“Let’s get this straight, my dear.” His pale eyes flicked for an instant to John, looking right through him. “You had a fight, you say? And he hit you?”
Brad looked miserable. Vickie said quickly:
“Daddy darling, everyone has fights. It’s none of our business what they were quarrelling about.”
“It’s certainly our business. All of our business. Linda’s our friend. If she’s in trouble …”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, don’t think I blame poor John,” said Linda. “It’s me I blame. It’s all me.”
She stretched out a hand for a cigarette. Eagerly Gordon Moreland offered a silver case and lit a cigarette for her. Puffing at it, Linda threw up at John a quick, intimate smile.
“Darling, I’ve been a dope, haven’t I? I should have kept my big mouth shut. It’s just that I knew they’d see my eye and wonder and … Oh well, now I’ve put my foot in it we might as well come clean. After all, we don’t have anything to hide from our friends.”
She slipped her arm around his waist, ostentatiously aligning herself with him against his would-be detractors. He could feel her body quivering with satisfaction.
“Darlings, let me announce the great drama of the Hamilton household. The people John used to work for in New York wrote and want him back again as head of the art department. Twenty-five thousand a year plus bonuses and plenty of free time to do his painting on the side. You all know little old me. I’m so materialistic. Sometimes I get so bored with skimping and saving, running the house, existing on the edge of poverty. I’m not the artistic type, I guess, and the idea of going back to New York and be able to live decently again—the way you people live here. The idea …”
Her voice faltered. It’s all rehearsed, thought John. She’s been practicing, coming down the hill, to the last gesture, the smallest catch in the throat.
Her voice sounded again, studiedly brave.
“But that’s just my selfish point of view. I realize that now. It’s John’s life that matters. If he wants to go on with his painting, if he doesn’t care about what the critics say, if he doesn’t mind pigging it in that sordid house and … well, that’s all that matters, isn’t it? And tomorrow he’s going to New York to turn them down, so that’s that, and, after all, I shouldn’t complain. It isn’t as if I didn’t have my dear friends. Life can’t be too dreary, can it, when I have dear Vickie and Brad, the dear Morelands, the dear, dear Careys?”
Her mouth started to quiver. With a sudden, blurred gesture, she held out her cigarette for Gordon Moreland to take from her. Clumsily, her head lowered, she ran to Mrs. Carey and threw her arms around her.
“Oh, I’m such a selfish monster. How can I be ruining the birthday party? How can I be making this appalling spectacle of myself hashing over a scene that’s settled, that’s all settled, that never should have begun? Ob, poor John.” She buried her face against the lace of Mrs. Carey’s capacious bosom. Her voice came, thin and forlorn. “I should have stayed home. I know I should. But when I was left there alone, I got to brooding and my eye hurt and—and I took a drink.” She gave a giggling laugh. “That’s what’s the matter with me. I took a big shot of bourbon. Linda’s stinking drunk.”
The laugh cracked and disintegrated into deep, racking sobs.
Perfect, thought John. The best to date. She’d even exploited the drunkenness just at the moment when it must finally have become obvious to them all, and turned it into yet another claim on their pity. He needn’t have worried. She hadn’t lost the Carey set at all. She had made them her allies and her champions for ever more, and for ever more to them he’d be pigeonholed as the louse of the world.
He could feel the outraged antagonism in the room. Mr. Carey was loathing him; Mrs. Carey had become a formidable, protective mother. The Morelands were watching him as if it was inconceivable that they could ever have met him anywhere. Dimly he reflected that there had once been a time when this sort of thing had hurt him the way Linda wanted it to hurt. When? Three years ago? When it had first started in New York, when his love had still blinded him and he’d really believed that, by asking her to entertain his sister or by pleading with her to go to a business dinner, or by whatever it happened to be, he had, in some way, let her down again. Yes, it would have hurt him then. But that was over long ago. All there was now was a kind of dull disgust, contempt for her and contempt for himself and for the life he had let them drift into. Loyalty, wasn’t that what he called it? Nobly standing by his afflicted wife who needed him so much.
Look at them now.
Wearily, ignoring the hostile glances, he went up to Linda.
“Okay. You’ve made your speech. Let’s go.”
Mrs. Carey clucked like a flustered hen. Mr. Carey barked, “You’re not going to take that poor child away and brutalize her again!”
“No,” said Mrs. Carey. “No. Linda dear, you must come home with us.”
Under half-closed lashes, Linda glanced up at him. The glance lasted only a second but John saw in it the inevitable concomitants of drunken spite—the defiance, the potentials of panic.
