“I didn’t say that.”
“No? How about thinking it?”
“I didn’t think it either.”
“Well, I did.” He had taken the chair nearest her, the one Lewis had sat in earlier in the evening, and now he bent his head and drew his eyebrows down to peer at her. He said abruptly, “I see you’ve got a new watch.”
She stirred a little and put her right hand over her left wrist, then at once removed it again.
“It isn’t new.”
“It’s very pretty. Much nicer than those cumbersome things they used to make. I noticed it, earlier, as soon as I came in the room.” He took his eyes away and directed them at the fire, and after a short silence he went on, “You know, giving you that damn watch was my one undiluted stupidity. I’ve never been able to forget it. It was a symbol, a token of a weakness I disown and the validity of which I deny. Thinking of the watch, naturally I thought of you, I thought of you wearing it—” He broke off shortly, and turned to her, “You did get it? You went back to the room...”
For reply she nodded. His eyes went back to the fire.
“Of course you would. I had no doubt of that. I used to say to myself, well, there was Lora. The pretty little piece who worked in a candy factory and never ran out of money. I used to sing here and there — you can imagine it, you’ve heard me sing: Lora and Petey were lovers, and oh, my, how she could love... Then I’d think of the watch, and I could see you finding it there on the pillow and putting it on... Bah. It made me sick. It interfered with my mitosis, it induced a suspension of function among my viscera.” He turned to her and said abruptly, “Have you still got it?”
“No,” she said, “I’m sorry—”
He said nothing. She went on, “I was in trouble, and I sold it. I was going to have a baby. It was a long time ago.”
She knew perfectly well he would smile with his mouth crooked, but nevertheless she winced a little when she saw it.
“Afterwards, when I got money, I tried to get it back, but it was gone.”
“Splendid!” Pete exclaimed. “You sold it to buy baby clothes. It wasn’t anything to brag about, I suppose by now it’s junk, but if not I’ll bet I know who has it. It is being worn by a clergyman’s wife who lives on Staten Island, and on Sundays when her husband’s watch isn’t running, as it usually isn’t, she lets him take hers to the pulpit with him to time the services by. That’s the watch I bought. Splendid! A worthy fate. It was amusing just now, when you got apologetic. Good lord, have you never heard of the maternal instinct? Its resourcefulness? Its fierce indomitable will? The desperate extremes it will go to? Why, to gain its ends, an instinct like that would sell a grandfather’s clock, even Big Ben himself, let alone one little wristwatch. Which reminds me, on one occasion your instinct seems to have slipped up somewhere. A couple of hours ago you heard me speaking — on a matter of business — regarding some children and their fathers. Four children, and four fathers — probably a record. But why not five? This is just between you and me, it’s not intended for the official dossier. Why not five? The eldest was born in the summer of nineteen-eighteen. There is in the dossier one little hint of the question I’m putting; the man who went west discovered echoes of some old murmurs about infanticide in the inquiry that followed your father’s death; but of course I have other reasons for asking myself, why not five? It occurs to me that you might be willing to help me find the answer.”
He stopped and waited, but Lora said nothing and would not look at him.
“Come,” he persisted, “I don’t claim any rights — even though I’m supposed to have an instinct of my own which should clamor for its destiny — but you’ll admit that my curiosity is valid. I might fairly press for an answer, don’t you think?”
Still she was silent. He was peering at her again.
“I do mean to have an answer,” he insisted. “Do you remember that? The Sunday mornings you would get breakfast at the room, and I would bellow at you, do I get another piece of bacon or do I not, I mean to have an answer, my love. That’s the present situation, I mean to have an answer, my love.”
Lora opened her lips long enough to say, “You won’t get one,” and closed them again.
