“All right, you can stand on your head as far as I’m concerned. Just stop shrieking like a fishwife. You have neighbors, neighbors have ears.”
“She insulted me. You heard her, she insulted me.”
“You insulted her first.”
“But she deserved it, she asked for it. After what she’s done to you, how can you stand there and take her part?”
“She’s my wife.”
“Wife. A fine word, but that’s all it is, a word. She’s used you, deceived you, made a fool of you. And she intended to do the same thing to me. To think I was taken in by that sweet smile of hers and that soft ‘Sit down and have a cup of tea, Marian, it will do you good.’ As if she cared. Lies, lies. The soft-talkers, they’re the worst. I’ve been taken in by them before. You’d think I’d have learned my lesson.”
Her voice broke and spots of color blotched her face and her neck. In a moment of perception Harry realized that she was not so much angry as disappointed. She had been looking forward to having Thelma around for a while to alleviate her loneliness and lend her life a little excitement. Thelma’s visit would have meant a transfusion of vitality; now the transfusion had been stopped almost before it began. Marian had closed the valve herself: she could not accept the blood of a slut, she would prefer to die.
“The girls at the office,” Marian said, “maybe they’re silly, yes, even malicious, but there’s not one of them bad like her. Not one of them’s ever gotten into that kind of trouble.”
Harry found himself saying, without conviction, “Thelma’s not bad. She made a mistake.”
“When people make a mistake they’re sorry. They’re not proud of it like her. They don’t go around bragging about a trip to California. I want to go to California too, I’ve dreamed of it for years, but you can bet I’ll choose a more respectable way of getting there.”
“I’m sure you will.” The dry irony of his tone added, I’m sure you’ll have to.
“This man she called Ron. Who is he?”
“I’m afraid,” Harry said, “that it’s none of your business.”
“News like that gets around. I’ll find out.”
“I’m sure of that, too.” Not only would Marian find out. Once Ron’s disappearance hit the newsstands, the whole city, the whole country would find out, and Thelma would have to get used to stronger words than bastard and slut. Harry wondered, with weary detachment, if anyone dared print the word cuckold.
Thelma came out of the bedroom wearing the navy blue coat and hat she’d bought for Easter and carrying a rawhide suitcase which had been a wedding present from Ralph and Nancy Turee. She ignored Marian, who was standing tense, braced for the next round, and said to Harry, “I’m ready. We can go now.”
“And good riddance,” Marian said.
“The same to you.”
Harry interrupted quickly, “Come on, Thelma. I’ll take you home.”
“I’m not going home. You can drop me at a hotel.”
“The house is yours. You need it more than I do. I won’t bother you.”
“I wish you’d stop being noble. I can’t stand it!”
“I’m not being noble. It’s just that I’d feel better if I knew you were looking after yourself properly. Me, I can stay anywhere, with Ralph, or Billy Winslow or Joe Hepburn. I’m used to bumming around. You’re not. You have to take care of yourself, now more than ever.”
She bit her lip in indecision, weighing her pride against her common sense and her concern for the baby.
“I won’t bother you,” he repeated. “I’ll just take you home and pack up some of the things I’ll need.”
“All right.” Her voice was tight and squeaky. “Thank you, Harry.”
Harry took her suitcase and opened the door, and she walked out into the hall with quick, impatient steps. Harry hesitated, as if he wanted to say something pleasant to Marian before he left, but Marian had turned her back, and it was like the closing of a steel safe to which he didn’t know the combination. No one did.
Outside a spring rain had begun to fall, lightly and steadily. Neither of them seemed to notice. They walked in silence for a time, unaware of any weather but their own, inside.
“Harry?”
“Yes.”
“Where will you stay? In case anything happens and I have to get in touch with you...”
“I don’t know. I haven’t decided yet. With Ralph and Nancy, perhaps.”
“But they have four children.”
“Yes, I know,” Harry said quietly. “I like children.”
Twelve
The private day school which the two Galloway boys attended had been closed for two weeks because of an epidemic of measles. One of the ways Esther had devised to keep them busy, and presumably out of mischief, was to give them certain duties and responsibilities previously assigned only to adults. The particular duty the boys enjoyed most, since it involved a rare freedom, was that of collecting the mail. They were allowed to walk all the way down to the end of the driveway, unescorted except by the little dachshund, Petey, and wait at the gate for the postman.
When the postman handed them the day’s mail, they assumed it was a gift, and so they usually took him a gift in return, a cookie coaxed out of the housekeeper, Mrs. Browning, or a new drawing by Marvin or the prize from a box of cereal. On Monday they had a special gift for him, the first angleworm of the season, a scrawny specimen elongated by considerable handling and rather dried out after a time spent in Greg’s shirt pocket.
The boys arrived early and the postman was late, so they had plenty of opportunity to indulge in the usual arguments and fights about who was to present the gift, who was to carry the mail into the house and who was to occupy the place of honor at the top of the iron gate. But on this particular morning neither of the boys seemed inclined to fight. Their energies were directed not against each other but against the mysterious tensions which now seemed to dominate the household. The boys had not been told, or allowed to overhear, anything about their father’s absence. They had no means of understanding their mother’s strange preoccupation, Mrs. Browning’s snappishness, Annie’s sudden lapses into silence, or the unusual permissiveness of old Rudolph, the gardener who lived over the garage. Rudolph, the most continuous male contact the boys had, loomed large in their lives. When the holes Petey, the dachshund, had dug in the rose bed on Sunday afternoon were filled quietly and without comment, both of the boys realized that something was the matter.
Their reaction was instinctive. Instead of remaining brothers, each jockeying for position in the household, they became friends, joined together against the world of adults. They climbed to the top of the iron gate and stuck out their tongues in the direction of the house and chanted derisive insults.
“I’m the king of the castle,” Greg sang, and named individually the people who were dirty rascals: Annie, Mother, old Rudolph, Mrs. Browning. Marvin was all for including Daddy, but Greg reminded him sharply that Daddy had promised to bring them a new dog when he came home, and shouldn’t be listed among the dirty rascals.
“What if he forgets?” Marv said. “He’ll be a dirty rascal, then can we sing him in it too?”
“He won’t forget. He’ll bring something. He always does.”
“A cat maybe, huh? I wouldn’t say no to a cat.”
“Petey would. Petey hates cats. Petey’s a real cat-killer.”
Petey, who had never seen a cat, responded to his new, unearned distinction with a happy yelp. This settled the matter as far as the boys were concerned. They couldn’t possibly keep a cat, and if Ron brought one home by mistake they would simply hand it over to old Rudolph to trade in on a dog. Until the previous day they’d been willing to settle for any kind of dog, but now, sensing that a very large one would be more annoying to the adults, they decided on a Saint Bernard.