Ten North Frederick (56 page)

“I knew there was something,” he said. “They did a great job of camouflaging, but I knew you were in some kind of trouble. Where's your husband now?”

“I'm keeping my promise. I don't know.”

“Do you want me to find him for you?”

“No,” she said. “They'll make trouble for him.”

“Trouble?
Trouble
? What do you want to do? That's all I want to know.”

“Oh—whatever I am doing. Whatever that is. Just going on living and not shooting myself.”

“Don't say that! Jesus Christ, girl!” This time he cried out and the weeping began again, but now it was not wordless; it was full of mutterings and incoherent sentences, and she put his head on her shoulder and patted his face. But it always stops, and his weeping stopped with a deep sigh.

“Harry. Dear sweet Harry,” she said.

He smiled. “Dear sweet Harry, with a whole head full of salty tears and nothing else.”

“That's why you're sweet and dear.”

“I brung along me pipe and tobacco. I think I'll have a smoke,” he said. The operation of filling and lighting his pipe, the something to do, brought him back from his misery.

“Marian and I have over fourteen thousand dollars saved up, not including six thousand dollars in Liberty Bonds. You ought to go away.”

“I may.”

“We'll give you the money. Don't take it off of them.”

“I don't know,” she said. “If I go I might as well let them pay for it.”

“No, that'll let them salve their conscience. That's letting them off too cheap. It isn't money either one of them sweated over. All it is is writing a check. It's time they realized writing a check doesn't make up for things. I'd rather you took our money, good hard work and long years behind it.”

“They wouldn't like that if I did.”

“Oh, I'm giving notice anyway, whether you take the money or don't. I wouldn't live in the same house with them any more.”

“If you leave, I'll leave.”

“All right, that's what I want you to do.”

“No, Harry. I'm going to stay. At least for a while.”

“Why?”

“Oh—it's my home, and they're my parents. I think there's been enough harm done for one family, without my adding to it. If I leave, what good will that do anybody? Now I pity them. They're beginning to realize they did something awful and they're not sure what they ought to do to make up for it. And I'm just as well off there as I would be any place else. Maybe better.”

“There's one thing you mustn't let them do. You mustn't let them make you think you made a mistake. Never let them do that. You made no mistake, girl. They made the mistake. Ah, what a mistake they made, and it'll plague them.”

Before she could reply they heard the short whirl of a police siren and immediately there was a face under a Stetson at the left door of the car.

“Having trouble?” said the highway patrolman.

“Well, not your kind of trouble,” said Harry.

“Are you the owner of this car?”

“I work for the owner.”

“Me see your owner's registration and your driver's license.”

Harry handed them to him. The cop held onto them while he questioned Harry. “Do you think this is a safe place to park, right on a main highway?”

“Well, I don't know.”

“Do you always stop on a main highway when you want to have a chat with your girl friend? I've been watching you for ten minutes.”

“We been here ten minutes?”

“More than ten minutes. I've been
watching
you for ten minutes.”

“And we didn't break any law.”

“No, but if you want to park why don't you get off the main highway? Who're you, young lady? The maid?”

“She's the maid.”

“Pretty soft for you. Go on, why don't you roll?”

“All right,” said Harry.

The cop mounted his motorcycle and moved up to the door again. “Give him the air, baby. He's too old for you.” He laughed, looked behind him, and deliberately backfired the machine and roared away.

The fresh cop changed the trip home into a cheerful journey.

 • • • 

Edith Chapin often wished that the family physician had not been so early in life and so permanently a man who was also a family friend. It was not so much that she felt embarrassment through the presence and the touch of Billy English; she had long ago accepted Billy in his impersonal, professional role; there was nothing more for him to see or to know. Except that there
was
more to know, that she never could let him know. She had no confidant as, for example, Ann had Harry Jackson as confidant. She had no woman friend to whom she would entrust a secret that was more her own than the more or less routine intimacies that she could tell another woman as another woman would confide in her. There were, so to speak, body secrets, functional secrets that finally were not secrets at all. They had, for instance, nothing to do with desire. She would not even go so far as to tell Josephine Laubach or Rose McHenry that she considered a man handsome. She seldom told any of the secrets of her mind, whether or not they were related to the actions or needs of her body. Even with Joe she had assumed and maintained an identity that went only as far as she wanted to go—and seemed to be as much as he wanted. They could revel in extremes of passionate experiment, but in the morning, after they had slept, they managed to make no reference, by word or by look, to the departure from conventional husband-and-wife that had occurred in the night. They would speak of each other as “my husband,” “my wife,” in such terms as to make the appellation seem to be a form of approval and applause, but at the same time a warning to the listener not to inquire into the subsurface relationship.

During the long convalescence Joe had not been in bed with her, and there was enough of drama and alarm about the accident to render them both impotent during the early stages. But when Joe went back to wanting her actively, the nature of his injury kept them apart. He had been warned of the serious consequences of a refracture, and when he was walking again and wanted to stay with her, she was still so fearful of his breaking his leg again that she could not want him. He would kiss her and touch her but the effect on her was no more exciting than a warm bath, and after his first attempts to force entrance into her, which were sufficient for him but inadequate for her, she would let him kiss her good night and no more. If he put a hand on her breast she would lift it away. “Wait till you're all well again,” she would say.

“But I am all well,” he would say.

“Not till I hear it from Billy English,” she would say.

But Billy English neglected to volunteer the advice that they could resume their full marital relationship. (Joe was his friend, but not his whole practice.) And in just such matters Edith was unable to speak frankly with Billy. She could not say to him: “I want to sleep with somebody.” There was no one in the world to whom she could say that, although that was the truth: the truth was not only that she wanted to sleep with Joe; she wanted to be slept with, and it didn't have to be with Joe.

