thinks it’s silly, even though it saves him a lot of work cooking.”

As if in response to his name, Forbes came silently out of the house carrying a steamer rug.

Charles waved him away. “Stop treating me like an old man. I don’t need a rug over my knees.”

Forbes snorted, very faintly, and went inside again.

“Would you like a cigarette or anything, Martha?”

“No, thanks.”

“Will you stay for lunch then?”

“I’d like to, but I’ve got a cab waiting.”

“Let it wait, won’t you? I have so many things to say to you. I can’t even get started.”

“I have something very important to discuss with you, too.”

“Then you’ll have to stay. What I’m going to say may require two hours, perhaps the whole rest of my life. Look, Martha.” From the inside breast pocket of his jacket he brought out a battered envelope with his own name written across the front. “Remember this?”

“Yes.”

“I carry it around with me all the time. It’s the only letter you ever wrote me.”

“Throw it away,” she said sharply.

He stared at her. “Why?”

“Because it’s a silly letter.”

“Extremely silly. That’s why it’s so important. Do you remember what you wrote?”

“Vaguely.”

“You told me you were afraid and you wanted me to come back home.”

She wet her lips. “Did I?”

“Afraid. Can you imagine? It bowled me over because I never dreamed you were capable of fear. I thought you were a rather hard woman.”

“I am. Don’t let a letter change your mind.”

“It didn’t. It merely made me start wondering whether I hadn’t been the big failure in our marriage. You had so many good qualities, but I never seemed to be able to bring them out. I knew you didn’t love me, of course, and I used to get crazy jealous wondering if you’d ever loved anyone else, and what his name was and how he looked.”

He leaned back in the chair, smiling.

“Crazy jealous,” he said. “Wasn’t I a fool?”

Her hand moved to her throat as if to loosen the invisible chains that were growing around her again, choking off the words she would have said.

“But I’ve changed, Martha. I know how ridiculous it is to get up suddenly and announce you’ve changed, but I have. I’ll prove it to you. You will let me, won’t you? You want me to come home, don’t you, as you said in the letter?”

She rose violently. The chair teetered, the floor vibrated.

“I’d better go and tell the cab driver to have lunch in the village,” she said.

“But you didn’t answer me. You do want me to come home... Don’t you?”

“Of course,” she said in a flat, thin voice. “Of course I do.”

“When? Soon?”

“Any time.”

“You’re not just saying that because you feel sorry for me, or anything? I know you’ll tell me the truth, and you’re always so honest.”

“Stop dreaming,” she said. “Stop making me up out of your imagination. I’m not honest. I doubt if any woman is.”

Her words didn’t disturb him, he was beyond their reach, up in the clouds again. Later, in an hour, a week, a year, he would fall hard and noisily down to earth, and the dreams he carried in his pockets would explode like grenades. She was incapable of softening the fall for him, or even trying, because she was so contemptuous of the original ascent.

“Lunch,” said Forbes from the doorway, “is ready.”

Charles got up, eager and excited. “Come on, Martha.” He took her arm. “It’s like old times, isn’t it, Forbes, having Mrs. Pearson here? Just like old times.”

Forbes’s satiric little eyes rested briefly on her face. There was dislike in them, but understanding, too, as if he realized quite as well as she did that Charles was up in the stratosphere again, detached completely from reality. “Old times” had become jolly evenings, sweet with love and gay with music. He had forgotten they were dull and interminable nights, shared with a woman who wanted to see him dead.

“Yes, you have changed, Charles,” she said with a grim little laugh. “You’ve no idea how much. Do you remember the last time I saw you?”

He reached across the table and put his hand over hers. “Yes. I was a brute.”

“No, no, you weren’t. Considering how you felt about me, you acted perfectly natural. But we’ve had so many ugly scenes.” She repeated the word, “Ugly.”

“I know. We won’t have any more.”

“Why not?”

“I have more control now.”

“Oh, dear.” She laughed again, with an echo of hysteria. “You really are hopeless, Charles. Remember the day I bought you the tie?”

“No.”

“You do, I can tell by your face. You’re such a bad liar. Do you want to know something about that tie?”

He moved uneasily. “No. I...”

“I didn’t pay a dollar for it, I paid eighty-nine cents! It was on sale!” How hilariously funny it was, and how uncomfortable he looked. In a minute he would say it wasn’t the price that mattered, it was the thought.

“It isn’t how much a thing costs that matters...”

“Oh, dear!” She couldn’t stand it, he was too funny, everything was. She brushed the tears from her eyes with the sleeve of her dress. “It’s the thought,” she gasped.

“Is anything the matter, Martha? Do you want some brandy?”

“And I don’t even know whether there was any thought. Isn’t that insane?”

“Here’s a handkerchief, darling. I’m sorry if I’ve done anything to upset you.”

“And the things you called me that day. You said I was sly, stupid. Maybe I am.” She had her face behind the handkerchief. It was a refuge to her from Charles’s bewildered eyes and Forbes’s listening ears. Within this world of damp linen, she could laugh or cry as much as she liked, and when she was through, she could squeeze it into a ball and toss it away.

“So much ugliness,” she said. “Ugly names, ugly thoughts.”

“Don’t keep saying that word. It’s going to be different from now on. Look at me, Martha. Please look at me.”

“Oh, leave me alone.”

“I love you, Martha. I promise you I’ll make you happy if you give me a chance. I won’t call you any more nasty names. If you irritate me sometimes, I won’t say anything, I’ll just go out for a walk around the block or something.” He added, hopefully, “Maybe you could do the same thing?”

She lowered the handkerchief and stared at him. “We’re going to be doing an awful lot of walking.”

She saw the two of them walking simultaneously around the block, Charles in one direction, herself in another, passing each other every five minutes but not saying a word because they both happened to be irritated. Eventually, perhaps, their system would be taken up by other people, and at all hours of the day and night the sidewalks would be jammed with husbands and wives walking their heads off.

She began to laugh again, with genuine amusement this time.

“I didn’t realize I’d become so funny,” Charles said with a stiff little smile. “You never used to laugh at me, not unless I broke an ankle or caught my hand in a lawn mower, that being the only sort of thing that would appeal to your macabre and practically non-existent sense of humor.”

“That’s more like it, Charles. Now you’re talking natural again.”

“Thank you. What is ‘natural’?”

“You know, ironic and rather nasty. I like you better that way. I can’t stand these happy, happy moods of yours when you go around starry-eyed and full of hope.”

“But I am full of hope,” he said quietly. “I can change my dialogue if it will make me seem more natural, but I can’t change the way I feel.” He paused. “Are you hungry?”

“Yes.”

“I thought so. You always act like this when you’re hungry.”

Her mouth opened in amazement. “Act like what?”

“Uncontrolled and shrill.”

“Uncontroll—”

He raised his voice. “Forbes, bring the soup in. Mrs. Pearson is starving.”

Forbes brought the soup in and then scurried back to the kitchen like a cockroach. It was obvious that he had heard every word of the conversation and that he didn’t want his presence to interrupt it.

“Have a cracker,” Charles said.

“I will not.”

“Do you mind if I do?”

“You’re the most impossible man. One minute you’re full of hope, and the next minute you’re calling me names.”

“I didn’t call you any names. I merely pointed out the fact that when you’re hungry you have no control over your emotions. Eat your soup.”

“I don’t want any. I prefer to go on being uncontrolled and shrill.”

“All right, but I’ve only got one more clean handkerchief. The laundry hasn’t come back yet.” He helped himself to another cracker. “Which reminds me of another small point. Do you have any handkerchiefs of your own?”

“Why?”

“Because every time you want to blubber, you blubber into mine.”

She glanced at him doubtfully, wondering why he was lying. She had never before borrowed one of his handkerchiefs and she couldn’t recall that she had ever cried in his presence.

She told him so, but he merely looked at her, smiling, and after a minute she realized that he was lying, haphazardly, saying the first thing that came into his head because she had wanted him to change his dialogue.

She picked up her spoon and began to eat, feeling defeated. Though the issue was small, a mere matter of words, Charles had outwitted her. She was doing and had done, in fact, exactly what he wanted her to: she had agreed that he was to come home, she was sitting here having lunch with him, and she was making a fool of herself. Charles was too profound and intricate for her. She could not erect a barricade against him because she never knew what road he would take. He had all kinds of devious little detours and he would pop up one and down another and be waiting for her at their destination, fresh, composed and somewhat amused at her laborious plodding in a straight line.

He reacted to everything — a gesture, a look, a silence that lasted too long or a word too quickly spoken — and his reactions were always complex. When Charles became displeased, it was not a simple matter, as it was with Steve, of losing his temper and swearing, and then apologizing. Steve was direct and comprehensible — somebody said or did the wrong thing and made him mad. But Charles’s anger seemed to come from inside himself. It germinated independently of exterior circumstances or other people; it was born without any reason except that the period of gestation was up; it died suddenly, without cause, and it was buried stealthily, without a name.

They finished their lunch in silence. She felt Charles’s eyes on her as she ate, but what emotion lay in wait behind them she couldn’t tell. He may have been contemplating her with pleasure or enjoying her appetite, condemning her foolishness or merely attempting to understand her, with a perplexity that equaled her own.

