A few weeks earlier, Will had gone uptown for lunch—a thing he seldom did. Walking down Madison Avenue, he thought he saw Maria ahead of him, with another man. The dark-red suit, the fur piece, and the hat were hers. He did not recognize the man. Acting impulsively where he might have acted stealthily, he had shouted her name—“Maria! Maria! Maria!” The street was crowded, and there was the distance of half a block between them. Before he could reach the woman, she had disappeared. She might have stepped into a taxi or a store. That evening, when he said to Maria, cheerfully enough, that he thought he saw her on Madison Avenue, she answered crossly, “Well, you didn’t.” After dinner, she claimed to have a headache. She asked him to sleep in the guest room.
The afternoon of the day after the dance, Will took the children for a walk without Maria. He lectured them, as he always did, on the names of the trees. “That’s a ginkgo…. That’s a weeping beech…. That bitter smell comes from the boxwood in the hollow.” It may. have been because he had received no education himself that he liked to give an educational tone to his time with the children. They recited the states of the Union at the lunch table, discussed geology during some of their walks, and named the stars in the sky if they stayed out after dusk. Will was determined to be cheerful this afternoon, but the figures of his children, walking ahead, saddened him, for they seemed like live symbols of his trouble. He had not actually thought of leaving Maria—he had not let the idea form—but he seemed to breathe the atmosphere of separation. When he passed the tree where he had carved their initials, he thought of the stupendous wickedness of the world.
The house was dark when they came back up the driveway at the end of their walk—dark and cold. Will turned on some lights and heated the coffee he had made at breakfast. The telephone rang, but he did not answer it. He took a cup of coffee up to the guest room, where Maria was. He thought at first she was still sleeping. When he turned on the light, he saw that she was sitting against the pillows. She smiled, but he responded warily to her charm.
“Here’s some coffee, Mummy.”
“Thank you. Did you have a nice walk?”
“Yes.”
“I feel better,” she said. “What time is it?”
“Half past five.”
“I don’t feel strong enough to go to the Townsends’.”
“Then I won’t go.”
“Oh, I wish you would, Willy. Please go to the party and come home and tell me all about it. Please go.”
Now that she urged him, the party seemed like a good idea.
“You must go, Will,” Maria said. “There’ll be a lot of gossip about the dance, and you can hear it all, and then you can come home and tell me all about it. Please go to the party, darling. It will make me feel guilty if you stay home on my account.”
At the Townsends’, cars were parked on both sides of the street, and all the windows of the big house were brightly lighted. Will stepped in the lamplight, the firelight, and the cheerful human noises of the gathering with a sincere desire to lose his heaviness of spirit. He went upstairs to leave his coat. Bridget, an old Irishwoman, took it. She was a freelance maid who worked at most of the big parties in Shady Hill. Her husband was caretaker at the country club. “So your lady isn’t with you,” she said in her sweet brogue. “Ah, well, I can’t say that I blame her.” Then she laughed suddenly. She put her hands on her knees and rocked back and forth. “I shouldn’t tell you, I know, so help me God, but when Mike was sweeping up the parking lot this morning, he found a pair of gold slippers and a blue lace girdle.”
Downstairs, Will spoke with his hostess, and she said she was so sorry that Maria hadn’t come. Crossing the living room, he was stopped by Pete Parsons, who drew him over to the fireplace and told him a joke. This was what Will had come for, and his spirits began to improve. But, going from Pete Parsons toward the door of the bar, he found his way blocked by Biff Worden. Ethel’s story of their neediness, her tears, and her trip to the parking lot with Larry Helmsford were still fresh in his mind. He did not want to see Biff Worden. He did not like it that Biff could muster a cheerful and open face after his wife had been seduced in the Helmsfords’ station wagon.
“Did you hear what Mike Reilly found in the parking lot this morning?” Biff asked. “A pair of slippers and a girdle.” Will said that he wanted a drink, and he got past Biff, but the entrance to the passage between the living room and the bar was blocked by the Chesneys.
In almost every suburb there is a charming young couple designated by their gifts to be an ambassadorial pair. They are the ones who meet John Mason Brown at the train and drive him to the auditorium. They are the ones who organize the bumper tennis tournaments, handle the most difficult cases in the fund-raising campaign, and can be counted on by their hostesses to humor the bore, pass the stuffed celery, breathe fire into the dying conversation, and expel the drunk. Their social and family connections are indescribably rich and varied, and physically they are models of attractiveness and fashion—direct, mild, well groomed, their eyes twinkling with trust and friendliness. Such a young couple were the Chesneys.
“So glad to see you,” Mark Chesney said, removing his pipe from his mouth and putting a hand on Will’s shoulder. “Missed you at the dance last night, although I saw Maria enjoying herself. But what I wanted to speak to you about is something of a higher order. Give me a minute? As you may or may not know, I’m in charge of the adult-education program at the high school this year. We’ve had a disappointing attendance, and we have a speaker coming on Thursday for whom I’m anxious to rustle up a sizable audience. Her name is Mary Bickwald, and she’s going to speak on marriage problems—extramarital affairs, that sort of thing. If you and Maria are free on Thursday, I think you’ll find it worth your time.” The Chesneys went on into the living room, and Will continued toward the bar.
The bar was full of a noisy and pleasant company, and Will was glad to join it and get a drink. He had begun to feel like himself when the rector of Christ Church bore down on him, shook his hand, and drew him away from the others.
The rector was a large man and, unlike some of his suburban colleagues, not at all wary of clerical black. When he and Will met at cocktail parties, they usually talked about blankets. Will had given many blankets to the church. He had given blankets to its missions and blankets to its shelters. When the shepherds knelt in the straw at Mary’s knees in the Nativity play, they were clothed in Will’s blankets. Since he expected to be asked for blankets, he was surprised to hear the rector say, “I want you to feel free to come to my study, Will, and talk to me if anything is troubling you.” While Will was thanking the rector for this invitation, they were joined by Herbert McGrath.
Herbert McGrath was a banker, a wealthy, irritable man. At the bottom of his thinking there seemed to be an apprehension—a nightmare—that without the kind of order he represented, the world would fly apart. He despised men who raced to catch the morning train. In the “no smoking” car, it was customary for people to light cigarettes as the train approached Grand Central Station, and this infringement so irritated Herbert that he would tap his neighbors on the shoulder and tell them that the smoker was in the rear. Mixed with his insistence on propriety was a curious strain of superstition. When he walked along the station platform in the morning, he looked around him. If he saw a coin, he would shoulder his way past the other commuters and bend down to get it. “Good luck, you know,” he would explain as he put the coin in his pocket. “You need both luck and brains.” Now he wanted to talk about the immorality at the party, and Will decided to go home.