Lloyd Williams was getting to be somebody in the county, no longer the nobody of the affair of ten years ago. He was getting to be so much of a somebody that he could, almost, safely boast about it if she slept with him again. She knew that as a nobody he had been astute enough to realize that to boast about the single night in Philadelphia would have been dangerous to his career; might even have been dangerous to his life. Ten years ago Joe might conceivably have shot him, Arthur McHenry would have beaten him, her own brother Carter might have defended her honor. And any or all of them would have hurt him professionally in the ways at their command, from political preferment to bank credit.
Now
if she were to use him and he were to brag about it, now that he was the district attorney and on his way up, he could blab it in any saloon in the county and be believed and remain unharmed. And now she would have another woman to contend with, for Williams had married Lottie, and Edith was one of the women who had always looked right through Lottie without seeing her.

Among her friends and acquaintances in Gibbsville there were women who had looked at her with expressions of bold curiosity. There were women who Edith was sure had had other men, and there were the others who had not had other women but were wondering whether she might not be the first. Sometimes she would be at the club, sitting on the terrace, and she would turn to discover a woman staring at her with such open, relaxed inquisitiveness that the woman was caught off guard, revealing more of herself than had ever been actively suspected of Edith. And Edith would smile politely, for the woman was always someone she knew, and say to herself: “Wouldn't you like to know?” The truth was that Edith had a great deal of contempt for members of her own sex. They could not lead the life of idleness without playing bridge or getting into some kind of trouble, spending too much money or incurring imaginary ailments, taking to the bottle or pretending to be unaware of their husband's whores.

Ann's elopement was a frightening experience for Edith, and she was thankful that her own circumspection had kept her from being in the midst of some kind of extramarital affair to match her daughter's rashly romantic impulse. An affair of her own would not have made her tolerant of Ann's, but she would not have been secure in her position of stern but kindly parent. Besides being a frightening experience it was an alarming one, alarming because of the detail of Ann's pregnancy; for Edith, who had not been bothered much by the candles on her birthday cakes (everyone in Gibbsville knew how old everyone else was), now realized that for a few months Ann had carried in her belly the first Chapin grandchild. Edith was forty-four, but it was not the number of years that mattered so much as the status of grandmother. As a mother only, a woman indulging in misconduct can have romantically forgivable excuses, but the same behavior in a grandmother becomes foolishness that is hard to forgive, even by other foolish grandmothers. For the moment, and possibly for the last time, Edith had been granted a respite. And for the moment she was not sure what she wanted to do with it. But she was having the respite.

 • • • 

A new and distinct kind of impoverished aristocracy was in the making during
1930
and
1931
. Its members were those men, and their families, who had made money in the stock market or through the general prosperity of the country in the latter half of the Twenties. They were quick aristocrats in the sense that their standing was based on recent dollars, but they were also quick to copy the spending habits (not yet the thrifty habits) of those families that had had money for more generations than could be measured by the new-rich in years. Moreover, the rich of the latter Twenties had so easily accustomed themselves to the tokens of wealth and, when possible, the company of older money that they also learned how to spend with the same free gallantry, if not quite the grace, that had been acquired by the old-rich through several generations. And when the stock-market ticker refused to answer their prayers they continued to spend and speculate until they had nothing left but their vote. With some misgiving, but hopefully, they gave or loaned their vote to the newer Mr. Roosevelt.

Joe Chapin had not been sufficiently impoverished to impel him to cast his vote for a Democrat, and the lasting impression made by the
1932
Democratic candidate as a Harvard undergraduate gave Joe Chapin a special reason for remaining a Republican. It was not feasible or desirable for Joe Chapin to stump the county and the state and tell the voters he had not liked Franklin D. Roosevelt at New York debutante parties. In the national mood of that moment such talk would have been paid for gladly by the Democratic National Committee. But Joe expressed himself at the Gibbsville Club and elsewhere, and since a lost cause makes aristocrats rather more attractive, and since Joe Chapin was already well thought of, his support of Mr. Hoover hurt him personally not at all; and actually was of some value in later years when he claimed the distinction of uninterrupted party conformism. He never had to make that hackneyed, apologetic admission that he had “voted for him in '
32
, but once was enough.”

Arthur McHenry confessed that right up to the very last minute, even as he entered the voting booth, he had not decided not to vote for the Democrat. “But then I thought of who my friends are, and I voted right,” he said. There was enough of Arthur's and Joe's kind of thinking to carry the state for Mr. Hoover, but there were not enough of them in the country as a whole, and Mike Slattery and a thousand men like him took a hard look at the figures and knew they had their work cut out for them. In Mike's case the test would be in '
34
, when the voters would elect a governor and a United States senator. “Give him enough rope and he'll hang himself,” said Peg Slattery, of the new President.

“Ah, now, but will he?” said Mike. “You won't listen to him on the radio, but you ought to, Peg. Know your opposition is one of the first rules of this nefarious profession of mine. Know your opposition, and take stock of what you've got to buck up against it with. Three things licked Hoover. The Depression, the fellow they elected, and Hoover himself. Say a few Hail Marys we'll develop a spellbinder by
1936
, nationally.”

“Put up Graham McNamee,” said Peg.

“A funny remark, but closer to the truth than you realize. Say another few Hail Marys he stays out of the governor and senator campaign in '
34
. Which he won't, of that you may be sure. He wants Pennsylvania. He has to have Pennsylvania if he wants to win again.”

“Win again, Mike? He's hardly in the White House.”