“What are you thinking about?” she asked abruptly.

“Aspirin tablets.”

Her mouth went tight. “I see.”

“I don’t believe you do.”

“Oh, I knew we’d have to go into it sometime...”

“We’re not going to go into it the way you mean. Look, Martha.”

“I won’t. I’m going home. I’m sorry I came.”

“All I want you to do is to see what I have in my hand.”

She turned. He was holding half a tablet between his thumb and forefinger.

“It’s aspirin,” he said. “I’m going to take it.”

“It will only make you sick. Stop trying to show off.”

“I’m not showing off. I want to prove something.”

“Prove what?” Doubts and suspicions gathered in her mind like an angry mob and burst suddenly into violence. She knocked the tablet out of his hand. It bounced into a glass of water, dissolving as it sank to the bottom. She shouted, “Forbes! Forbes!”

He was at the door in an instant.

“I want you to hear this, Forbes. He was going to take an aspirin while I was alone in the room with him, so he’d have more evidence against me.” She turned back to Charles, breathing hard. “Isn’t that right, Charles? Isn’t that what you wanted? All this business about loving me and wanting to come home again, it was all a pretence, a trap for me, wasn’t it?”

The two men were silent.

“Well, why don’t you admit it?” she cried. “The two of you probably cooked it up between you, maybe the doctor was in it, too! I was to be here alone with you when you became ill, I was to be caught in the act this time!”

“He takes aspirin every three or four hours,” Forbes said in a rather bored voice. “He practically lives on the damn things.”

“Martha,” Charles said.

She sat down, bowing her head. The mob dispersed, wandering aimlessly in all directions. Its anger had been spent, leaving no substitute.

“If you distrust me so deeply,” he said, “I must deserve it somehow. I wish I could change that, make you regard me as a friend.”

“You’re no friend of mine.”

“Do I go now and wash the dishes,” Forbes said, “or do I stick around and act as referee?”

“I don’t like the way he talks,” Martha said.

Forbes raised his eyebrows at Charles. “She doesn’t like the way I talk, so I’ll go and do the dishes.”

He went, muttering under his breath.

“How can you allow him...”

“Wait a minute, Martha. Before you say anything about Forbes, you may as well know he’s not working for me anymore, and he’s not coming home with me when I go. He’s only staying here with me now for some obscure reason of his own.”

“Because you have no one else you can trust. That’s his reason. He told me so himself.”

“Nonsense, there are a great many people I can trust implicitly — you and Laura and...”

“Forbes doesn’t think so. He hates me, that’s the real reason he’s not coming back.”

“He doesn’t hate you,” Charles said patiently. “He likes to make you believe he hates you. You don’t understand Forbes. He’s a lonely man. He has no family and no friends, and none of the excitements and delights and calamities that go with them. He lives off other people, a kind of emotional parasitism. For instance, you should see him when I take my aspirin every four hours. He stands there quite prepared to have me drop dead on the spot.” He smiled. “He wouldn’t exactly like it if I did, but the possibility of it flavors his existence.”

“Maybe,” she said, with sudden insight, “it even flavors your own.”

“True. I feel very daring. Like one of these arsenic-eaters, you know.”

“So that’s the idea — you’re building up an immunity.”

He spoke eagerly. “That’s only part of it. The whole business is experimental. You might call it silly.”

“What does Dr. MacNeil call it?”

“Nothing, yet. But he’s very interested. He comes out every other day, and we talk.”

“About what?”

“Sometimes about you, but mostly about me. He asks me questions and I answer them. It’s a little bit like the old type of psychoanalysis, perhaps, except for this difference: MacNeil believes, and I agree, that no one can face the complete truth about himself. No neurotic is cured, he merely substitutes one set of neuroses for another. Like a man who stops biting his fingernails only to start scratching his head. Or like me — when I became able to eat tomatoes, I couldn’t eat pork. Or you might look at it this way: When you start to houseclean and you sweep out one room, unless you keep the door shut, the dust will go into another room. Well, that door can’t be shut, not entirely.”

“You make it sound hopeless,” she said.

“That’s the first step. That was the initial fact I had to grasp, that, no matter how much money I spent or trouble I went to, I would still have more difficulties than the average person, just as I have more benefits. The problem was then to try and guide the difficulties, to sweep the dirt that came out of that room into neat little piles, so that I would have some idea of what was in each pile, the people, experiences, thoughts.”

She stirred, and he said instantly, “If I’m boring you, I’ll stop. I have no right to inflict all this on you.”

“I suppose I’m in one of the piles of dirt.”

“I think so.”

“Do I have one all to myself, or do I have to share it with someone?”

“I am boring you,” Charles said, with an attempt at a smile. “It was foolish of me to try to explain something I don’t understand very well myself.”

“Does MacNeil?”

“No. I told you we were experimenting. He believes that every one of these bouts of allergy poisoning was a form of suicide, that I wanted to die.”

“And did you?”

“I’m beginning to think so, yes. They always occurred when I was having some difficulty, mostly with you.”

“You were having them before you even knew me.” She turned and faced him. “I see. I’m sharing my pile of dirt with your mother.”

“Well...”

“How are we getting along together? Any scratching or hair-pulling?”

“I’m serious,” Charles said. “MacNeil thinks that I was over-spoiled and dominated by my mother and too dependent on her, and that when she died, I looked around for a substitute, someone who resembled her in appearance.”

Her mouth opened in amazement. “Are you telling me that the reason you married me was because I looked like your mother? I’ve seen pictures of...”

“Oh, I didn’t say that. MacNeil did.”

“That old quack...”

“Please listen. The real point is that when we did get married, you weren’t in the least like my mother. You paid very little attention to me, you didn’t try to boss me, and God knows, you didn’t over-spoil me.”

“I’m not the type.”

“That’s it, exactly. You’re not the type, and I can’t change you, so I must change my conception of you and my expectations. I must change myself. I can, too. I already have to a certain extent.”

He waited for her confirmation, but she could think of nothing to say. She felt tired and confused. Following Charles as he scampered up and down his little detours was exercise too strenuous for a cumbersome mind like her own. Perhaps he and the doctor were right, perhaps they had evolved, with a little deft borrowing from Cove, Freud and Mary Baker Eddy, a system whereby Charles could live at peace with himself.

“I’m going to get rid of all the old trappings of dependence,” he went on. “Even Brown and Forbes, because they were with my mother and they both treat me as if I were still a kid. The only person I need is you, Martha.”

He came over to her and put his hand under her chin and raised her face to his. “I’m not asking you if you love me. I’m afraid to.”

She moved away from him with an imperceptible sigh.

“I have to be going now, Charles. Where’s my coat?”

“But it isn’t dry yet. You can’t wear a damp coat all the way home, you might catch cold.”

“I never catch cold.”

“That’s right, I’d forgotten.” He went out to the porch for her coat, walking as if his legs had suddenly become heavy.

When he returned he said again, “It’s still damp,” but he spoke listlessly as if he knew very well she would leave, even if the coat were dripping wet.

As soon as she was out of sight of the cottage she began to run. The pine needles were slippery as ice and the moist earth treacherous as quicksand, but she kept on running, senselessly, knowing that no matter where she ran, how fast or how far, Charles would be waiting for her.

Chapter 18

She stood on the veranda, watching the cab drive away, until it was no larger than a pink bug scuttling down the road.

She thought, I’ll have to go over and tell Steve what happened right away, before I lose my courage as I did with Charles.

It was broad daylight and everyone was at home, their eyes and their tongues ready for the moment that she would cross the lawn. I must comb my hair, she thought, as if the mere act of combing her hair and tidying herself might prejudice the watchers in her favor.

She went into the house and up to her bedroom, moving through the halls uneasily, as if she expected to be challenged.

She picked up her brush and began to do her hair. She avoided her own face in the mirror, half-afraid that she might see Charles’s face there, too, peering over her shoulder, laughing and malicious: See? I beat you home, didn’t I? And I’ll be right behind you, too, when you go over to see your lover. I know you won’t mind my coming along. You’re so honest, you have nothing to conceal. You’ve always been so honest!

With a stifled exclamation she flung the brush away. It struck the mirror.

The mirror splintered into smiles. She saw her face cracked and wrinkled like a hag’s and her head chopped into sections like a phrenologist’s chart.

“Martha!” her mother called out. “Is that you, dear?”

She turned, alert, suspicious. “Yes?”

Her mother trailed into the room, looking sleepy. “Oh, there you are.”

“Yes.”

“I thought I heard something break.”

“The mirror.”

“What a shame. Be careful you don’t cut yourself.”

“I broke it on purpose,” Martha said. She realized that her mother knew this already, had, in fact, figured it out as soon as she entered the room. Her mother’s vagueness was a camouflage, a protection; if she pretended not to notice things, she would not be expected to do anything about them.

I wonder how much else she’s figured out, Martha thought. She said aloud, “I went out to see Charles.”

“How is he?”

“Fine. He’ll be coming home one of these days.”

“Won’t that be nice.”

