Evelyn stayed in the general vicinity of the green study after Bradford and Harrison and Patricia went into it, both because of her worry about Bradford’s odd manner — the smile had been gone at dinner, replaced by a grim silence — but also because Earl Chatham had already started his routine doomed flirtation with her. It wasn’t that Earl was hard to resist, but that he was too easy to resist, that he padded on with such a strained smile and apologetic manner of bruised self-mockery that after a while he began to affect Evelyn exactly as did his son, making such urgent demands on her pity that it became physically painful to be in either male Chatham’s presence.
There was a distraction from thoughts of Earl almost immediately after Bradford and Harrison and Patricia closed the green study door behind them. Loud voices sounded through that door, loud and angry, male and female both. The thick door muffled the meaning of the words, but the general message was clear: Bradford and Patricia were fighting.
Don’t let him have an attack, Evelyn thought, remembering that his first attack, five months ago, had also been in the presence of Harrison and Patricia. At the same time, she was relieved that the tension had boiled over so soon, which might clear the air. It would ultimately have been worse for Bradford — for everybody — if all the rages had continued to simmer for another day or two.
The shouting the other side of that door went on and on, both voices frequently sounding simultaneously, striving to drown one another out. Evelyn waited around indecisively in the hall, not too close to the door, half-expecting and half-dreading a sudden silence, the door thrown open, her own name called. By Patricia? More likely by Harrison.
She hadn’t heard Bradford angry like this for several years. In his days in active politics he had been known as a man slow to anger but capable of cold violent rages. This shouting now brought back to Evelyn dim memories of other such incidents, with family members or political associates or White House staff, during Bradford’s tense four years as President.
The door flung open. Evelyn stopped where she was, mouth open, waiting for the call.
It didn’t come. Patricia appeared in the doorway, hand on the knob as she glared back into the room. “I’ll talk to you later! Harrison? Are you listening to me?” Through Harrison’s embarrassed mumbled reply, Evelyn heard the echo of Patricia’s daughter saying the same thing to Earl this afternoon, coming into the house. “Are you listening to me?” Same voice, same inflection, same intensity. Did the two Patricias really believe they had to force the world to attend them, did they really appear that colorless in their own eyes?
Patricia stepped out to the hall and pulled the door closed not quite hard enough to be called a slam. It was clear now what had happened; Bradford had thrown her out, had insisted on talking to Harrison alone. Patricia wouldn’t take that kind of defeat kindly.
She moved away from the door and saw Evelyn, and her mouth twisted. “Well, you little snoop, get an earful?”
“And a bellyful, Aunt Patricia,” Evelyn said. She frequently thought of things like that, infrequently said them. Tension helped bring them to the surface. But even now, tense and angry, she couldn’t put the broken glass into her voice that Patricia quite naturally had in her’s. Evelyn’s statement had been soft-voiced, calm, it slid past Patricia’s sharp face without a mark.
Or did it? Patricia stopped long enough to look Evelyn up and down, and say, “Belly? I didn’t know you had a belly.”
Why was it that the more obscure an insult the more sharply it was felt? Possibly because apparent non sequiturs are impossible to answer. Evelyn understood that Patricia had been making a slighting reference to Evelyn’s sex life — her capacity for a sex life, perhaps — and the remark stung much more than if it had been a direct explicit statement. Also, where was her defense? What was her sex life, that it should be immune to sneers? One bored Frenchman in nearly three years.
Evelyn stood in helpless silence while Patricia stalked away, and it wasn’t till she was out of sight that Evelyn said, softly, “I didn’t know you had ears.” Another near non sequitur, but also relevant, if one cared to look for the meaning. Somehow, though, Evelyn doubted that Patricia, had she heard it, would have felt crushed.
v
The next afternoon, Thursday, Evelyn went riding alone. To get away from Earl in particular, who was being more morbidly persistent than ever this trip and who was afraid of horses, and to get away from the family in general. There was nothing new or different about this visit, they were all following their normal behavior patterns, but for some reason it was all much more intense this time than it had ever been before. Possibly because of Bradford, whose manner continued to alternate between two poles of aloofness; a remote sardonic amusement and a closed grim silence.
Whatever the reason, everyone was being more himself, more herself, the tensions were tighter, the flare-ups were faster and harsher, and Evelyn found her nerves steadily fraying more and more.
Not only because of Earl, who was prowling after her this time with a kind of morose urgency, fitfully lit by self-scorning humor. There was also Martha, whose panicky desire to please, to do something, to somehow pay her dues so she could feel like a full-fledged member, was driving her harder than ever before. This was the first time she’d ever invaded the kitchen, which she’d done today after lunch, rattling both herself and the staff with her compulsion to be useful in some sort of domestic way. (It was also the first time Evelyn had discovered that Martha was as harsh and domineering toward servants as her family was toward her, a discovery that made sense but which had surprised and shocked Evelyn nevertheless.) It had taken Evelyn most of an hour to calm the cook’s ruffled feathers, and even now there was no assurance that Martha would not once again enter the kitchen nor that the cook would not finally leave it.
The two Patricias were at one another almost exclusively now, with only occasional negligent sideswipes at their respective husbands, neither of whom had the inclination to pay much attention. The declared object of the women’s battle was poor little Bradford Chatham. The elder Patricia had attacked the boy for some failing or some misdemeanor, and the younger Patricia leaped to her son’s defense with a determination that fooled no one about her true feelings toward the boy, including young Bradford himself. Fortunately the battle didn’t require his presence, and except for mealtimes he could be found in the upstairs library, devouring the fiction there. Almost any world, it seemed, was better than his own.
The other children, the five Simcoe girls, normally squalls, were now a fullfledged hurricane. The tensions and panics of the adults had communicated themselves to the children, who reacted with their own tensions and panics, so that at least one of the girls was wailing at all times. They’d started to turn their attentions on young Bradford at one point, invading the upstairs library for the purpose, but Evelyn had astonished everybody — including herself — by lashing out at them like a lioness protecting her cub, and the girls had retired, surprised but wary, and had left the boy alone since.
Evelyn’s own child, Dinah, was being kept segregated in her own quarters, with the nurse. Evelyn had spent some time there yesterday evening, after the run-in with Patricia, and had also dropped in twice today, and Dinah seemed just as glad for the isolation. In the past, the Simcoe girls had never looked upon her as anything but a smaller antagonist, which had baffled Dinah’s gentle and reserved nature, and now she expressed no desire to renew the acquaintance.