“Yes.”
“Why did you come to me, George?”
“I missed you.”
“Yes, I missed you, too. But maybe you better have some patience, too, George.”
“With her?”
“Yes.”
“It won’t keep me from loving you, Lalie.”
“She’s cold?”
“No, it isn’t that. She just isn’t right for me.”
“Is she afraid of you? Of a man?”
“No, it isn’t that, either.”
“Well, tell me. I told you.”
“I don’t want to say it, Lalie. Don’t make me.”
“Could anybody make you do something you didn’t want to do? I doubt that.”
“I’m selfish? Yes, I guess I am.”
“I don’t have any right to call anybody selfish. I was selfish to tell you to come tonight.”
“You’re not selfish, Lalie. Nobody could ever say that about you.”
“I sacked a hired girl because I wanted to go with you. I had to tell a big lie to Karl. I told him the woman was lazy, and she wasn’t lazy. She was a good worker, and jobs like this are scarce. But it was the only way I could meet you. Karl don’t like for me to be alone at night, George.”
“Meaning that you’re going to hire another woman to live in?”
“Karl has money. He says I can have two women live in.”
“How will we meet?”
“Maybe we don’t. Reading isn’t so big. If they saw me come out of a hotel.”
“Why didn’t you marry a poor man? Then I could have taken a room here, a boarder.”
“Jokes don’t help. Karl would kill a man, you know. Me, also. His friends make jokes with him, but he comes home and tells me, and I wouldn’t be some of those men if he ever loses his temper.”
“What if I gave Karl some law business? Would he invite me to stay here when I came to Reading?”
“You’re crazy in the head.”
“Crazy ideas work sometimes, but I guess that one’s too crazy. Are there any rooms for rent near here?”
“To board? Around the corner I see signs in the windows, but that’s crazy too.”
“I know! An office. I’ll rent an office. I have business in Reading every now and then.”
“An office with a bed in it?”
“A sofa. I’ll put in a desk and chairs, and a sofa. We have a sofa in our office for my father to take a nap. I’ll look around, shall I?”
“Not in this neighborhood, though. And I could never go there at night, wherever you picked. We have the phone now, and Karl can always ring up if he’s out for the evening.”
“One friend. If you had one friend you could trust.”
“I have friends I can trust, but not for this kind of a business, George. They wouldn’t like me any more. They’d turn against me sooner or later, and even if it was ten years from now Karl mustn’t know. You can come here this summer, then rent your office.”
“I’ll rent it now and they can get used to me coming and going at odd times, and by autumn they won’t notice.”
“Is that the way we’re going to go on the rest of our lives, George?”
“No, Lalie. This won’t last forever. One of these days you’ll send me away for good. I know that, don’t you?”
“Yes, but it’s a good thing you said it. I didn’t want you to tell me a lie. Sure, I know it.”
“But when you send me away it won’t be for someone else?”
“No. Only Karl. I married Karl.”
She was his mistress for three years and they met in many places. Hazardously in second-rate hotels in Gibbsville and Philadelphia, more safely at the office George Lockwood rented, for quick erotic exchanges in the front parlor of her house, and once by accident when George and Agnes Lockwood and Karl and Lalie Brauer were stopping at the same hotel in Atlantic City. The two couples did not meet, but George went to Lalie’s room while Karl was at a Turkish bath. “You’re out of your head,” said Lalie to George Lockwood.
“Don’t ever say no to me, Lalie.”
But for Lalie it was the beginning of the end. His selfishness had become arrogant recklessness, and though she went through with the assignation, her parting words that afternoon prepared him for the final break. “I like your wife,” she said. “She’s head and shoulders above you, just by looking at her.”
“I never expected you to dislike her, Lalie. But I was sure I wouldn’t like Brauer, and I don’t.”
In a year of haphazard infidelity George Lockwood made no mistake that Agnes Lockwood could fix upon, and the events of that first year, of changing from the protective affection of her virginal life with her parents to that of wifehood with George Lockwood, filled her thoughts to the exclusion of suspicion. It was a radically new way of life, which nothing she had been told or read could prepare her for. It had to be experienced by her before it became of any value or before she was truly the better or the worse for it. At night she would submit to George’s ways of making love and she learned to take pleasure in them—or she would sometimes lie untouched and expectant for nights on end, but that too was part of learning. In the daytime hours she had the household duties, her own servants, menus and accounts, storekeepers and clerks, the restricted social life that was largely with Gibbsville families. She had her father-in-law, to learn about and to adjust to. And she had her abortive pregnancy all to herself. She had her home, that she was encouraged to regard as her own home, but that for most of that year was not her home but a place out in the cold, cold world. Her loneliness was relieved during her pregnancy by a desire to protect the pitiable life within her, that was hers and not hers and then was nothing but a shapeless mess on her bedsheet. Now home could never again be the place she had known with Theron and Bessie Wynne. There was no going back to that refuge or even to that way of life or to that earlier person. She had made a failure of her function, but it was a failure that established her maturity just as irrevocably as though it had been a success. Indeed, in some respects the miscarriage had advanced her maturity in that her function had achieved both of the terminal truths of life and death. It was a year for learning and some of it was harsh, but at least for that year there was so much that was new that for the present it could only qualify as information. Sagacity, good judgment, wisdom, prejudice, a philosophy, would have to wait their turns. Agnes Lockwood was going by a phrase she had heard—the phrase, a good wife—and all the information she collected in that year was in some way related to the phrase and to her eagerness to qualify for the designation. Milk turned sour in a thunderstorm; Krafft’s was the best grocery store in Swedish Haven; the best morning train for Philadelphia left Swedish Haven at 8:45; all Lockwoods gave a dollar bill to the plate collection on Sunday; Abraham Lockwood liked unsalted butter on his breakfast toast; George Lockwood would not make love unless the room was pitch dark; there had once been a high brick wall around the Lockwood property; Protestant farmers did not work on the Catholic feast of the Ascension; scrapple was more edible if fried to a crisp; Miss Nellie Shoop was the best dressmaker in Gibbsville; Yock Miller was the same as Jacob Miller, but Ock Mueller was Oscar Mueller, and they both worked at the bank; no one laundered lace curtains as beautifully as the nuns in Gibbsville, but they certainly knew how to charge for their work; Moses Lockwood lost the lower half of his ear at the battle of Bull Run; Mr. Heimbach, the clockmaker who also tuned pianos, was allowed in the front door but other tradesmen had to come in through the kitchen; Penrose Lockwood was nice but not very bright in his studies.