She didn’t answer, and her mother repeated deliberately, “I said, won’t that be nice.” She didn’t look sleepy anymore. She had stepped out of her vagueness as out of a negligee, and put on something sharp and tight. “Won’t it, dear?”

“Yes, won’t it.”

From downstairs came the sound of Laura fooling with the piano, snatches of boogie-woogie, long sweet chords and low blue ones like ecstatic groans.

Her mother’s voice picked its way carefully among the notes. “She doesn’t play pretty little tunes anymore, just these modern pieces that keep reminding you of things or promising you things.” She added, without change of tone, “Well, if you don’t want to live with him anymore, why haven’t you got nerve enough to pack up and get out?”

“I can’t.”

“Why can’t you? If you’re thinking you have any obligations to Laura and me, you can forget it. I got along all right for years without Charley’s money. As for Laura, you’re not doing her any favor by staying here.”

She went over to the window and looked out, speaking over her shoulder, as if it were a matter of no importance: “There’s just one thing you can’t do. You can’t keep on living with Charles and making a cuckold out of him. He won’t like it when he finds out. Men are pretty fussy on that point.”

She didn’t turn around to see the effect of her words. She seemed to be musing aloud in front of a picture.

“You know, Steve’s the kind of man I understand better than you do, though in my day, we had a different name for them — lady-killers.”

“You can’t tell me a thing about...”

“Yes, I can. I’ve known quite a few of them. Steve’s a little different, he’s a cut above the rest of them, but he shares the same weakness. He can’t help chasing skirts, and the more inaccessible the skirt, the better the chase. And then what happens when the chase is over, you should know. It’s happened to you before. You got left. He walked out on you.”

She turned. There was no pity or censure in her face, it was as immovable as a fact.

“I didn’t say a word to you the first time. You were so much in love with him, it wouldn’t have done any good. Besides, you’ve always had to learn the hardest way. You could never know how high a cliff was until you fell off and broke a few bones. But, do you know, I used to nearly go crazy lying up in bed listening to that darned couch creak.”

Martha averted her face, as humiliated as if she’d been told that every scene on the couch had had a voyeur.

“I used to have to bite my tongue to keep from saying anything, Martha. Sometimes I prayed that you’d come out of it all right, and sometimes I even planned what I’d do if you had a baby. I would have taken it as my own.”

“Why tell me this now?” Martha said harshly.

“Because your life isn’t entirely your own anymore. You signed a bit of it over to Charley when you took his name.” She gave a dry little smile. “And the couch still creaks. You’ve fooled nobody — except Charles.”

Except Charles. The words brought Charles’s face to Martha’s mind. Charles was not smiling or sarcastic. He looked lost and helpless, and his eyes were strained as if he were trying hard to make out what everyone else saw very distinctly.

“I can’t help it,” she said. “I went out to tell him, to ask him for a divorce, and then I couldn’t. I simply couldn’t. He depends on me so much.”

“You may just think that because you depend on him so much.”

“Me depend on Charles?”

“Yes, I think you do. You may go prancing off across the lawn, thumbing your nose at the world for love, but you wouldn’t be so blithe about it if Charley wasn’t in the background, Charley and everything he stands for. You’re far too realistic to deny that.” She paused, frowning. “I wish Charley would push you around a little bit,” she said seriously. “I feel you’re the kind of woman who gets along best when a great many demands are made on you. Great demands, I mean, like having to go out and work all day and coming home at night to a husband who’s capable of slapping you around and a houseful of wet babies and dirt.”

“You’re making quite a few unpleasant remarks about me today.”

“That wasn’t unpleasant. I consider it a compliment.”

“Thanks. If you’re finished, I’ll go now.”

“I won’t ask you where.”

“You don’t have to, I’ll tell you. I’m going over to see Steve.”

“Give him my regards,” her mother said blandly. “In spite of what I’ve said about him, I’ve always been fond of Steve. I hoped for quite a while that he’d marry you. Is he going to, this time?”

“Yes.”

“I suppose I should offer my congratulations, but I think it would be safer to reserve them.”

She departed abruptly, without waiting for a reply.

Martha thought, I should follow her and defend Steve. I should say something in his favor. But for the life of her, she couldn’t think of anything to say in his favor. She felt only the old, implacable resentment: he walked out on me, he jilted me.

She went into the bathroom and turned on the water in the tub full force. The roar drowned out for a moment the echo of her mother’s words.

She undressed quickly and got into the tub. The little waves reminded her of Charles and how blue and cold his skin had looked when he came out of the lake. She saw her own skin, pink with health and the heat of the water, and she thought, he shouldn’t go swimming until he’s better. I should have made him promise.

She crossed the lawn, pursued by the eyes of the windows and the melancholy tongue of the piano.

When she reached the apartment she walked in without knocking. Steve was making his bed. He finished tucking in the corners before he turned and came over to her.

“Well?” He put his hands on her shoulders, as if ready to shake her. “What did he say?”

“I... I didn’t ask him. He was in swimming.”

“I see. He must be a hell of a strong swimmer. You’ve been away six hours.”

“I mean, at first he was swimming. He shouldn’t have been, he’s not well enough, so I had to stop him.”

“And then?”

She swallowed. “Then we had some lunch and I came home.”

“Very jolly. Did the lunch give him hives?”

“Charles can’t help getting hives,” she said curtly. “It’s nothing to laugh about.”

He dropped his hands as suddenly as if she’d slapped them away. “You sound like a mother protecting her young. Don’t you think Charles is old enough to have graduated from the growing-boy class?”

“Let’s not quarrel... Steve, kiss me, will you?”

“I don’t want to quarrel and I don’t want to kiss you, either. I just want to know where I’m at. What’s come over you since last night?”

She lowered her eyes. “Nothing.”

“Nothing? Remember how you acted last night? You were happy, contented, you didn’t care what anyone thought, you even felt respectable, you said. The happy adulterer. Well” — he eyed her grimly — “you don’t look so goddamn happy to me. Has anybody been talking to you?”

“My mother. She knows about us.”

“And she doesn’t approve, of course.”

“No.”

“Naturally. I haven’t got as much money as Charles. I can’t give her or the kid or you any security. All I can offer is a little excitement and I’m afraid she’s a shade too old for the kind of excitement I can provide.”

“She believes,” Martha said cautiously, “that even if I divorce Charles, you won’t marry me, you’ll be tired of me by that time.”

“And you believe it, too?”

“I don’t know.”

“The fact is,” he said after a deliberate pause, “that I’m pretty tired of you already. I have to think about you too much. That makes me tired. Which reminds me, do you mind if I finish making my bed?”

He went back to the bed, threw on another blanket and began tucking it in at the sides.

“You haven’t enough of the tart in you,” he said as he worked. “You can go to bed with a tart and then forget all about her. You can turn over and go to sleep, providing you’ve got a padlock on your wallet.”

He finished the bed and pushed it back into the closet. She noticed that he had cleaned the whole room; the chairs had been dusted and the ashtrays washed and he had polished his shoes. He had even tried to press his own pants — the new crease didn’t quite coincide with the old one, and through the open door of the kitchen she could see the ironing board that he’d forgotten to fold away.

“Steve,” she said. “Steve, I wish... I wish...”

“Let’s get out of here. I need a drink.” He buttoned his coat and ran his hand over his hair to smooth it. “Coming?”

She hesitated. “Where can we go?”

“We have a couple of hundred bars to choose from. We can go to one, or we can go to them all, if you like.”

He opened the door for her but she continued to stand there.

“Come on,” he said, “and I’ll show you some real tarts so you’ll understand the difference.”

She touched his coat sleeve timidly, as if she were about to make an appeal. But she didn’t make it; he had moved away from her with a trace of impatience and was halfway down the steps before she caught up with him.

“Aren’t you forgetting your manners?”

“Look,” he said. “Let’s just pretend for once that you’re not the great lady you really are, you’re just an ordinary girl. And I’m an ordinary guy, see? — and we’re going out together. We haven’t much money, so we walk up to Jane Street to catch a bus. You’re sure riding a bus won’t be too much for your delicate constitution?”

“You don’t have to be so sarcastic. I’ve ridden on lots of buses with you before.”

“B.C. Before Charles. By the way, you don’t have to be afraid any of Charley’s friends will see you. They don’t ride buses, except maybe once a year, to keep in touch with the common man.”

“I’m sick of talking about Charles,” she cried. “And I’m sick of talking about buses!”

He wagged his finger at her. “Tut, tut. If you’re going to lose your temper, we’ll talk about trains.”

She began to walk down the driveway toward the road with swift angry strides. He kept up with her effortlessly.

“I adore trains,” he said. “Don’t you?”

She tossed her head in reply.

“When I was a boy — and a charming little chap I was, too — I used to call them choo-choos. Pretty damn original of me, eh?”

They reached the road and she turned left without slackening her pace. He stood still and talked to her retreating back.

“Matter of fact, H. L. Mencken gives me credit for the word. Choo-choo, an onomatopoetic disyllable coined by little Steve Ferris, aged one year, three months and six days. Incidentally, you’re going in the wrong direction.”