“But it did arrive,” Pete said. “That seems to have been pretty well established by the testimony of the maid — Martha, wasn’t it — at the inquest. Reinforced by the information furnished later by Mrs. Ogilvy, otherwise Cecelia, I never liked her. Your mother, by the way, nearly got herself into serious trouble; they couldn’t pry her mouth open. She was a medieval heretic confronted by the black-robed Inquisition; she raised her eyes toward heaven, or lowered them toward hell — the details are meager — and refused to utter a word. The sympathy of the community saved her from the righteous rigor of the law. But Martha was frightened and spilled the beans. There was a search for you high and low; you were traced as far as Chicago, and that’s where Cecelia came in, they suspected her of having hid you in a closet or under the bed. Acute fellows. What they were looking for was a baby, live if necessary but preferably dead, for that was what they had smelled. Pleasant inoffensive little game of hide and seek. They didn’t find it. It’s all forgotten now, of course, so you run no risk if you satisfy my curiosity.”
“No,” Lora said. She said again, “No. I won’t talk about it. There was no baby.”
“Oh, well.” He shrugged his shoulders. “If you won’t. Maybe you’re a little vague about it yourself; apparently your father was a man of action.”
“You sent a man out there?” said Lora.
“My paper did.”
“Did he see my mother?”
“He sure did. Oh, it’s all right so far, he said nothing about you, he had strict orders on that point. He saw your mother twice, but she wouldn’t talk, at any rate not about this. Otherwise she was quite chatty.”
“She still lives there?”
He nodded. “In a big brick house with three or four servants and a bald gentle husband.”
Lora stared at him. “A husband!”
“Indeed, yes. You know, it’s hard to believe all this is news to you. You’re not putting it on? No, I suppose not. She has a husband all right, got him years ago, I don’t know just when.”
“What’s his name?”
“I forget.” He considered. “It wouldn’t be Davis?”
Lora shook her head. Bald, she thought, and gentle. A newcomer, probably. Well! Her mother had a bald and gentle husband and a big brick house! She didn’t like the idea at all, it didn’t fit, and she resented it. She felt the irritation of the resentment within her, and that seemed absurd — good lord, wasn’t her mother welcome to a husband if she wanted one? The balder and gentler the better. But the resentment remained, and induced a sort of confused pseudo-disbelief. If she got on a train and went back to that town tomorrow she could not even go to her father’s house, there would be strangers in it; her father would be nowhere, actually not anywhere; and to find her mother she must ask, and could not even properly ask, not knowing her name. Certainly all this was true, but it could not at once be believed, and meanwhile must be resented. She thought the resentment was silly, but she did not try to banish it; indeed, she clung to it, and to all the shreds of emotion she could muster, regarding her mother and the absurd bald husband, regarding the house of her father and her father himself, now a ghost, a wraith that floated grotesquely from the hard reality of memory into the unsubstantial vapor of fact, and back into memory again.
She clung to these because she was afraid of what was trying to replace them. Her mind kept trying to escape, and fiercely she forced it back. What had flashed into it when she had opened the door and saw Pete there on the threshold, was now perfectly plain, and that was what she was desperately determined to conquer and suppress, at least until he had gone and she could consider it calmly, could shut herself up with it alone in her room and have it out. The urgency of it amazed her and filled her with panic; with him sitting there in the chair next to her, so close she could have reached out and touched him, she knew she dared not trust her thoughts for a single instant. She must touch him — heaven help her, father, the ghost of her father, and mother with a bald and gentle husband... She must let him know that she wanted to feel him... dead now, and always had been dead, and mother wouldn’t let them pry her mouth open, he had said, and he had said why not five, he wanted to know about the baby he had put in her... He had put in her, god think of that, there he was, and all those nights, he was the one who knew how to do that... right now, right this instant... but she couldn’t talk about that, she had told him so, she would not talk about that time when she had without any doubt been ready to get her father’s revolver from the bedroom and shoot him with it and now he had shot himself... No use pretending about it, what she wanted, look at his legs stretched out like that, and the cuffs of his shirt were dirty, they always were, if he put on a clean shirt when he got up the cuffs would be soiled by the time he got his hair combed, if you could call it combing... she could comb his hair all right, all his hair, and she would, his head first, it was more exciting to lead up to it... but not now, refinements could come later... not now... for now, oh, now...