Coverly kept telling her that it didn’t matter and gave her a glass of sherry and then she decided to call the Frascatis. “All I want now is to have a little party,” she said, “and I have all this food and maybe the Frascatis would like to come. They haven’t been very neighborly but maybe that’s because they’re foreigners. I’m going to ask the Frascatis.”
“Why don’t we forget the whole thing?” Coverly said. “We can eat our supper or take in a movie or something. We can have a good time together.”
“I’m going to ask the Frascatis,” Betsey said, and she went to the telephone. “This is Betsey Wapshot,” she said cheerfully, “and I’ve meant to call you again and again but I’ve been a bad neighbor, I’m afraid. We’ve been so busy since we’ve moved in that I haven’t had the time and I’m ashamed of myself for having been such a bad neighbor but I just wondered if you and your husband wouldn’t like to come over tonight and have supper with us.”
“Thank you but we already had supper,” Mrs. Frascatti said. She hung up.
Then Coverly heard Betsey calling the Galens. “This is Betsey Wapshot,” she said, “and I’m sorry I haven’t called you sooner because I’ve wanted to know you better but I wondered if you and your husband would like to come over tonight for supper.”
“Oh, I’m terribly sorry,” Mrs. Galen said, “but the Tellermans—I think they’re friends of yours—Max Tellerman’s young brother has just come home from college and they’re bringing him over to see us.”
Betsey hung up. “Hypocrite,” she sobbed. “Hypocrite. Oh she’d break her back, wouldn’t she to get in good with the Galens and she just wouldn’t tell me, her best friend, she just wouldn’t have the nerve to tell me the truth.”
“There, there, sugar,” Coverly said. “It isn’t that important. It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters to me,” Betsey cried. “It’s a matter of life and death to me, that’s what it is. I’m going over there and see, I’m just going over there and see if that Mrs. Galen’s telling me the truth. I’m just going over there and see if that Max Tellerman’s sick in bed or if he isn’t. I’m just going over there and see.”
“Don’t, Betsey,” Coverly said. “Don’t, honey.”
“I’m just going over there and see, that’s what I’m going to do. Oh I’ve heard enough about this brother of his but when it comes time to introduce him around their old friends aren’t good enough. I’m going over and see.” She stood—Coverly tried to stop her, but she went out the door. In her bathrobe and slippers she marched, bellicosely, up the street to the next circle. The Tellermans’ windows were lighted, but when she rang the bell no one answered and there was no sound. She went around to the back of the house where the curtains on the picture window hadn’t been drawn and looked into their living room. It was empty but there were some cocktail glasses on the table and by the door was a yellow leather suitcase with a Cornell sticker on it. And as she stood there in the dark it seemed that the furies attacked Betsey; that through every incident—every moment of her life—ran the cutting thread, the wire of loneliness, and that when she thought she had been happy she had only deceived herself for under all her happiness lay the pain of loneliness and all her travels and friends were nothing and everything was nothing.
She walked home and later that night she had a miscarriage.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Betsey was in the hospital for two days and then she came home but she didn’t seem to get better. She was unhappy as well as sick and Coverly felt that she was pushing some kind of stone that had nothing to do with their immediate life—or even with her miscarriage—but with some time in her past. He cooked her supper each night when he came home from the laboratory and talked or tried to talk with her. When she had been in bed for two weeks or longer he asked her if he could call the doctor. “Don’t you dare call the doctor,” Betsey said. “Don’t you dare call the doctor. The only reason you want to call the doctor is to have him come and prove that there isn’t anything wrong with me. You just want to embarrass me. It’s just meanness.” She began to cry but when he sat on the edge of the bed she turned away from him. “I’ll cook the supper,” he said. “Well, don’t cook anything for me,” Betsey said. “I’m too sick to eat.”
When Coverly stepped into the dark kitchen he could see into the Frascatis’ lighted kitchen where Mr. Frascati was drinking wine and patting his wife on the rump as she went between the stove and the table. He slapped the Venetian blinds shut and, finding some frozen food, cooked it after his fashion, which was not much. He put Betsey’s supper onto a tray and took it into her room. Fretfully she worked herself up to a sitting position in the pillows and let him put the tray on her lap but when he went back into the kitchen she called after him, “Aren’t you going to eat with me? Don’t you want to eat with me? Don’t you even want to look at me?” He took his plate into the bedroom and ate off the dressing table, telling her the news of the laboratory. The long tape he had been working on would be done in three days. He had a new boss named Pancras. He brought Betsey a dish of ice cream and washed up and walked down to the shopping center to buy her some mystery stories at a drugstore. He slept on the sofa, covered with an overcoat and feeling sad and lewd.
Betsey remained in bed another week and seemed more and more unhappy. “There’s a new doctor at the laboratory, Betsey,” Coverly said one night. “His name is Blennar. I’ve seen him in the cafeteria. He’s a nice-looking fellow. He’s a sort of marriage counselor, and I thought …”
“I don’t want to hear about him,” Betsey said.
“But I want you to hear about him, Betsey. I want you to talk with Dr. Blennar. I think he might help us. We’ll go together. Or you could go alone. If you could tell him your troubles …”
“Why should I tell him my troubles? I know what my troubles are. I hate this house. I hate this place, this Remsen Park.”
“If you talked with Dr. Blennar …”
“Is he a psychiatrist?”
“Yes.”
“You want to prove that I’m crazy, don’t you?”
“No, Betsey.”
“Psychiatrists are for crazy people. There’s nothing wrong with me.” Then she got out of bed and went into the living room. “Oh, I’m sick of you, sick of your earnest damned ways, sick of the way you stretch your neck and crack your knuckles and sick of your old father with his dirty letters asking is there any news, is there any good news, is there any news. I’m sick of Wapshots and I don’t give a damn who knows it.” Then she went into the kitchen and came out with the blue dishes that Sarah had sent them from West Farm and began to break them on the floor. Coverly went out of the living room on to the back steps but Betsey followed him and broke the rest of the dishes out there.
On the day after they were married they had gone out to sea in a steamer of about the same vintage as the Topaze but a good deal bigger. It was a fine day at sea, mild and fair and with a haze suspended all around them so that, but for the wake rolled away at their stern, their sense of direction and their sense of time were obscured. They walked around the decks, hand in hand, finding in the faces of the other passengers great kindliness and humor. They went from the bow down to the shelter of the stern where they could feel the screw thumping underfoot and where many warm winds from the galley and the engine room blew around them and they could see the gulls, hitchhiking their way out to Portugal. They did not raise the island—it was too hazy—and warped in by the lonely clangor of sea bells they saw the place—steeples and cottages and two boys playing catch on a beach—rise up around them through the mist.