She stopped and came slowly back to where he was standing.

“You make me furious,” she said. “You...”

“I hope to God so.” He looked at her somberly. “Any reaction is better than no reaction.”

Chapter 19

When they got on the bus at Jane Street, he took her hand and held it. She tried to withdraw it, but he whispered, “Ordinary people always hold hands on buses. It’s a rule.”

An old lady in the opposite seat eyed them with deep suspicion, as if all whispering was about herself and to her disadvantage. At the same time her face had a scared, intent aspect.

“She’s frightened,” Martha said. “Perhaps she’s not used to being alone in a city.”

Steve laughed. “My bet is, she’s heading for a movie and she’s trying to sneak away without her grandchildren.”

Clutching her purse, the old lady got up and changed to a seat at the front of the bus.

“See?” Steve said. “Look at the death-grip she’s got on her purse. That’s her Humphrey Bogart money in there, her ticket to the past. For two hours she’s going to look like Lauren Bacall. Her withered breasts will ripen again like grapefruit, her false teeth will miraculously start growing onto her gums, and the varicose veins will drop off her legs like dead blue worms.”

His gaze shifted from the old woman to Martha, and he was surprised by their similarity of expression. Martha was afraid, too, not of being alone in a city, but of being seen out with him. Or perhaps simply of growing old.

He thought of Beatrice and her continual references to her age, as if the monotony of repetition would obscure the fact. Martha was four or five years younger than Beatrice, and maybe she’d talk the same way when she was Beatrice’s age. Maybe, too, by that time, he and Martha would be married and have a child or two. They’d sit around the house every night, not doing much talking because Martha wasn’t much of a talker, she seemed to have a contempt for words as if she thought they didn’t solve anything, they merely created new problems — and not doing much love-making, either, because Martha would be used to him by then, and when he made a pass at her she’d have a backache or a cold, or she’d be too tired.

“What are you frowning about?” she asked.

“Time,” he said with a false grin. “He’s waving that damn scythe of his at me. But watch me duck.”

“Sometimes I don’t quite understand what you mean.”

“You wouldn’t like it if you did, my darling.”

They got off the bus at the corner of Madison and College. The five o’clock rush was on. A stream of cars moved north, in rhythmic jerks like a typewriter ribbon. Shoppers plunged headlong out of the dress shops and department stores, as if afraid the doors might close on them and leave them locked there for the weekend. Even those who were not eager to get home hurried there anyway because they were used to hurrying.

He felt, as he usually did when he saw a lot of people on a city street, a profound excitement. He wanted to watch them all at once, follow them all home and have supper with them and listen to their talk and their troubles, solve their problems, go to bed with the best-looking daughter, and run like hell for home.

“It’s wonderful,” he said, the excitement audible in his voice. “I haven’t been going out enough. Come on, let’s get drunk! Come on, Martha!”

He grabbed her hand and began steering her expertly through the crowd. She dragged like a stone. She said he was going too fast, they were attracting attention, the streets were dirty, she had dirt in her shoe, and people were bumping into her.

He headed for the nearest bar, and they went inside.

There were a great many people in here, too, and they were just as noisy as those in the street, but the noise was different, and the people themselves seemed to be invisible, subtly divided from the street people by rows of bottles containing the pickled ghosts of Carrie Nation and General Booth. The lights were sparse and lurid, for reasons of economy and glamour. They had the added effect of flinging a veil of intrigue across the room, so that the most ordinary talk seemed like secrets spoken aloud. To the untutored eye, the most commonplace men could have passed for financiers or pimps, and the women for duchesses or dykes. But Steve sorted them out immediately — he’d seen them all before in different bars, different countries and different lighting.

There were the two men talking business. Nervous, tense, they drank Scotch or Bourbon, preparing to relax for the weekend, but reluctant to depart from a world made intelligible by neat mathematical boundaries. Beside them was the inevitable lady who waited. Her eyes made direct trips from the drink in front of her to the door, seeing nothing between. She may have been waiting for a man, a girl, or a bolt of lightning, but whatever it was, he, or it, never came. Eventually she would toss off her drink and set her course straight for the door, as if neither the gloom nor the interfering bodies bothered her because she was guided by radar.

Beside her a very young man was drinking beer and staring cynically at the sign behind the bar: “It is illegal to sell alcoholic beverages to a minor. A minor is a person under twenty-one years of age.” Three women, half-submerged in parcels and paper bags, drank Manhattans and discussed clothes. At the end of the bar a group of sailors stood watching everyone in the place with a speculative air, as if they might be looking for a fight or a pick-up.

They spied Martha, measured Steve, and finally one of them gave a very soft wolf-whistle.

Steve stopped dead.

“Go and sit down,” he told Martha. “I’ll be with you in a minute.”

She didn’t understand. “What?”

“I said, go and sit down.”

“But what about you?”

The sailors had their ears pricked up. Steve stood with his body bent forward a little, like a boxer balancing on the balls of his feet.

The sailor whistled again, twice, much louder this time. He paused a moment, and then, using the same two notes to start, he began “The Cuckoo Waltz.” His friends joined in. One of them picked up an empty beer bottle and used it as a baton. Or as a threat.

Steve turned and took Martha’s arm. “Come on.”

They found a table near the door.

“You look quite fierce,” she said, puzzled.

“I’m not fierce enough to take on five,” he said. “Not in a joint that serves beer in bottles.”

She frowned. “Well, why shouldn’t they serve beer in bottles?”

“If you’d ever been hit over the head with one, you’d know.”

“Have you?”

“Once.”

“Honestly?”

She was impressed, there was no doubt of it. He felt amazement and a little anger. He had done so much to impress her and most of the time he had failed. Yet here she was, wide-eyed because he’d once been hit on the head with a beer bottle.

“Did you have to have stitches?” she asked.

“Yeah.” If she liked it that much, she might as well have it good, so he added, “Eighteen stitches. I lost three quarts of blood, seventy-proof. It wasn’t wasted, though. The doctor thought it’d be a shame to waste blood with that much alcohol in it, so he passed it on to a couple of drunken werewolves.”

He hoped she’d laugh, but she didn’t. He felt tired of trying to amuse her and never succeeding. He wondered if perhaps she was just as tired of his trying to be funny.

He asked her if she was.

“Not exactly,” she replied.

“Not exactly. Thank you, my dear, thank you for the clever evasion.”

“You don’t like me today, do you? You keep picking on me.”

“Oh, yes, I like you. I love you, I even respect you. But, it just struck me we have very little in common. We share nothing but a bed.”

“Oh?” She sat up, stiffly. “Then perhaps it’s just as well I didn’t ask Charles for a divorce, isn’t it?”

The waiter came up.

“Three double Scotches,” Steve said. He added to the empty seat across the table, “You will have a drink with us, won’t you, Charley, old boy?” He turned back to the waiter who was eyeing the empty seat cautiously. “Charley says he doesn’t mind if he does.”

“Y-yes, sir.”

Steve shook his finger at him. “And don’t stare at him. It embarrasses him. He likes to be treated like an ordinary person. Don’t you, Charley?”

Martha was smiling painfully at the waiter. “He always talks like this. He’s being funny.”

“He’s a card, all right,” the waiter said and departed.

“I wish you wouldn’t,” Martha said in a miserable voice. “People will think you’re drunk.”

“People are going to be right.”

The waiter came back with the drinks. He put one in front of Martha and one in front of Steve. He couldn’t decide what to do with the last one, so he stood holding it uncertainly in his hand.

“I must say you’re behaving badly,” Steve said. “My friend Charley doesn’t care to be slighted in this unseemly fashion. Put it down. No, on second thought, give it to me. Sometimes I taste Charley’s drinks because he has such a delicate constitution.”

“A dollar ninety-five,” said the waiter.

Steve sipped the Scotch. “Charley, old boy, I’m afraid I have bad news. It’s too strong for you.” He tossed the drink off and reached for his wallet. “Two more.”

The waiter was grinning. “I bet you hurt his feelings.”

“Charley knows I act only in his best interests,” Steve said piously. He was already pretty bored with the Charley game but he kept it up for a while to annoy Martha. She was horribly embarrassed. She kept looking around to see if anyone was watching them, and she didn’t say a word to him, as if, by maintaining silence, she might convince people she wasn’t with him, that he’d sat down beside her by accident.

By the time he’d finished the four drinks, he felt better. He didn’t want to annoy Martha anymore, and he didn’t want to fight with sailors, not even one sailor. They were a good bunch of boys. If they felt like whistling, let them whistle. He, too, could whistle. He could whistle even after eating soda crackers, just watch him.

The waiter was sorry, they were fresh out of soda crackers.

Fresh out of soda crackers even for a man who could whistle through his teeth like this? Well, that was a fine thing. He wouldn’t be seen dead in a joint with no soda crackers. Come on, Martha, let us not demean ourselves. Good-bye, Charley.

The bars were strung along the street like bright beads. The Zanzibar, The Top Hat, The Roscoe, Chez Henri.

