In his imagination this proposal always took place outdoors somewhere, although of course that would be too public. Could he be thinking of a park? The nearest park was several blocks from home. He pushed away the outdoor images and in the mornings, while he sat with his orange juice and she poured cornflakes, he tried to think of some natural way to lead in to what was on his mind. He couldn’t. Mary talked about her daughter and the weather and library books, nothing more personal. “Now Darcy is shooting out of all her clothes. I’ve never seen a child grow the way she does. I thought as soon as I got a job I would buy some material and borrow Mrs. Jarrett’s sewing machine, but sewing has never been my strong point and I’m not at all sure that I—” How could he bring love into a conversation like that? She gave him no openings. He sometimes thought that she might be sending him some silent warning, telling him not to ask even the simplest things that occurred to him: Where do you come from? Why are you here? Who was your husband? What are your plans?
“At home Darcy used to beg for cornflakes,” Mary said once. “I’ve never seen a child so contrary.”
“Where was that?” Jeremy asked her.
“What?”
“Where was your home?”
“Oh, well — and now she wants bacon and eggs, wouldn’t you know? I believe she just thinks up these things to devil me.”
Jeremy didn’t press her. He contented himself with the surface that she presented to the world, and it was only inside him that the questions continued. What happened to your husband? Why did you cry with that man John? What is his significance?
Will you marry me?
Now each morning that he failed to propose he saw them to the door, tagging after them in the hope that somewhere along the way — in the dining room, the hall, the vestibule — he might gather his courage. He took to going out on the steps and waving after them. “Goodbye! Goodbye! Have a nice walk!” Turning back afterward was worse than being left in the kitchen. He always felt oppressed by the sudden dark coolness as he stepped inside. He started accompanying them farther — to the second house, to the third. Maybe, given time, he could follow Mary all the way off his island. Gradually: wasn’t that the key? Oh, if there were any god he believed in, it was gradualness! If people would only let him go at things his own way, step by step, never requiring these sudden leaps that seem to happen in the outside world! But every day he was overtaken by some magnetic force that seemed to affect only him. It dragged him back with a tug at his spine; it caused him to slow and then to halt, damp with exhaustion. “Goodbye! Goodbye! Have a nice walk!” Mary and Darcy waved and grew smaller. They separated cheerfully at the approach of total strangers, they talked aloud without fear of being heard, they crossed the wide street against the light. Dogs with enormous grinning mouths sniffed at Mary’s skirt and she never even noticed. Oh, he had undertaken too much. He could never keep up with a woman like that. He turned and trudged homeward, stumbling over cracks in the sidewalk and muttering words of encouragement to himself, and before he started the day’s work he had to lie on the couch in his studio a while catching his breath and trying to still the twitching of his leg muscles.
It seemed to him that his sisters were always calling him on the telephone nowadays. “What are you doing, Jeremy, why haven’t we heard from you? Are you getting out more? Are you eating right?” They no longer phoned only on Sundays but occasionally on weekday evenings as well, on Saturdays and in the middle of lunch. Then one morning they called so early that he was still in the kitchen with Mary and Darcy. “Jeremy, honey, this is Laura,” he heard, and although he had always felt close to Laura he was conscious now of a sudden impatience tightening his fingers on the receiver. In the kitchen Darcy said something and Mary laughed. There was no telling what he was missing. “Is there something — what seems to be the matter?” he asked her.
“Matter? I was just worried about you, dear. You haven’t answered our last letter.”
“But I don’t believe I received any letter this week,” he told her. Then, too late, he remembered the flowered envelope that he had absently stuck in his shirt pocket on the way upstairs the other day. It was probably in the bathroom hamper. “He says he didn’t get any letter,” Laura told Amanda. To Jeremy she said, “Honestly, they can fly to Europe but they can’t get a simple note from Richmond to Baltimore. Well, I knew there was some explanation. Now here is Amanda to say a few words. Amanda?”
“How do you seem to be getting along, Jeremy,” Amanda’s voice said very close to his ear.
“Oh, fine, thank you.”
“I told Laura there was no need to call but she said she had a funny feeling, she gets them more and more these days. Any fool should know you can’t trust the U.S. mail.”
Jeremy stood up straighter. It always occurred to him, when talking on the telephone, that to people at the other end of the line he was invisible. Except for the thin thread of his voice he did not even exist. “Jeremy!” Amanda said sharply, and he said, “Yes, I’m here”—reassuring both himself and her.
“Labor Day is coming up, Jeremy.”
“Oh, yes, is it?”
“Maybe you could make the trip to see us.”
“Well, Amanda …”
“Now I don’t want to go over three minutes here but I’m sending you a train schedule. Let’s not hear any excuses, Jeremy. Why, you’ll just love travel, once you catch on to it. And you don’t want to spend your life just sitting home now, do you. Mother wouldn’t have approved of that at all, she would have wanted you to get out and enjoy yourself.”
He knew that his sisters were all that was left of the world he had grown up with, his only remaining connection with his parents, but sometimes when Amanda spoke of their mother it seemed she meant someone he didn’t even know in passing — someone stern and rigid, not his own sweet-faced mother with her soft, sad smile. “Well, you see,” he said, “I do try to—”
“I have to run, Jeremy. Do please answer our letters, you know how Laura worries.”
“All right, Amanda.”
He laid the receiver carefully in its cradle. There was a damp mark where his hand had been. He went back to the kitchen and found Mary just sponging Darcy’s face, with breakfast finished. He had missed everything. His chances were over until tomorrow. “I’m going to the grocery,” Mary told him. “Do you want anything?”
His despair was so enormous that it gave him courage. He said, “Oh, why, several things. Perhaps I should come along.”
Mary only nodded. She was frowning at a stain on Darcy’s collar. “Oh, Darcy, look at you, it’s your last clean dress,” she said.
“I don’t care about an old stain.”
“Well, I do. Come along then.”
Words kept rearranging themselves in Jeremy’s head. May I have the honor—? Could you possibly consider—? Is it asking too much for you to marry me? But once they were descending the front steps the only conversation he could think of was an exaggerated squint toward the sun, implying a remark about the weather. Mary didn’t look up. She was reading her grocery list. “I’m going to get a gumball,” Darcy said. “Am I going to get a gumball, Mom? I’m going to get a penny for the gumball machine.”
“I wasn’t aware they had a gumball machine,” said Jeremy.
“Oh yes,” Darcy said. “Perry’s does.”