“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.