Saturday night? People crawled from bead to bead. A whole conga line of people passed from the Zebra Room to the Casino Latino to the Bar Nine, in shunts and staggers. You met the same ones all the time because the string was limited, there were just so many beads, and all alike except for their names and the lavatories. Some had clean lavatories, some had not.

The real difference, he explained, is lavatories.

The Kit-Kat.

The same people. It was extraordinary how other people remained the same while you changed, from bar to bar, minute to minute. Under the rosy lights of the Kit-Kat, you looked pretty good. Not handsome, no, but fresh and appealing. The other jerks looked worn out and tired, and their women were bags.

Martha was eating pretzels. She looked like a little girl. That was fine, because he himself looked fresh and appealing.

Just a couple of kids, sexually precocious.

The Monkey House.

A mistake to come here. Bad lights, too yellow and garish. They seemed to coax your liver bile right up into your face. They peered into each pore of your skin and glared at your sweating forehead.

The waiter was too obsequious and there were too many single girls hanging around the bar. They were all young and dressed with a smartness that was too extreme. Whores feel a kinship with movie actresses and they copy their clothes, zipper for zipper when they can.

“Really?” said Martha.

Yes, really.

She had switched to peanuts, and while she ate she watched the girls at the bar while they watched each other. Two of them had given up the chase for the night. They sat with their arms entwined, talking softly.

They are lovers.

Lovers?

And the headwaiter is a pimp.

A pimp?

She was very excited, she had never seen a pimp or prostitute lovers before. She beamed approval at him, imagine being so clever, knowing these things.

Her eyes wide and avid, she stared at the performing animals through the iron bars of the cage.

I am ill, it’s too hot in here, I wonder if I’m getting jaundice?

You need some food, Martha said. You need some real food.

Real food could be had at Luigi’s. Real sizzling steaks, real Italian spaghetti, real homemade pies.

Other restaurants might be in the habit of serving papier-mâché pies and steaks of painted plaster, but not Luigi’s.

When the spaghetti came, it was quite real, but it had unrealistic elements, exotic bits of green and shreds of yellow and hard little lumps that might have been meat. It slid around his mouth like soap with slivers of wood in it.

Viva Italia.

I think I’m getting jaundice. Will you excuse me while I go and relieve my jaundice?

He went to the lavatory. Someone with a careless aim had soaked the floor, and the walls were covered with dirty words, pictures, invitations and condemnations.

“Come to Jesus” had been scrawled over “For a b.f. call Harry, Bellflower 23664.” Harry was an artist, it must have taken him hours to carve his message in the plaster. He wondered if b.f. meant boyfriend, or something earthier.

And where was Harry now? In a V.D. ward, with a case of hemorrhoids? Golden lads and girls all must like chimney sweepers come to dust.

Come to Jesus.

Not a bad idea. Must try it.

He went back to the table. Martha was gone. She had finished her spaghetti and vanished.

She’s gone home, back to Charles.

Charley dear, I’ve been thinking. I don’t like that man Ferris. He takes me to the oddest, places, he knows the oddest people, he’s the oddest fellow. It is all very interesting, of course, to observe how the other half lives, but really, one doesn’t care to live like that oneself, does one?

One does not.

She returned with her nose powdered and fresh lipstick on. She had the relaxed, contented air of a healthy young animal with a full belly.

Healthy. No jaundice, no hives, a big appetite.

He picked up his fork and began to push the sickening mass of spaghetti around his plate. It coiled and uncoiled, it slithered like long, white eels. He couldn’t eat eels. He got quite bitter because certain people could eat eels, could eat anything, while he couldn’t.

Pretzels, peanuts and then eels. My God, darling, you’ll get fat.

I won’t.

You will.

I won’t.

You will.

Poor old Charles. It was no life for any man sitting around night after night watching his wife get fat.

He looked around the place. Funny how most women were fat. There was only one really thin one in the whole room. She was sitting at the bar with her back toward him. She had a bony little rump and long skinny legs twined around the bar stool. She was with a boy and from their backs alone you could tell they were both very young and shouldn’t be in a place like this.

The girl disentangled her legs and then tangled them all up again the other way. She laughed a great deal and fingered her drink and shook her floppy hair around. She couldn’t keep still. In contrast, the boy was very quiet, as if he were too scared to move.

A Minor Is a Person Under Twenty-One Years of Age.

Should be a law.

Is a law.

Should be a law to enforce the law.

The girl turned and said something to the boy.

“Come on, Martha,” Steve said. “Let’s go to another place.”

“But why? I like it here.”

“I know a better place.”

He wasn’t drunk anymore. He could spend hours getting drunk and then suddenly something would sober him up, just a little thing like recognizing the young girl. He felt old, jaded, irritable.

He picked up Martha’s coat and helped her put it on, standing directly in front of her so she couldn’t see the bar.

“I know where we can get some more peanuts.”

“I’m not hungry anymore. Besides, you told me I was too fat.”

“No, I didn’t.” For the past few hours a number of thoughts had been pushing around inside his head and he couldn’t quite remember which ones he’d put into words. He was sure he hadn’t told her she was too fat, though, because he hadn’t thought it. “I don’t like thin women, anyway.”

Like the girl.

“Their bones stick out,” he said. “Now, your bones don’t stick out, so let’s go.”

She rose like an obedient child, not sure where she was going or why, but anyway there would be peanuts and anyway there were no bones sticking out on her. When she walked to the door she was steady on her feet, but her eyes had a blurry quality.

“I feel good,” she said. “I’m not used to drinking, except sherry, and I feel good.”

“That’s fine.”

The night air was still hot, as if it couldn’t forget the passion of the sun.

There was a bus bench a few yards away and he led her toward it.

“Wait here for me, will you? I have to go back a minute.”

“You are always saying, ‘Come on, Martha,’ or ‘Let’s go, Martha,’ or ‘Wait here, Martha.’ You’re so — so active.”

But she really didn’t care. Dreamily she closed her eyes. It was nicer when he said, ‘Wait here, Martha.’ Much much, much nicer.

He laughed, hoping his laugh didn’t sound as hollow as it felt.

“I won’t be long. I forgot to leave a tip.”

He returned to the bar. He walked up behind the girl and said, “Hello, Laura.”

She turned with a convulsive jump. Her legs were so tangled up with the bar stool that she nearly lost her balance and fell off.

He didn’t want to frighten her or make her weepy or belligerent, so he said in a calm low voice, “I’ll call you a cab. Martha’s outside. You wouldn’t want her to see you here.”

Laura stuck her chin out. “Well, fancy seeing you! I’d like you to meet Bill. Bill, this is an old family friend.”

She was trembling, but she had a lot more poise than the boy.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Bill said. “Oh, for God’s sake. I didn’t want to come here, you made me, you did so, you made me.”

“Stop blubbering,” Laura said. “Steve won’t tell your father.”

“He’ll never give me the car again, he’ll...”

“I won’t tell a soul,” Steve promised.

Laura turned on him with a vicious little snort. “I’ll say you won’t, not if you’re smart. I could do some talking myself.” She turned up her nose. “So Martha’s outside, is she? Well, what do I care? You don’t suppose she’d have the nerve to say anything to me after what I know about her?”

“It isn’t her,” the boy moaned. “I don’t care about her. It’s my father. He’ll never give me the car again.”

The bartender had been watching them closely. He came over now with quiet deliberation, a heavy, middle aged man with a fastidious little mustache.

“Any trouble here?”

“Oh, not at all,” Steve said. “It’s just that I don’t like to see sixteen-year-old kids lapping up liquor. I’m persuading them to go home.”

The bartender gave a quick look around to see if anyone else had heard. Then he leaned across the counter and said to the boy, “Take your girlfriend and beat it.”

Laura’s self-assurance had infected the boy. “I’m twenty-one,” he said. “You can’t talk like that to me, I’m twenty...”

“And don’t show your nose around here again.”

“I’m twenty-one I tell you!”

“Little liar!” Laura said. “He’s seventeen.”

“Oh, God!”

“While we’re on the subject,” Steve said to the bartender, “don’t you check up on ages in this joint?”

“I asked them how old they were,” the bartender said. “They said twenty-one. It’s not my fault. I asked them.”

“Pretty gullible, aren’t you?”

“Look, I don’t want any trouble. The kids are going home. All they had was a couple of drinks...”

“Three,” Laura said.

The bartender shot her an ugly glance but he kept his temper. “Maybe three, but that’s all. And if they didn’t get it here, they’d get it some place else, or the boy would steal a bottle from his old man and they’d drink it in a car parked in a lane. You gotta be reasonable about these things.”

“I don’t like your kind of reasoning,” Steve said. “It makes me want to call in a policeman.”

“No!” Laura said, with the first hint of real panic in her voice. “Don’t you dare!”

“You’ll ruin the kids’ reputations,” the bartender put in smoothly. “You wouldn’t want to do that.”

“I’ll tell Charley!” Laura cried. “I’ll tell Charley what you’ve been doing behind his back. You and Martha... you... you’re dirty! Dirty!”

She put her hands over her eyes. “You do dirty things.” Tears slid down between her fingers. “Oh, God! Oh, Bill!” But Bill was a man, he, too, could do dirty things. Oh, the despair, the loneliness, there was no one, no one. The horror, the dirt, the fascination...

