He would be seeing her, on schedule, three days hence. After that, came the turn of the dark, brooding, capricious Helen, his second, in a suburb of Boston. Helen was a little extravagant. She always had been. But what were a few faults? They were only to be expected. After all, he probably had a few himself.
So Richard C. Brown speculated, as he often did, weighing the pros and cons of this life he led.
Had he chosen wisely in selecting matrimony as his profession? Richard frowned, faintly, and softened the harsh phraseology of the question. He hadn’t chosen it, exactly. He had drifted into it, beginning as an ardent, even a romantic, amateur. It was so easy to get married that he had not even thought of that vulgar word, bigamy, until some time after he had already committed it.
But after two ceremonies, with a third impending — his match with Marion — yes, by then he had realized he was launched upon a special type of career, one that might have certain risks attached, but one that also, with care and prudence, offered rich rewards.
“Richard? Is that what’s worrying you?”
Richard returned his attention to Marion, suddenly aware that her voice echoed a whole series of remarks he had not quite caught. Richard smiled, genuinely surprised. “Worrying me, dear?”
“For a minute, you were frowning. I thought perhaps your mind was on that offer to buy the house and lot. It was such a big price the broker offered, I could hardly believe it. I thought maybe you regretted turning it down. I wonder if you did it just on my account, even though you thought it was really a mistake to pass up the chance. Was that it, Richard?”
Richard was still more surprised — honestly surprised, and deeply touched. “No, nothing’s worrying me,” he said, in affectionate rebuke. “Least of all, that proposition to sell. I’d forgotten all about it.”
Marion, pouring him a second cup of coffee, pursued the subject to its logical end. “Because, if the offer is still open, and you think we ought to sell, I’ll sign. Our joint title to the deed, I mean. Perhaps you thought I sounded unwilling before. But that was only because I didn’t really understand what a wonderful price we were being offered.”
Richard was mildly amused, but still more moved. The offered price had been quite good, certainly, but by no means high enough to justify the nuisance of finding or building another place, then moving and getting established.
“No,” he said firmly. “I’m quite happy here, and we won’t think of selling, unless you’ve changed your own mind, and that’s what you want yourself.” With large and patient generosity, he emphasized the point. “Since I have to be away so much, on business, I’ve always felt any decision about the house should be mainly up to you. That’s why I insisted, from the first, that title to the property should be in both our names.”
He did not add, though he privately noted the fact and gave himself a good mark for it, that this was one of his fixed rules for lasting success in marriage on a mass basis. Never play the domestic tyrant, he often told himself. Let the little woman — whichever one it was, though Lucille and Helen were hardly little — make most of the household decisions, or at least imagine she made them. It kept her happy and, whenever he had to make an important move, made her all the more amiable in deferring to him.
Sometimes, at moments like this, Richard wished he had some friendly, professional colleague with whom he could talk over the finer problems of, say, quadruple and concurrent matrimony. But this could never be. Richard did not doubt that superior operators, like himself, were in existence. But they were not readily to be found — any more than he himself was.
There were only two types of repeaters the public ever heard about, and Richard disdained them both. On the one hand, he was no idiot Romeo who married seven or eight pretty but penniless young things, usually in the same region if not the same city, and inevitably came to grief on some absurd but mathematically predictable mischance. Love was the key-word to describe this type, love and carelessness.
Then there was the other well publicized practitioner, the sinister Bluebeard who, having married for money alone, then proceeded to do away with… No, this gruesome technique so revolted Richard he shrank even from thinking about it.
Marriage should be undertaken only for money and love. Richard imagined himself giving this sage advice to some earnest young man who might appeal to him for guidance, before choosing this specialized vocation as his own lifework. Marry for money and love, and never relax one’s careful attention in fostering each, that was what Richard would tell the acolyte.
Quite carried away by the thought, Richard crumpled his napkin and slapped it down beside his breakfast plate in brisk, executive encouragement. Of course, there were hundreds of other facets to such a career, minor perhaps, but highly important. There was the choice of employment one should pretend to have, for instance, the changes of identification that would never overlap, and… Richard sighed, abandoning these thoughts as idle. After all, there was no young man seeking his counsel. In the nature of things, as long as he remained successful, there never would be.
“Richard? Don’t you want to look at it? Just to be sure before they install it and lay the cement?”
He realized that Marion had again been talking for some time, unnoticed. It irritated and vaguely frightened him that he was not observing his own precept to pay careful attention. “Of course, dear.” He groped, but expertly. “Why, aren’t you satisfied?”
“Oh, I suppose the furnace people ought to know the best place for it. They must install hundreds of auxiliary fuel tanks. But if you’d just look, to make sure. Maybe you’ll think it ought to be somewhere else.”
He remembered now. It was a domestic trifle, an improvement in the heating system. He nodded, glanced up at his wristwatch and stood up. “I’ll do it right now. Then I’m afraid I’ve got to be going.”
“Do you have a lot of calls to make today, Richard?”
“Lots,” he said, cheerfully, and proceeded to overwhelm wife number three with a torrent of details. “Elite, Paragon, Acme, three or four Eat-Rites, two Welcome Inns. That’s just between here and Trenton. I hope I’ll reach there by evening. But with the list of restaurants I’ve got to see — about twenty-five to thirty a day — I’m not sure just where I’ll be tonight. Or, for that matter, in the next ten or twelve days. Eleven days, to be exact,” he added thoughtfully. “Now, let’s see the tank.”
On the way to the basement, Richard collected his hat, overcoat and suitcase. He set the suitcase down in the kitchen, then followed Marion through the door that led downward. At least, he went two-thirds of the way down the wooden steps, intending, from that barest possible display of interest, to give full approval to her arrangements.
Standing on the lower part of the stairway, he could see most of Marion’s basement. This basement belonged to Marion, because all of its appointments were hers, whereas the Hartford basement had a bar, which made it both his and Lucille’s. Besides the assorted laundry machines, and the door of the small partition that formed Marion’s photographic dark-room — her one hobby — he saw that a slit-trench affair had been drilled through the cement floor and dug out of the dank earth beneath. Beside it stood the new tank, not yet lowered into place, and a bulky, unopened sack of some ready-mixed cement.
Richard had now seen enough to give either his approval or criticism, if any, with suggestions. He still inclined toward approval, as easier and quicker.