Her invalidism, like her chasteness, seemed to be an imposture, and he reminded himself to be patient, but sitting at a window, watching the lawns darken, he felt very forlorn at having a wife who had promised so much and who now refused to discuss with him the weather, the banking business or the time of day. He waited there until dark and then went down the stairs. He had missed his dinner but a light was still burning in the kitchen, where a plump old Irishwoman, who was mopping the drainboards, cooked him some supper and set it on a table by the stove. “I guess you’re having trouble with your sweetheart,” she said kindly. “Well, I was married myself to poor Mr. Reilly for fourteen years and there’s nothing I don’t know about the ups and downs of love. He was a little man, Mr. Reilly was,” she said, “and when we was living out in Toledo everybody used to say he was runty. He never weighed over a hundred and twenty-five pounds and look at me.” She sat down in a chair opposite Moses. “Of course I wasn’t so heavy in those days but towards the end I would have made three of him. He was one of those men who always look like a little boy. I mean the way he carried his head and all. Even now, just looking out of the train window sometimes in a strange city I see one of these little men and it reminds me of Mr. Reilly. He was a menopause baby. His mother was past fifty when he was born. Why, after we was married sometimes we’d go into a bar for a beer and the barkeep wouldn’t serve him, thinking he was a boy. Of course as he got old his face got lined and towards the end he looked like a dried-up little boy, but he was very loving.
“He never seemed to be able to get enough of it,” she said. “When I remember him that’s the way I remember him—that sad look on his face that meant he was loving. He always wanted his piece and he was lovely—lovely things he’d say to me while he caressed and unbuttoned me. He liked a piece in the morning. Then he’d comb his hair on the left side, button up his britches and go off to a good day’s work in the foundry, so cheerful and cocky. In Toledo he was coming home for his dinner in the middle of the day and he liked a piece then and he couldn’t go to sleep without his piece. He couldn’t sleep. If I woke him up in the middle of the night to tell him I heard burglars downstairs there was no use my talking. The night Mabel Ransome’s house burned down and I stayed up watching the fire until two in the morning he never listened to what I said. When thunderstorms woke him at night or the north wind in winter he’d always wake up in a very loving mood.
“But I didn’t always feel like loving,” she said sadly. “Heartburn or gas would get me down and then I had to be very careful with him. I had to choose me words. Once I refused him without thinking. Once when he commenced to gentle me I spoke roughly to him. Forget about it for a little while Charlie, I says. Helen Sturmer tells me her husband don’t do it but once a month. Why don’t you try to be like him? Well, it was like the end of the world. You should have seed the way his face got dark. It was terrible to behold. The very blood in his veins got dark. I never seed him so crossed in my whole life. Well, he went out of the house then. Come suppertime he isn’t home. I went to bed expecting him to come in but when I wakes up the bed is empty. Four nights I wait for him to come home but he don’t show up. Finally I put this advertisement in the paper. This was when we was living in Albany. Please come home Charlie. That’s all I say. It cost me two-fifty. Well, I put the advertisement in on Friday night and on Saturday morning I hear his key in the lock. Up the stairs he comes all smiles with this big bunch of roses and one idea in his mind. Well it’s only ten o’clock in the morning and my house-work isn’t half done. The breakfast dishes are in the sink and the bed isn’t made. It’s very hard for a woman to be loving before her work is done but even with the dust all over the tables I knew my lot.
“Sometimes it was a hardship for me,” she said. “It kept me from ever broadening my mind. There’s lots of important things he kept me from seeing, like after the war when the parade went right by our windows with Marshal Foch and all. I looked forward to that parade but I never got to see it. He was on top of me when Lindbergh flewed the Atlantic and when that English king, whatever his name was, put down his crown for love and made a speech about it over the radio I never heard a word of it. But when I remember him now that’s the way I remember him—that sad look on his face that meant he was loving. He never seemed to be able to get enough of it and now, God bless the poor man, he’s lying in a cold, cold grave.”
It was not until Saturday that Melissa came down, and, asking her to walk with him after dinner, Moses noticed how she hesitated at the door to the terrace as if she apprehended that the summer night might end her imposture. Then she joined him but she kept a meaningful distance between them. He suggested that they go down through the garden, hoping that the smell of roses and the sound of fountains would prevail, but she continued to keep a protective distance between them although when they left the garden she took a path through some pine woods that he had not seen before and that ended in a plot that turned out to be the animal cemetery. Here were a dozen headstones, overgrown with weeds, and Moses followed Melissa, reading the inscriptions:
Here lie the bones and feathers of an amiable bird,
A cold December twilight saw his fall.
His voice, raised in sweet song, was never heard,
Because the bird was very small.
Here lie the bones of Sylvia Rabbit.
She was sat on by Melissa Scaddon on June 17th
And died of contusions.
Here lie the bones of Theseus the Whippet.
Here lie the bones of Prince the Collie,
He will be missed by One and All.
Here lie the bones of Hannibal.
Here lie the bones of Napoleon
Here lie the bones of Lorna, the kitchen cat.
The lot exhaled the power of a family, Moses thought, and the glee they took in their own nonsense, and looking from the headstones to Melissa’s face he saw hopefully that her expression seemed to be softened by the foolish graveyard, but he decided to take his time and followed her out of the lot down a path to the barns and greenhouses when they both stopped to hear the loud, musical singing of some night bird. It sounded in the distance, on the early dark, with the brilliance of a knife, and Melissa was captivated. “You know J. P. wanted to have nightingales,” she said. “He imported hundreds and hundreds of nightingales from England. He had a special nightingale keeper and a nightingale house. When we came back from England the first thing we did on the boat after breakfast was to go down into the hold and feed mealy worms to the nightingales. They all died. . . .”
Then looking past her, to the roof of the barn where the night bird seemed to be perched, Moses saw that it was not a bird at all; it was the plaintive song of a rusty ventilator as it turned on the night wind; and feeling that this discovery might change the sentimental mood that the twilight, the graveyard and the song promised he led her hurriedly into the old greenhouse and made a bed of his clothing on the floor. Much later that night, when they had returned to the house, and Moses, his bones feeling light and clean with love, was waiting for sleep he had every reason to wonder if she had not transformed herself into something else.