She stepped forward, raising her arm as if to ward off more words. He caught her wrist and held it.
“Don’t worry, I wasn’t going to hurt you,” she said contemptuously.
“I wanted to be sure,” he said. “You’re a pretty big girl, you could pack a pretty big wallop.”
“You’ve probably been slapped by quite a few women.”
“Not so many.”
“Let go of me.”
He stared at her a minute. Then he held up her wrist between his thumb and forefinger and let it drop suddenly.
“You’d better start thinking about that eviction notice, Martha, because I think I’m going to stick around for a while.”
“Why?”
“Because you don’t want me to. Besides, I like it here. The atmosphere is so friendly.”
“I’m so glad you like it.”
“Let’s put it this way,” he said, turning his head away and speaking in an impersonal manner. “I want you to have your little revenge, if that’s what you can call it. I want you to get everything off your chest. Then we’ll start over.”
“We’ll...? I don’t know what you mean.”
“Yes, you do.”
Her eyes narrowed. “You’re preposterous!”
“And don’t bring up the subject of Charles. I don’t give a damn about Charles. I wouldn’t walk a block to see Charles wearing nothing but his hives.”
“I warn you, you’re not going to mess up my life again. I’m perfectly happy and I’m going to stay that way.”
“I see. Everything’s just dandy between you and Charles, is it?”
“Yes.”
“And when he gets better, he’s going to come home and you’re going to be right there at the door to welcome him and take up where you left off?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe you’ll change your mind.”
“Why should I?”
“It’s funny, but I have the impression that you don’t like him very much.”
“I love him very much.”
“Say it again.”
“I love him very much.”
“Again.”
“Damn you,” she said quietly.
When she reached her room she felt exhausted and in pain, as if someone had stripped off a layer of her skin and exposed the raw stuff underneath.
“Charles,” she wrote. “I am afraid. I want you to come home.”
Chapter 11
The next day the doctor went out to see Charles. He asked very few questions. He let Charles talk for nearly two hours, about his childhood, his mother, Martha, any little incident that occurred to him. It was only when Charles appeared too tired to continue talking that MacNeil inquired about his physical symptoms.
“Migraine still bothering you, Pearson?”
“No, it’s gone.”
“Good. Forbes looking after you all right?”
“Yes.”
“He tells me you’re eating well.”
“I am.”
“You’re feeling generally pretty good then?”
“I’m fine,” Charles said without conviction.
He hadn’t any pain, but a numbness had settled in his limbs. He lay for hours in a deck chair on the porch, muffled in sweaters and blankets, watching the lake. The constant motion of the water seemed to paralyze him, he hardly breathed. In his shroud of blankets, with his staring eyes, he looked so much like a dead man that Forbes would come out now and then to reassure himself.
“Mr. Pearson, you want your cap?”
A fretful stir under the blankets. “What?”
“Do you want your cap?”
“Cap? No. Nothing.”
A little ashamed of his apprehensions, Forbes would go back into the cottage and resume reading his book on herb cookery. Reading about food relaxed him. He was no longer young and he felt the strain of being with a sick man all the time — not the physical strain, for Charles didn’t require much care, but the mental strain of never quite knowing what to expect. Though he liked Charles, he didn’t have the sentimental fondness for him that Brown had and he had pretty well made up his mind that when the time came for Charles to return home, he wasn’t going along. He hadn’t told Charles, but Charles seemed to have guessed it as he guessed a great many things. Forbes didn’t know whether it was intuition or whether Charles simply was more observant than ordinary people.
While Dr. MacNeil was there, Forbes stayed inside the cottage, trying not to eavesdrop. But as soon as the doctor left, Forbes went out to the porch again. Charles was sitting with an unopened letter lying in his lap.
“Anything you want, Mr. Pearson?”
“No, thanks. Just leave me alone for a little while.”
“All right.”
Charles looked at the letter with resentment because it had intruded on his privacy. She had followed him even here — she had no decency, no sense...
“Dear Charles.” How strangely incongruous her writing was, he thought. Timid, fearful little letters bunched together as if for protection. The capitals were hardly larger than the other letters. He wondered why he’d never noticed this before and whether it meant anything.
When he finished reading the letter, he looked out over the lake again. “I am afraid, I want you to come home.” The sincerity of the words was obvious. Even her writing had changed at this point; it was larger and so erratic that it seemed each letter must have been made by a different person.
Afraid? Naturally she was. She was afraid of gossip, of her reputation. It was not her fear that was extraordinary, it was her confession of it, and, above all, her appeal to him. She never appealed to him for anything. She might make a request, but if he refused, she took his refusal as final, she didn’t coax or become coy or tearful. It was one of the traits he admired in her, yet it was also the one that hurt him most — she didn’t consider it worthwhile to manage him or jolly him along or even to quarrel with him. The face she presented to him was invulnerable: You can’t help or hurt me, Charles. There seemed to be no way of getting at her, or penetrating the layers of coldness which protected her from any emotional involvement with other people, even her own husband. This was her stock-in-trade, a complete lack of reaction which made people feel inadequate and ineffectual.
She is invulnerable, Charles thought, because I can get no reaction from her but a cold acceptance of cold facts. And the invulnerability is not so much a particular quality in her, but the particular quality in other people which makes human reactions necessary to them. Few of us can realize we are alive unless we read it in the faces of others. A smile, a frown, a lifted eyebrow, a kiss, an exclamation — these are the signs, and not our own heartbeats, that we are alive. So what people like Martha do is to strike at our instinct for self-preservation and make us afraid. We are both afraid, Martha.
But why the sudden confession? Had she simply wakened up one morning and realized that she was getting nothing from life and that her youth and beauty were slipping slowly into the past? She had never before given any sign of such a realization. She spent her days as if she had already lived her life and was merely marking time until the end. She worked in the garden, she dusted books and emptied ashtrays, she went to an occasional movie with Laura or out to dinner with him. She didn’t enjoy going out to dinner, she was always ill-at-ease and ate scarcely anything. This had puzzled him, for at home she had a good appetite. It took him some time to discover that she was shy about eating in public. No, it was more than shyness, it was a kind of shame, as if she hated to let other people know that she, too, was subject to the demands of the body.
Or perhaps it was merely that she wasn’t accustomed to eating in restaurants. “You must realize, Charles, how hard I tried to accustom myself to a new way of life and how humiliating it was sometimes.”