“What’s the trouble, baby,” he called, from the front room where he sat in the wheel chair with the afghan over his shrunken legs. “Was that Gerald?”
“It was indeed,” his daughter said, striding into the room. She looked over at her father hatefully. “He must be either drunk or insane. He knew very well that I’ve planned the outing for this afternoon. How he can dare, at the last minute…”
“He’s unable to come up?”
For a moment Maryjane stared at him, as though aware for the first time that he was in the room. Her small, sharp face was bitter and the thin mouth was drawn tight as her pale eyes looked him slowly up and down.
“No excuses-nothing,” she said. “Just called and said not to expect him this week end. As though he didn’t know that I’ve been planning for weeks now…”
“Perhaps he’s ill,” the old man said. “You know how it is sometimes, a man…”
“Oh, God, I know all right,” Maryjane said. “Don’t think I could have been around here for the last dozen years waiting on you hand and foot without knowing. But he isn’t ill. There’s nothing wrong with Gerald. He just merely called and said he wasn’t coming up. And when I very politely asked him why he wasn’t, he didn’t say a thing for so long that I had to repeat my question. And then do you know what?”
She stopped for a minute as she stared at her father and her eyes narrowed.
“He said that he damned well didn’t want to come. Can you imagine? Gerald Hanna-said that he damned well didn’t want…”
She sputtered and stopped speaking then, her face suffused with color and her slender, reedy body shaking in anger and frustration.
“The boy must have been drinking,” Swiftwater said. “Perhaps…”
“Please don’t be a fool. Father,” Maryjane said. “Gerald drinking! The very idea is preposterous.”
“Well, then maybe he meant what he said,” the old man said, taking his eyes away from his daughter and staring out of the window. “Maybe he’s finally getting tired of waiting, getting tired of having you postpone…”
She swung toward him swiftly and for a second it looked almost as though she was going to strike him.
“Gerald knows very well why we must wait,” she said. “And certainly you, of all people, can’t accuse me of postponing or procrastinating. As long as I have you to take care of, and Gerald must send money home to his family, marriage is out of the question. Gerald knows it and he agrees with me.”
For a long moment the old man looked at his daughter and then slowly shook his head.
“Baby,” he said, his voice tired and old, “baby, you know better than that. Nothing stands in the way of you and Gerald getting married except you yourself. I can manage to get by all right. I’ve got my pension and I can go to a home…”
“No father of mine is going to go to a home so long as I can work,” Maryjane said. “Just stop talking foolishness. Anyway, Gerald still has to send money home and he makes so pitifully little.”
Once more the old man shook his head.
“I won’t argue with you, baby,” he said. “You know the truth as well as I do. I’d be happier in a home and no matter how little Gerald makes, you two could get along if you really wanted to. You’re like your mother-you’re afraid. You’re afraid of marriage and what marriage means. You want a husband but you don’t…”
Maryjane turned and started for the door. She yelled the words in a thin high voice over her shoulder as she left the room.
“You’re a miserable old man,” she said. “You have a bad mind. You don’t understand; you just don’t understand anything…”
She was crying as she ran up the stairs and slammed the door of her bedroom.
Flinging herself on the white counterpane of the single four-poster bed, she doubled her fists and pounded the mattress at her sides.
“They’re all dirty-all men,” she said in a high, tight voice. “Vile, lecherous, filthy…”
The words ended in a hysterical series of sobs as she lay staring up at the ceiling with the tears flowing from her half-closed eyes.
She didn’t quite know how or why, but she just assumed that once they were man and wife, his masculinity would no longer frighten and shock her.
She never thought of herself as being cold or frigid; she merely thought of herself as decent and proper. She knew all about sex, having read considerable material on the subject, but it was a knowledge obtained solely from books. In fact, she prided herself on her open-mindedness and her intellectual approach to something which she considered to be, after all, a minor part of the relationship between a man and a woman.
She never did know how she’d happened to let him talk her into agreeing to spend the week end at the lodge up in Saratoga. The place was owned by a friend of Gerald’s and he told her that his friend and his friend’s wife had asked them both up over the week end. They drove up, leaving on Friday night.
It was a small, weather-beaten shanty, a sort of hunting cabin, up in the mountains above the town and they went up late in the fall when the weather was brisk and clear and very cold at night. He’d been there before and he had no difficulty in finding the place in spite of the lonely back roads leading to it. They arrived near midnight-finding the cabin completely dark.
She hadn’t suspected anything at first, had merely assumed that Gerald’s friends had tired of waiting for them and retired. Gerald had taken their bags from the car and gone to the front door and let himself in, using a key that he carried. The place was empty and he explained that their hosts were probably late getting away from the city and had not arrived as yet.
There was a fire already laid in the great field-stone fireplace, which covered one wall of the room, and Gerald had lighted it. Then, while she warmed herself and took off her coat, he went into the kitchen and made a pot of hot coffee.
She was chilled through and the steaming coffee was welcome. Immediately she noticed the peculiar taste and Gerald explained that he’d laced it with brandy. She protested, as she almost never drank, but he’d insisted. It was odd the effect the drink had on her. It seemed to go through her veins like fire, warming her and making her pleasantly drowsy. He hadn’t had to argue about her taking a second cup.
Later, when she came to think about it, she realized that those two drinks had actually made her half drunk. It was while she was finishing that second cup that Gerald had confessed to her. The people who owned the cabin were not coming up. They would be alone in the place.
The strange thing was that she had argued only feebly. She knew of course that she should have insisted and that they left at once. She should have been furious at his deception. But the fact was she was very tired from the drive and she hated to face the thought of the long, lonely road back. She hated to leave the warm comfort of the place.
He had pulled the great bear rug from the couch and thrown it on the floor in front of the fireplace and she stretched out on it, half dozing in front of the flickering flames. She was only half conscious of his sitting beside her, holding her head in his lap as he talked with her. She was very drowsy, and the brandy was making her sleepy so she only half listened as he talked.
Then suddenly she had decided that she hated him; that she hated all men but especially him.
The strange part of it was the decision she reached the moment she realized it. She would never let him go. She would marry him, as they had planned, sometime in the future. He must belong to her, now and forever. But there must be time, time for her to adjust herself.
He owed her something and he must be made to pay for it. Yes, they would be married, but when the time came, things would be different. It would be a marriage on her terms, not his.