“The father, also named Jimmy, was known as a womanizer, which will give you an idea how long ago this happened. I can’t recall how long it’s been since I’ve heard that word spoken seriously. Well, everyone felt properly sorry for Henrietta, having to put up with this, but there’s no record that she ever voiced any objection. The point is that James Senior’s death was on the colorful side. A farmer up around Allentown caught James Senior in bed with his wife and used a shotgun on the pair of them before putting the barrel in his mouth and blowing his own head off in the bargain. All this to the immense delight of everybody within fifty miles, as it gave them something to talk about besides aren’t we going to get any rain this summer. I could tell you the farmer’s name except that it’s slipped my mind. Couldn’t be less important, actually.
“Now Jimmy Junior grew up into a carbon copy of his father. The same sort of hell raising, after everything in skirts, married or single made no difference to him, except that he went on living at home with his mother. And how she would carry on about him. All about how she wished he’d get married and settle down and leave off chasing other men’s wives before he wound up the same way his father did. And from what she said it was obvious she knew just what the boy did and where and with whom, and after you’d heard it all a few times, you got the feeling she was proud of the little rascal.
“She couldn’t have been more than thirty-five when the farmer’s shotgun made a widow out of her, but she never remarried. Her farm was a profitable one and she was a good enough looking woman, but if any man got interested, she didn’t encourage him. She lived to over sixty and Jimmy lived with her until she died, and in all that time he went on raising hell and never gave a thought to marrying and settling down.
“Then she died, and Jimmy himself was between thirty-five and forty when they buried his mother. Two months later he married a Doylestown girl, and if he ever once stepped out on her for the rest of his life no one ever heard a word of it. Worked hard, fathered four children, and spent his nights at home. He only lived another fifteen years but as long as he lived I think he would have been true to that woman. His heart finally killed him. There were rumors it was the late stages of syphilis that were responsible, that he’d had from his younger days, but you have rumors all the time in cases like that.”
They walked for a few minutes in silence. Then Linda said, “Are you going to tell me the point of the story or do I have to work it out for myself?”
“I’d tell you if I knew what it was. Stories don’t always have a point, do they?”
“I have a feeling this one does.”
“Well, I have the same feeling, but I can’t put my finger on it. Something we talked about earlier must have put it in my head, but I’d be hard put to say how or what or why. Easy enough to say it’s just another example of the strange things people find to do with their lives and let it go at that.”
“I could read all sorts of things into that story if I wanted to.”
“You could, and it might be a good idea and it might be a bad one. Well, that was a better meal than I’d have had alone, Linda. Thank you for keeping me company.”
“It’s my place to thank you, and you know it.”
“You needn’t thank me for the story, though.”
“I hadn’t intended to,” said Linda Robshaw.
When he picked her up she told him she didn’t want to make it a late night. “I haven’t felt well today,” she said.
“What’s the matter?”
“Well, cramps, actually. It’s that phase of the moon. I suppose it’s not so bad, especially when I consider the alternative.”
“The alternative? Oh, I see.”
But it wasn’t that time of the month, not quite. Her period was not due for two days, and she had had no cramps. She wondered why she said she did. Because she did not want to make love, obviously. And yet she had said the words before she had consciously realized that she did not want to make love,
He asked her if it bothered her to sit in the car, and she said it didn’t, and he suggested a ride up Route 32 along the river. She asked how the book had gone, the inevitable question, and he answered that it had gone very well, which had lately been the inevitable answer. He turned north on Main and drove north along the Pennsylvania side of the river, along a winding tree-shaded road banked here and there with old stone houses.
Some twenty miles up they stopped for a drink at a Colonial tavern. They sat at a table in a dark corner and nursed scotch and sodas. He lit her cigarettes and kept his pipe going.
He did most of the talking. This night he talked not about the book and not about his daughter. Instead he was telling her a great deal about his earlier life. The vague and aimless period after the war. The first novel, and his marriage, and elements of his life that followed. She sensed that he was purposely showing her parts of himself which he habitually kept concealed, and she found herself wondering how many other women had found him as open as she did. It was impossible for her to know this, but she felt there had been few, very few. It was a conceit to think that no woman since his wife had known him as well as she herself did now, and yet although she recognized it as a conceit she could not avoid it. The thought pleased her, even warmed her, and at the same time in some indeterminate way it unsettled her.
Her mind kept picking up threads of the story Olive had told her. There was the suggestion of an obvious parallel there, but she suspected the story’s relevance might lie elsewhere. And she did not want to think about it. She knew that much, that she did not want to think about it.
He did want to marry her. She had been quite certain of this, although perhaps less certain than she had let on to Olive. His conversation tonight made his intent unmistakable.
It would be very pleasant to be his wife. He was a thoughtful man and a good lover. He would cherish her. That was a good word — cherish. No man had ever cherished her, ho man had ever thought her someone to cherish.
And it would be secure to be his wife, both financially (which Olive said was important, and which probably was) and emotionally. There would be stability in her life, and she had lived too long with too little that could be called stable. She could belong to that fine old house. She could put down roots in those woods. His home could be her home as no place had ever been home to her. And it seemed now that she had never had a home. The house in which she grew up, even that had never been her home.
Did she love him? Well, she supposed that she did. She loved him but was not in love with him — the schoolgirl distinction which somehow persisted over the years. But had she ever been in love with anyone? She rather thought not, although she had thought herself thus from time to time. Did she love him enough to be married to him? Now that was another question, wasn’t it?
She had been married once. She could review that marriage, as she so often had done. She could try to see it in the context of the love that had or had not been there, as she could review her relationship with Marc. But it was hard now even to remember that marriage, and there were times when an accurate memory of her time with Marc seemed similarly elusive. It was hard to remember what it was like at the time, hard to summon up the person she herself had then been. And whoever she had been, she was in so many ways different now.
Would she want to have his children? Yes, if she wanted to have children at all. Would she want her children to look like him? She regarded him thoughtfully, projecting his strong features onto the countenances of children. Yes, she would like to have a son who looked like this man. Or a daughter — a daughter in his image would be unquestionably attractive, she thought, and then realized that he already had a daughter in his image. Karen had his features down to the last decimal place.