When they came home after one of those evenings, his mood seemed affectionately cheerful. He was trying to make it easier for her, she thought—and gratitude drove her to study the harder.
She expected her reward on the evening when, by some imperceptible transition, she found herself enjoying a party for the first time. She felt free to act, not by rules, but at her own pleasure, with sudden confidence that the rules had fused into a natural habit—she knew that she was attracting attention, but now, for the first time, it was not the attention of ridicule, but of admiration—she was sought after, on her own merit, she was Mrs. Taggart, she had ceased being an object of charity weighing Jim down, painfully tolerated for his sake—she was laughing gaily and seeing the smiles of response, of appreciation on the faces around her—and she kept glancing at him across the room, radiantly, like a child handing him a report card with a perfect score, begging him to be proud of her. Jim sat alone in a corner, watching her with an undecipherable glance.
He would not speak to her on their way home.
“I don’t know why I keep dragging myself to those parties,” he snapped suddenly, tearing off his dress tie in the middle of their living room, “I’ve never sat through such a vulgar, boring waste of time!”
“Why, Jim,” she said, stunned, “I thought it was wonderful.”
“You would! You seemed to be quite at home—quite as if it were Coney Island. I wish you’d learn to keep your place and not to embarrass me in public.”
“I embarrassed you? Tonight?”
“You did!”
“How?”
“If you don’t understand it, I can’t explain,” he said in the tone of a mystic who implies that a lack of understanding is the confession of a shameful inferiority.
“I don’t understand it,” she said firmly. He walked out of the room, slamming the door.
She felt that the inexplicable was not a mere blank, this time: it had a tinge of evil. From that night on, a small, hard point of fear remained within her, like the spot of a distant headlight advancing upon her down an invisible track.
Knowledge did not seem to bring her a clearer vision of Jim’s world, but to make the mystery greater. She could not believe that she was supposed to feel respect for the dreary senselessness of the art shows which his friends attended, of the novels they read, of the political magazines they discussed—the art shows, where she saw the kind of drawings she had seen chalked on any pavement of her childhood’s slums—the novels, that purported to prove the futility of science, industry, civilization and love, using language that her father would not have used in his drunkenest moments—the magazines, that propounded cowardly generalities, less clear and more stale than the sermons for which she had condemned the preacher of the slum mission as a mealy-mouthed old fraud.
She could not believe that these things were the culture she had so reverently looked up to and so eagerly waited to discover. She felt as if she had climbed a mountain toward a jagged shape that had looked like a castle and had found it to be the crumbling ruin of a gutted warehouse.
“Jim,” she said once, after an evening spent among the men who were called the intellectual leaders of the country, “Dr. Simon Pritchett is a phony—a mean, scared old phony.”
“Now, really,” he answered, “do you think you’re qualified to pass judgment on philosophers?”
“I’m qualified to pass judgment on con men. I’ve seen enough of them to know one when I see him.” “Now this is why I say that you’ll never outgrow your background. If you had, you would have learned to appreciate Dr. Pritchett’s philosophy.” “What philosophy?” “If you don’t understand it, I can’t explain.” She would not let him end the conversation on that favorite formula of his. “Jim,” she said, “he’s a phony, he and Balph Eubank and that whole gang of theirs—and I think you’ve been taken in by them.” Instead of the anger she expected, she saw a brief flash of amusement in the lift of his eyelids. “That’s what you think,” he answered.
She felt an instant of terror at the first touch of a concept she had not known to be possible: What if Jim was not taken in by them? She could understand the phoniness of Dr. Pritchett, she thought—it was a racket that gave him an undeserved income; she could even admit the possibility, by now, that Jim might be a phony in his own business; what she could not hold inside her mind was the concept of Jim as a phony in a racket from which he gained nothing, an unpaid phony, an unvenal phony; the phoniness of a cardsharp or a con man seemed innocently wholesome by comparison. She could not conceive of his motive; she felt only that the headlight moving upon her had grown larger.
She could not remember by what steps, what accumulation of pain, first as small scratches of uneasiness, then as stabs of bewilderment, then as the chronic, nagging pull of fear, she had begun to doubt Jim’s position on the railroad. It was his sudden, angry “so you don’t trust me?” snapped in answer to her first, innocent questions that made her realize that she did not—when the doubt had not yet formed in her mind and she had fully expected that his answers would reassure her. She had learned, in the slums of her childhood, that honest people were never touchy about the matter of being trusted, “I don’t care to talk shop,” was his answer whenever she mentioned the railroad. She tried to plead with him once. “Jim, you know what I think of your work and how much I admire you for it.” “Oh, really?
What is it you married, a man or a railroad president?” “I... I never thought of separating the two.” “Well, it is not very flattering to me.” She looked at him, baffled: she had thought it was. “I’d like to believe,” he said, “that you love me for myself, and not for my railroad.” “Oh God, Jim,” she gasped, “you didn’t think that I—!” “No,” he said, with a sadly generous smile, “I didn’t think that you married me for my money or my position. I have never doubted you.” Realizing, in stunned confusion and in tortured fairness, that she might have given him ground to misinterpret her feeling, that she had forgotten how many bitter disappointments he must have suffered at the hands of fortune-hunting women, she could do nothing but shake her head and moan, “Oh, Jim, that’s not what I meant!” He chuckled softly, as at a child, and slipped his arm around her. “Do you love me?” he asked. “Yes,” she whispered. “Then you must have faith in me. Love is faith, you know. Don’t you see that I need it? I don’t trust anyone around me, I have nothing but enemies, I am very lonely. Don’t you know that I need you?”
The thing that made her pace her room—hours later, in tortured restlessness—was that she wished desperately to believe him and did not believe a word of it, yet knew that it was true.
It was true, but not in the manner he implied, not in any manner or meaning she could ever hope to grasp. It was true that he needed her, but the nature of his need kept slipping past her every effort to define it. She did not know what he wanted of her. It was not flattery that he wanted, she had seen him listening to the obsequious compliments of liars, listening with a look of resentful inertness—almost the look of a drug addict at a dose inadequate to rouse him. But she had seen him look at her as if he were waiting for some reviving shot and, at times, as if he were begging. She had seen a flicker of life in his eyes whenever she granted him some sign of admiration—yet a burst of anger was his answer, whenever she named a reason for admiring him.
He seemed to want her to consider him great, but never dare ascribe any specific content to his greatness.
She did not understand the night, in mid-April, when he returned from a trip to Washington. “Hi, kid!” he said loudly, dropping a sheaf of lilac into her arms. “Happy days are here again! Just saw those flowers and thought of you. Spring is coming, baby!”