Steve was silent. There were no words to bridge the gap of years and experience, none even to relieve his own melancholy.

Martha, I love you.

Dirty.

You are my wife.

You do dirty things.

In dark corners and parked cars, behind drawn blinds, on davenports and benches and musty mattresses, between sheets of grey cotton and white linen and striped flannelette, in lanes and doorways and murky halls, dirty things were being done.

Flesh of my flesh.

“You’ve ruined my life,” Laura whispered. The boy sprang off the stool and made a beeline for the door. No one paid any attention.

“His life, too,” she added. Two beautiful young lives ruined, and nobody even looked up. What a waste to have a life ruined without any witnesses except Steve and the bartender, neither of whom would be likely to talk about it: Ah, yes, I was there the night young Laura Shaw’s life was ruined. Where is she now? Ah, no one knows. In a nunnery, perhaps, or a degraded dive. Her name is spoken only in whispers.

Degrading dive. That sounded better.

“Are you ready to go home now?” Steve asked.

“I have no place else to go.” Her tragic tone was marred by a yawn. Her eyes slid to the clock. Eleven. What a night! Wait’ll she told Susan and Becky. They’d die, they’d simply die. As for that drip Bill...

Steve gave the bartender two dollar bills. “See that she gets into a cab.”

“It’d be a pleasure.”

He looked at Laura once more. She had the resilience of a pup, and the gift of melodrama found in the adolescent. A few minutes ago she faced real despair — she had been betrayed by the man she was infatuated with and her own sister, and betrayed in a way she couldn’t understand, that seemed to her dirty and evil. But at sixteen, despair is too bleak and naked a thing to face in a room by itself. To be bearable it must be staged and costumed and made unrecognizable by greasepaint and spotlights. Then you could sit back and enjoy the show, and you had the satisfaction of being creator, narrator and audience all at the same time.

He went outside. Martha was standing on the sidewalk just outside the door. She wasn’t tapping her foot, but she looked as if she’d just stopped or was about to begin.

“Well?” she said.

He gave her his best smile, knowing in advance it wasn’t going to do any good.

“Well, what?”

“You might at least have taken me home first. Then you could have come back and picked her up later.”

“What?”

“The girl. The girl you were so anxious to pick up.”

“She’s the daughter of an old friend of mine. I wasn’t picking her up. I was telling her to go home, she’s just a kid.”

A streetcar roared up and hissed to a stop like a well-trained dragon. It opened its mouth, swallowed a few people in a good-natured way, dropped a few more as leavings from its other end, belched, and bolted on again. Its antenna shuddered and gave off fiery crackles. The cars scurried past, trying to get ahead of it before it stopped and swallowed them, too.

Steve thought he saw the old lady who’d been on the bus with them. She was smiling, happy in captivity in the dragon’s bowels.

But of course he couldn’t be sure.

“If she’s just a kid, why is she in a place like that?”

“For a thrill, maybe.”

“I don’t believe it.” She began walking away from him. She had nice hips and good legs, but she didn’t walk gracefully. She was too businesslike about it: Let’s have no shilly-shallying. Walking is putting one foot in front of the other. Well, let’s get on with it.

He followed her without hurry. He didn’t care whether he caught up with her or not. If he did catch up, he might be tempted to tell her the girl had been Laura, and that wouldn’t do anybody any good.

She stopped, waited for him.

“I’m beginning to think my mother was right about you. You’re a lady-killer.”

He saw a cruising cab and whistled for it. They got in and sat carefully apart.

“You can’t help yourself,” she said. “You’ve got to chase skirts, and as soon as you grab one, you have nothing but contempt.”

“If it’s sleazy material, yes.”

“And I am, I suppose?”

“No, darling. Sleazy implies cheap silk. You’re not cheap and you’re not silk. You’re all wool, finest grade, tightest weave, hand-loomed. A nice piece of goods, but you make me sweat, darling.”

“Stop calling me darling.”

“All right.”

They both looked blindly out of their respective windows.

She’s a jealous woman.

He’s a skirt-chaser.

She distrusts me in every way, even when I tell her the truth.

He’s a liar. Charley at least isn’t a liar or a skirt-chaser.

Martha and I never have anything to talk about. Even Bea and I can talk together, and Bea laughs when I’m funny, which is something, which is a great deal, in fact.

Charles would never humiliate me in front of a waiter by trying to be humorous.

But I couldn’t go to bed with Bea. There’s something sexless about her.

But Charles would humiliate me at home. I admit that.

Martha isn’t sexless, God, no.

If Steve had some of Charles’s good qualities...

If Bea looked like Martha.

If...

If.

“Martha.” He held her hand, stroking the long white fingers. “Do you still want to marry me?”

“What?”

He repeated the question, aware that she had heard it the first time, but didn’t have an answer ready.

“I... of course I do.”

“I thought perhaps you’d changed your mind.”

“Did you?”

“Didn’t you, a couple of times tonight?”

“Not exactly. I mean, sometimes you confuse me. I don’t know what you’re going to do next. I think I understand Charles better than I do you.”

“Does that matter?” Her hand still lay in his. Sometimes, when they were making love, her hands seemed boneless and soft as cotton, fragile as a bat’s wing. But now they were heavy as lead, big capable hands useful for scrubbing or gardening or wringing a chicken’s neck. They gave the lie to the softness of her eyes and the gentle molding of her mouth. Here, the hands implied, is what Martha is really like — practical. She will never do what won’t be best for herself in the long run. She’s no passion’s child. Going to bed with you was a novelty, a banquet after a series of sketchy lunches with Charles. But don’t kid yourself — Martha prefers her food real. Spaghetti’s more filling than sex. Both were nice, though.

“If we’re going to be married,” he said, “we’d better make a few plans.”

“Plans?”

“The things we made last night, remember? You were to go out and ask Charles for a divorce. You screwed up that little plan, so let’s make some more.”

“You use some of the vilest language.”

“If you were really a little lady, darling, you wouldn’t know it was vile.”

“I never swear, and you know it.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, darling. Do you honestly think in that cute little brain of yours that it’s a virtue not to swear?”

“If you’ve got such a great brain why don’t you go and make something of yourself?”

“Like Charles?” he said dryly.

“You needn’t be so contemptuous of Charles. His position requires a great deal of intelligence.”

“Charles’s position would bore me to death. Besides, you’re forgetting I was away for a few years, a little matter of a war. I thought I’d better take a long rest. In bed.”

“You’ve got your rest. Now what?”

“Now I take my fifteen hundred dollars and twenty-two cents and buy an old car and get my job back on the paper. I’ll make enough to support us if you’re careful, and maybe we can afford a child next year. If we get a two-bedroom apartment, your mother and Laura can live with us. It’ll be a bit crowded, but then we’re so crazy about each other, I’m sure a little crowding won’t matter.”

She was silent.

“Nothing will matter except that we have each other, eh, Martha?”

He wasn’t certain whether he was being serious or ironic or both. But Martha was. She swooped down with a magnet in each hand and picked out the irony.

“Oh, stop your fooling,” she said harshly.

“I’m not fooling. What did you expect when you married me? — that we’d live with Charley and call him uncle?”

“I hadn’t thought about it.”

“Look, Martha, you wanted to marry me before on any terms...”

“You backed out.”

“And now you’re backing out.”

They had reached the end of Jane Street. Steve said to the driver, “We’ll get out here.”

While he was being paid, the cab driver looked them both over without curiosity. He realized vaguely that they’d been quarreling, but he hadn’t heard a word of the quarrel. He saw too many people to have any real interest in them. People were, after all, just people. They all did the same things. They got up in the morning, dressed, ate, talked, worked, undressed, made love, slept, and finally died, leaving room for some more people. No matter how hard they tried, their distinctions were slight because they had so many necessities in common. There was only one real difference: some people were women. And that was all right.

“Hot night,” he said, for a tip.

A dime. A nickel a word.

He headed back to town.

He cruised a bit, took a couple of old ladies home from a bingo game, picked up a shabby big guy about forty who was looking for a clean house. He didn’t know of any. No sir, he didn’t. You do. I don’t. You’re lying. You must be nuts. Come out here and say that, you son of a bitch. You’re goddamn right I’ll come out there and say that.

He ended up in jail. His wife bailed him out at 3 A.M. She had her hair in curlers and she was mad. She nagged him for hours. He got mad, too. He threw a lamp. The lamp cost $12.95. He cried like a baby. Never you mind, what’s a lamp anyway, his wife said, and fried him four eggs.

The big guy found a house all by himself.

The old ladies had won a blanket at the bingo game.

Laura went to bed without washing her face.

Charles dreamed he got sheet burns on both his knees.

The bartender put a dab of Lash-Lustre on his mustache.

The dragons roared amiably back to their sheds with empty bowels.

The string of beads broke as the lights went out.

An old but ever-stimulating monosyllable had been added to the walls of Luigi’s.

The night cooled off suddenly. To hell with the sun.

