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.