That much was true. She had worked hard and persistently but she had worked to make herself into the kind of wife she thought he should have, not the kind he wanted. Once, at the beginning of their marriage, he had intimated that he liked her the way she was and didn’t want her to change.
She had looked at him in bewilderment and disbelief. “But I’ve got so much to learn. I don’t want to disgrace you.”
He laughed. “Where on earth do you get your ideas, Martha? From Henry James?”
She knew who Henry James was, but she hadn’t read him. The scene, which had begun with a declaration of love, had ended up with her reading aloud from The Ambassadors.
Lord, he thought, I should have grabbed her. I should have smacked her over the head with the damn book and made love to her.
Instead, he had gone to sleep. When he woke up, she was still reading, and though she must have known he’d been asleep she didn’t say anything about it. She ignored it in the way you ignored the social lapses of a guest — a belch, a yawn, a dropped dish. Yet he had the feeling that her behavior wasn’t prompted by good manners but was intended, instead, as a denial of intimacy.
She treated him, most of the time, with a formality that made him too conscious of the difference in their ages. The difference was only nine years, and shouldn’t have mattered. But it rankled with Charles. His sterility made him oversensitive and overcritical of himself, and he worried constantly over the fact that he had married a healthy woman so much younger than himself and couldn’t even give her any children.
His attitude toward her became more and more apologetic. When he went to her room at night he always knocked at the door and waited for her permission to come in. If she intimated that she was tired or had a headache, he left immediately without kissing her good night, feeling that he had blundered in some way and that she despised him for being sterile.
On the occasions when he did stay, however, she was helpful and cooperative, so cooperative that it was months before he understood that she was modest to the point of morbidity, that it was agony for her to undress in front of him. He couldn’t understand why anyone with so beautiful a body should be ashamed of it.
“You’re lovely,” he told her. “You’re perfectly lovely.”
“No, no, I’m not.”
“You’re the most beautiful woman...”
“No.” She closed her eyes and turned away from him.
“Stay like that a minute,” he said. “You remind me of a painting I’ve seen. It’s a Venus by Velasquez, in the National Gallery in London.”
“Don’t be silly, Charles,” she said sharply.
The next day he bought a reproduction of Velasquez’s Venus and took it home to her. She liked the picture, but told him flatly that it was absurd of him to think she looked like that.
The picture helped, however. Martha seemed a little less embarrassed in front of him, and not so brusque when he paid her compliments. She still didn’t believe them, but he got the impression she was more ready to be convinced.
He should have kept on trying, of course, not to get her over her self-consciousness but to make her more conscious of herself as she really was. It struck him as ridiculous that what vanity she had was hung on qualities she hadn’t. She was perfectly willing to admit that she had a good brain and a strong character.
“I don’t believe in physical beauty,” she told him. “It’s ephemeral.”
He began to laugh, he couldn’t help himself.
She was instantly suspicious. “What’s so funny?”
“I don’t know. Everything, I suppose.”
“That was the right word, wasn’t it? Ephemeral?”
“Yes. Oh, Lord, yes.”
“Well?”
He couldn’t explain why he was laughing.
She was at least consistent in her attitude. Her clothes were sober and functional, and when Laura entered college and began wearing the regulation baggy sweaters and saddle shoes, Martha approved. She said she thought the younger generation dressed more sensibly than her own.
Though she wasn’t overtly affectionate toward Laura, she was very proud of her. Laura had brains; Laura was going to have all the opportunity that she, Martha, had never had; Laura was going to make a name for herself in the world (whether she wanted to or not, her tone implied).
Amused and a little awed by her determination, Charles had talked it over with Laura.
“Well, that’s all right,” Laura said. “I intend to, anyway. Be somebody, I mean.” She added casually, “I may as well, since I’m never going to get married.”
“Why not?”
“Oh, marriage makes people old. Look at you and Martha. I mean, what do you get out of it?”
He intended to pass it off with a smile, but he found himself saying soberly, “I don’t quite know.”
“I mean, you and Martha are certainly a Horrible Example. Of what happens when people get married.”
“Are we? Go on.”
“No, I won’t. You’re getting mad.”
“I am not. I swear on my honor I am not mad!”
She refused to talk about it anymore. She merely said, in her most bored voice, “You’re kind of a good egg, Charley.”
He felt overwhelmingly flattered. “You’re not so bad yourself.”
“Do you think, when I get older I mean, that I’ll be as pretty as Martha?”
“I think it’s very likely.”
“I don’t. I keep getting these ghastly ickies. One after another. It makes me sick to my very core.”
“I presume my advanced age has affected my eyesight, but I can’t see any ickies.”
“You would, if I washed my face. Naturally I don’t go around advertising them.”
Charles smiled. “In spite of these grave obstacles in the path of beauty, I think you’ll do all right.”
“Now you’re kidding me.”
“No, I’m not. And I hope... well, I hope that some day you’ll be very happy as well as pretty.”
She gaped up at him. “What a funny thing to say. As if you were on the verge of crying or something.”
“I hope not,” he said.
It was only a month or so after that, early in April, that he came home with an agonizing headache and went straight to bed.
Martha came up to see him. “Brown told me you have one of your bad heads.”
“Pretty bad.”
“Why don’t you take the stuff the doctor gave you?”
“It wouldn’t do any good.”
He turned away and closed his eyes to indicate that he didn’t want to talk.
She went on, anyway. “How can you tell, if you never try anything? Mother had some headache tablets but I know you wouldn’t take them. It’s just as if you enjoyed having a headache.”
“Oh, for God’s sake.”
“Don’t swear. It’s so childish.”
“All right, all right. You win.”
She brought him a glass of water and two tablets, which he swallowed. She still didn’t go away, so he pretended he was asleep. She pulled the covers up to his shoulders and kissed him on the forehead.
Then quite suddenly she jabbed him viciously in the stomach with her fist. He screamed and she threw sand in his mouth. He doubled up with pain and she thrust a knife between his shoulder blades. And all the time her face never changed expression. It was exquisitely gentle and remote, her voice was a love-whisper: “Oh, Charles, does it hurt? Oh, I’m sorry if it hurts, Charles. We’ll try this instead,” she said and slit his eyelids expertly with her thumbnail.
“Wake up, Mr. Pearson,” Forbes said. “It’s time for lunch.”
“I’ve been dreaming,” Charles said, but he wasn’t sure where the dream had begun.