Chapter 20

He made love to her though neither of them intended it to happen. In fact, Martha said, “Don’t touch me, don’t come near me,” as if he were a wild beast that had to be kept at bay.

“Don’t worry,” he said wearily. “I won’t.”

“I just meant that I...”

“Whatever you meant, it’s okay with me. Shall I take you to the front door?”

“No, thanks.”

“Well, good night, then.”

The pebbles of the driveway were moist and slippery with dew. He reached down and scooped up a handful.

“When I was a kid I used to like throwing rocks,” he said. “Usually at windows. But sometimes I’d throw them at the moon. If I didn’t hear them fall some place, I figured they must be on their way to the moon. It made me feel pretty powerful. Once, though, I imagined that one of my rocks hit the king of the moon square in the eye. He was pretty mad, naturally, and came over to get me. But he got lost in space or else he’s still on his way.”

He laughed softly. “Maybe that’s the reason I don’t like to go to bed alone. It’s not that I like women. It’s because I’m afraid the king of the moon is still after me, and a woman is a magic charm for my protection.”

“Any woman, any time?”

“No, you. Now.”

He tossed the pebbles and they fell in a spray on the lawn.

“I heard them fall,” she said.

“No, you didn’t. I’m sure you didn’t.”

She was staring at the grass, trying to discern the pebbles. He put his hands on her shoulders and turned her around to face him.

“You mustn’t look for them, that’s not fair. You must take certain things on trust.”

Her eyes were black and somber in the faint light.

“Must I?” she said.

“Certain things, for a certain length of time. When I tell you the pebbles are on their way to the moon, you must believe me, if only for a minute. Tomorrow morning when the sun is up, you can crawl around on your hands and knees and gather them all up and throw them in the garbage. You can do it now if you want to. I have a box of matches.”

She stirred in his arms. She had heard the pebbles fall, and what difference did it make anyway?

“Martha,” he said, “if you asked me tonight if I would die for you, I would say, yes, gladly. But tomorrow morning, when the firing squad comes in, I’d say to hell with it. The important thing is that right now, this minute, I love you enough to die for you.”

“Words,” she said.

“Certainly, words. I can love you two ways, by actions and words. You don’t want me to touch you, so I’m telling you.”

“Well, I’d rather...” She stopped and bit her underlip.

He was regarding her dryly. “So would I rather. Will you come into my parlor?”

“No!” She stepped back out of his reach. “It wouldn’t seem right, not now.”

“It used to.”

“Well, it doesn’t now, not tonight.”

“When did it suddenly stop ‘seeming right’? When you saw Charles this morning?”

“That was the beginning.”

“And then when your mother told you what she thought of me? And again when I took you to all those nasty, nasty bars and tried to pick up a girl behind your back?”

“Did you?”

“What?”

“Try to pick her up.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“I suppose you never tried to make love to Beatrice, either?”

“That’s right. I kissed her once in a rather uncousinly fashion. She liked it all right, but I didn’t. That’s all.”

“It isn’t all. She’s crazy about you. You only have to look at her face to see that.”

“Well, you only have to look at my face to see I don’t give a damn about her. What in hell started you worrying about Beatrice?”

“I’m not worried about Beatrice. She’s just a symptom, like Laura. There must be dozens of women whose names I don’t know who are crazy about you.”

“Thousands,” he said quickly.

“I don’t know what line you hand them all, probably the same one you handed me. ‘You are my beloved, my wife.’ Your wife, my foot!”

Her viciousness caught him off guard. He felt a little sick, as if she’d suddenly hit him in the stomach when he was expecting a kiss.

He conjured up the ghost of a smile. “Did I say that? I must have been — must have been plastered.”

“Well, I never believed any of it, thank Heaven! Not even for a minute.” She mimicked his tone. ‘You must take certain things on trust, Martha, for a certain length of time.’ You and your damned talk!”

Denial was useless, but he couldn’t stop himself saying, in an incredulous voice, “You must have believed me. I meant it.”

She didn’t hear him. “You and your two-bedroom apartment! It’d be all right for you, certainly. You’d never come near the place unless you were hard up. Imagine anyone trying to domesticate you... you... you stallion!”

She stopped with her mouth open, as if she had shocked herself into silence.

“Stallions,” he said in a flat voice, “are so domesticated that they can no longer have sex relations with a mare without the aid of people. Jackrabbit would be a better name. Or stoat. There’s only one name for you, though. You’re a bitch.”

She began to cry, holding her face tight against the sleeve of his coat.

“Now you’re a crocodile,” he said, quite gently.

“I don’t know — why I said those things — I...”

“You said them because you thought them.”

“No, no. I...”

“And you’re confused, darling. We’re both confused.” His mouth touched her hair. “We’re caught in a trap and we can’t get out without hurting ourselves. But it doesn’t matter, don’t cry, it doesn’t matter. We’ll get out. Don’t worry. We’ll go away together.” He stroked her hair. “We’ll go away before Charles comes back. You don’t have to have an apartment. We could get a house. Would you like that, darling?”

She rubbed her face up and down his coat sleeve in agreement. “A house...”

“Charles will give you a divorce. He won’t try to keep you if he knows you love somebody else. As you do, don’t you?”

She nodded again.

“A house in the country, maybe, where you could have a garden. You like gardens, don’t you? And look, you don’t have to have a kid if you don’t want to, if you’re afraid it would grow up like me.” He smiled, feeling the sting of tears in his eyes. “Don’t cry, darling, everything’s going to be swell. We’ll have a wonderful life.”

They both believed it for a whole minute.

“She’ll be surprised,” Charles said. “Don’t you think she’ll be surprised, Forbes?”

“Yeah, I do.” Forbes kept his eyes on the road ahead. His hands were gentle on the steering wheel. It was the last time he would drive the little car, and he was saying goodbye to it as if it were his dog, reassuring it by petting, and wondering if the new owners would be kind to it and feed it properly. The car had been as real a factor in his life as if it had had blood instead of oil running through its veins. He had treated it right; it was healthy and full of beans, and though its heart was mechanical and could be stopped at will, it couldn’t always be started at will. It beat for some people and not for others. Pearson, for instance, couldn’t handle the car any better than he could his wife. His manner toward them both was too timid and half-hearted, as if he expected them to meet him halfway.

“Maybe you should have phoned her,” Forbes said. “Women don’t like to be surprised.”

“Don’t they?” Charles murmured.

“Not that I know anything about it, but I read once, women don’t like to be surprised.”

Charles was amused. Whenever Forbes talked of women, he herded them all together, threw a rope around them and retreated to a safe distance to observe. At that distance they lost their distinctions and became as mysteriously active and alike as a box of ants. Forbes had once read or been told that women didn’t like to be surprised, and he accepted it as a fact because it made as much sense as anything else about a group of people as completely incomprehensible to him as women.

“Some of them do,” Charles said absently.

They had reached the outskirts of the city. The billboards and gas stations and hot dog stands and cocktail lounges and steak houses were multiplying in heterogeneous profusion like a mixture of small animals that had been bred artificially in a lab to produce hybrids. Hot-dog stands that looked like schoolhouses turned out to be cocktail lounges. Gas stations sold road maps and chocolate bars, fresh flowers and contraceptives, provided pinball machines, clean rest rooms, free literature on Christian Science, and information on all subjects from food to hair tonic.

Here and there a church spire rose in contemptuous dignity above all this squalid mismating.

They passed one now. The bells were ringing and some people were standing on the lawn outside, stiff as statues, as if the rigidity of mind and purpose that was required once a week by their religion had extended to their bodies. Every Sunday morning they climbed into their iron suits and clanged away to church with righteous noise, looking narrowly through their visors at the ungodly and the other-godly.

“What time is it?” Charles said.

“Nine.”

Nine o’clock Sunday morning on a summer day. It seemed good to Charles, a good time to start all over, to begin a new life.

“It’d be kind of nice to be religious,” Forbes said. “You wouldn’t feel so much responsibility for yourself, you know. It’s like passing the buck to Jesus. But me, I’m not built for it. I’m a moral man. I don’t have to have any morals read to me out of a book by some little squirt with his collar on backwards, who couldn’t make a living any other way than by shooting off his mouth.”

Charles thought, the ungodly, too, peer through visors.

“An uncle of mine got religion,” Forbes said. “He went out to California and became a monk in one of those new religious places. They milked him of all his money and he died in an asylum. They have a lot of places like that in California. Maybe the sun goes to their heads out there.”

“As someone has already said, it’s the last point west for the desperate. After California, comes the Pacific Ocean.”

Perhaps he would take Martha there some day for a holiday. She had always said she didn’t care to travel, but he realized now that it was because she never had traveled. She was a little afraid, just as she used to be afraid of eating in restaurants because she wasn’t accustomed to it.

He must be careful how he approached her though. There was no use asking, “Would you like to go to California?” She would instinctively refuse. He must be more definite about it and decisive. “Come on, we’re going to California.” She was, in many respects, like a child. Children function better within clean-cut boundaries and rules; given their choice about everything, they lose the ability to make a choice at all. The possible and the impossible become equally possible, and in this confusion they must be guided.

He would be firmer, much firmer about everything. Money, for instance. She wasn’t extravagant by nature, but she had been spending money recklessly the past year and they had lived beyond his income. It was entirely his fault, he admitted. He wanted her to have everything and he had set her no limits. Consequently, she had spent the money without thought and probably without pleasure. Her checkbooks were always in a mess, and she never knew within a thousand dollars how much money she had in her account because she never bothered to open her bank statements. She piled them all up, neatly and in order of date, in a corner of her desk. He smiled, thinking of how orderly she was even about bank statements that she had no intention of reading.

Perhaps he would give her an allowance every month, or they would have a simple discussion of the facts. My income is... My assets are... My liabilities are...

He hadn’t the faintest doubt that she would be reasonable. She might even enjoy saving money. He’d frequently suspected her of being a little stingy.

A trip to California; a firm hand; an allowance — small pegs to hang a future on, but he was confident, and sure, not of her, but of himself. He had one fact in his favor: his profound conviction that his marriage was the core of his existence. It was necessary to preserve it, no matter how many personal sacrifices he had to make or how many petty spites and triumphs he had to forego.

He was aware that the most difficult part would be to stop himself from worrying about whether she loved him, or cease carrying around inside his head the little scales on which he weighed her feeling for him down to the last ounce. He must destroy the scales, accept it as a reality that she didn’t, and couldn’t love him as much as he loved her; and then go on from there to have as good a life as possible.

The really important thing was that she didn’t love anyone else. On that small negation he based his hopes.

“I still think,” Forbes said, “that the sun has something to do with it.”

Charles blinked. “With what?”

“Making people buggy in California.”

“All right.”

“Could be rays. Cosmic rays, maybe.”

“It could.”

Charles opened the window to let the sun in. Charged with cosmic rays and hope, it shot through the dust of the city.

Nine-thirty, but the house was quiet, and the blinds drawn like lids over sleeping eyes.

“You can take the luggage around to the back,” Charles said. “I want to go in alone.”

He got out, and the car slid away from behind him with anxious haste.

Perhaps Martha wasn’t awake yet, he thought. Mrs. Putnam and Lily would be at church, of course. Mrs. Putnam was a Presbyterian and Lily was a Lutheran, but they went together to church, one Sunday to the Lutheran Church and the next Sunday to the Presbyterian. During the week they argued, sometimes quite bitterly, and once Charles was called in to arbitrate. “Religion,” he told them, “is a matter of the heart.” He hadn’t any idea what he meant, if anything, but it sounded good to Lily and Mrs. Putnam and they used it whenever they were at a loss for a rebuttal.

A matter of the heart. One of those simple phrases that could, with the proper inflection, sound convincing and profound. Suitable for any occasion. Everything, my dear Martha, is a matter of the heart.

He went up the steps of the porch, feeling that he had been away a long time and that no one expected him ever to come back.

The door was unlocked. For that he felt pathetically grateful. It was a welcome, and he would have liked to believe that every night Martha left the door unlocked in case he should come home unexpectedly. Of course he didn’t believe it. Brown had merely forgotten to lock up, or else Mrs. Putnam had unlocked the door before she left for church.

He went inside the house quietly. There was a faint odor of flowers in the hall and the door into the drawing room was shut. It reminded him of a funeral, with the corpse lying in state behind the closed door, smothered in the ominous sweetness of flowers.

“Martha,” he shouted suddenly. “Martha, it’s me!”

The house sprang into action, as if he’d shouted, “Fire!”

Brown came out of the kitchen, grinning from ear to ear, and Laura flew down the stairs, crying, “Charley! Hey, Mother, Martha! Charley’s home!”

She hugged him and told him all in one breath that he looked wonderful, having a tan suited him, she herself, though, was not going to have a tan this year, it was passé, for a woman she meant, not for a man.

“Where’s Martha?”

“I don’t think she’s up yet,” Laura said.

He mounted the steps, two at a time. His body felt feather-light, he could easily run up and down steps all day if he had a reason.

But he hesitated outside her door, not knowing whether he should pursue his new policy of being firm, walking in as if he had as much right to enter this room as she had; or whether to act natural and rap on the door first.

She settled it by saying in a weak and incredulous voice, “Charles? Is that you, Charles?”

He went in. She was brushing her hair with nervous, faltering strokes as if she had just picked up the brush for something better to do. Everything in the room was the way he remembered it, except that the mirror was broken.

He walked toward her with a slowness that indicated not reluctance but a deliberate postponement of pleasure.

“Are you glad to see me?”

“Yes, I...”

“Well, say it then.”

“I’m glad to see you, Charles.”

“Sorry to bother you,” Forbes said. “I just want to pick up a couple of things I left.”

“That’s all right,” Steve said. “Make yourself at home.”

“Thanks.” Forbes noticed that the bed wasn’t made and two empty suitcases were lying open on top of it. “Going somewhere?”

“Maybe.”

“Holiday?”

“Not exactly. I’m waiting to hear from somebody.”

“A dame, I bet,” Forbes said slyly.

“As you say, a dame. I think, though, I’m wasting my time.”

“She doesn’t want to go along, eh?”

“She wants to, but she won’t. She’s got a husband.”

“That’s bad. Did you come across a calabash pipe anywhere?”

“It’s in the kitchen.”

Forbes went and got the pipe. When he returned Steve said, “I see Mr. Pearson’s home.”

“That’s right.”

“He’s okay again, then?”

“He’s as okay as he’ll ever be, I guess. He’s got bad nerves.”

“Oh.”

“Did you by any chance come across a couple of books?”

“They’re in the case.”

“Thanks.”

He picked the books out of the bookcase and went to the door.

“Well, I hope she turns up.”

“So do I.”

“Must be a tricky thing for a woman to decide.”

“Very tricky, yes.”

They shook hands as if they were drinking a toast to all tricky decisions.

“But are you really glad?”

“Of course I am, Charles.”

“It’s nice to be home.”

His eyes swept the room again. There was another change besides the broken mirror. She had put new spreads on the beds.

“Aren’t the spreads new?”

“Yes. Do you like them?”

“They’re beautiful,” he said, but he preferred the old ones. He wanted everything to be exactly the same as he’d left it, to have himself as the only change.

“That’s a new robe, too, isn’t it?”

“Yes. I bought a few things this spring.”

He wasn’t much interested in women’s clothes, but he wanted suddenly to see exactly what she had bought because it would be part of knowing exactly what she had done while he was away.

He opened the wardrobe closet. Half the dresses in it he had never seen before.

“Well,” he said smiling, “you certainly splurged.”

She returned the smile. “Yes, didn’t I?”

“They’re quite different, too. Some of them might even be called gaudy.”

“I got tired of wearing black all the time.”

“Why the sudden change?”

“Everyone’s wearing color this spring.”

“You never cared before what everyone else did,” Charles said in a reasonable tone. “Why do you care now?”

“I don’t care. I just wanted some new dresses.”

“But why?”

“I gave you my reason.”

“But it doesn’t seem to me to be a good enough reason.” This was fine, he was really being firm now just as he had sworn he would. The thing was to figure everything out neatly, then to formulate a policy and pursue it. It worked, too. Look how rattled she was getting, even frightened. While he remained perfectly calm and in control of the situation, and above all, logical.

“You buy dresses because you want them, certainly, but why did you want them?”

“Charles, for heaven’s sake, be sensible. Don’t start acting in the same old way as soon as you get home.”

The same old way. Only the most obtuse of women could fail to notice the change in him. But he wouldn’t lose his temper, he would merely continue to pursue his policy of cold, firm reasoning.

“I simply desire to get to the bottom of things,” he said. “Why did you want the dresses?”

“For heaven’s sake...”

“Did you buy them for somebody? For me, perhaps? That’s it, isn’t it, Martha? You bought them for me, to please me.” He began walking toward her while she stared at him with the most comical expression of fear. “That was frightfully nice of you, to buy the dresses to please me. I’m terribly pleased. I knew there must be a reason, a real reason, and I’m so terribly pleased that that turns out to be the reason.”

He touched her shoulders. Under the silk robe her flesh was soft and boneless as apple pulp. Eventually, if he pressed his fingers down hard enough, he would feel the core. But the fact was he had no control over his fingers. They went down, down, they couldn’t help themselves, they were caught in quicksand. Down, down, on a little elevator. The core was there, plainly. Not an apple, a peach with a peachstone. The elevator crashed to the bottom of the shaft. It was dark, bloody dark, noisy dark, because people were screaming for help. They all got out except him. He was left alone in the dark shaft. The machinery of the elevator was smashed to pieces, but it wouldn’t stop whirring and whirring around him.

He had to scream to make himself heard: “Don’t go away, Martha, come back! We could be quite happy in an elevator shaft if you only realized it, and I’ll give you an allowance.”

By and by he saw her running across the lawn.

Later, when the whirring noise stopped making him dizzy, he would go after her. No matter how far, how fast she ran, he would find her and bring her home. He would be ill, and neither of them would ever leave his room again. Soon he must start running after her, but right now... right now...

I simply desire to get to the bottom of things.

Content

Margaret Millar
Experiment in Springtime

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20