Have I gone too far this time?
“Come on,” he said. He knew she would come now, not because he had her in control but because she’d achieved her purpose.
Slowly she drew herself away from Mrs. Carey. For a moment she stood looking at her, smiling ruefully, the tears shining in her eyes.
“Darling Mrs. Carey, I’m so terribly sorry. Everyone, I’m so sorry. I’m drunk and I’ve ruined the party. Of course I’m going with John. He’s my husband. I hadn’t any right. .
She started quickly through the room. She almost stumbled over the slide-projector. Gordon Moreland sprang to help her. Mr. Carey cried, “Linda.”
“Please.” She brushed Gordon Moreland aside with her hand. “I’m all right. And please—forgive me. John, dear, I’ll wait in the car.”
She ran up the steps and out through the hall.
Vickie said, “Brad, go after her. See she’s all right.”
As Brad hurried out, John said into the glacial silence, “Well, good night, everyone.”
“That poor child,” said Mrs. Carey into the air in front of her.
The Morelands had turned their backs on him. Mr. Carey, bristling, at his most imperious, started toward him but, before he could say anything, John moved away up the steps.
Vickie came with him. When they reached the open front door, Brad hurried from the car to join them.
“She’s all right, I guess.”
Vickie asked awkwardly, “Is it true what she said, John?”
“More or less true.”
“And you’re going to turn down the offer?” Brad’s voice was faintly incredulous.
“Yes, I am.”
Unexpectedly Vickie said, “Don’t let Father and everyone worry you. It’s none of their business. You do what you feel is right.”
“Yes,” said Brad. “You’ve got to decide for yourself, of course.”
John turned to look at them through the summer darkness. Had he too surprisingly acquired allies?
Vickie took his hand and kissed him on the cheek. “Good night, John dear. And call us, if you need us. We’re so fond of Linda—and of you.”
They stood at the door, waving, as he walked across to Linda and the old black sedan.
ON THE DRIVE home up the hill through the woods, dim and unfathomable in the starlight, she sat huddled on her side of the front seat. She didn’t say anything, but he could feel the implacable hostility radiating out from her—and the other thing, too, of course.
How am I going to get a drink?
That’s what she was thinking.
When we get home, he’s going to lock up the liquor.
Or had she settled that already? Had she bought a bottle in Pittsfield and got it hidden away somewhere?
For the first time, John Hamilton was without hope. Always before, unreasonable as it had increasingly become, there had been the feeling that, if he tried hard enough, if he just clung on, life would somehow become workable; she would get a little better, better enough to consent to seeing a doctor, or even worse, worse enough where the whole matter would be taken out of his hands or hers. But now even that frail support was gone because he knew he was running out of strength. He could feel exhaustion in him, paralyzing his will. She was going to fight to the death about the job. He knew it. This was the time when he needed his reserves for an all-out struggle. And there was nothing left. He didn’t care what the Careys thought about him any more than he cared what the village thought about him. He didn’t care whether Linda got to the liquor or didn’t get to it. He didn’t even care about his painting. Painting? To hell with it! Let it go— let everything go.
He made the turn at the head of the hill by the Fishers’. They were almost home now.
Suddenly she said, “I’ll go to them tomorrow and tell them I lied about you hitting me.”
When he didn’t reply, she said more belligerently, “I was only telling them my point of view. There’s nothing wrong with that, is there? After all, you’ve probably been trying to get them around to your side all evening and they’re my friends. Aren’t I allowed to take my friends into my confidence when it’s something as important as this, when it’s … ?”
“Linda.”
“And I had to explain about my eye. I suppose I could have said I’d fallen down walking in the dark through the woods. But I didn’t think of it. Honestly, I didn’t think of it. I just thought I’d got to explain and everyone knows people have fights, don’t they?”
The house loomed ahead of them. She’d left no lights burning. It looked desolate, uninhabited.
“Well,” she said, “I don’t see why you’re being so absurd about it. You always say you don’t like them. You’re always saying they’re such bores. Why do we have to go to those boring Careys? That’s what you always say.”
As he swung the car into the drive, she lurched sideways, bumping into him.
“You park the car,” she said. “I’ll get out. I think I’ll just get out.”
Almost before the car had come to a halt, she was out of it, making for the kitchen door. To hell with her, thought John. Not hurrying, oddly detached from himself and from everything, he put the car in the garage, rolled down the door and stood a moment, looking through the skeletal silhouettes of the apple trees toward the woods beyond. A faint cry sounded from the darkness, almost like a human voice calling. An owl?
He went into the house through the dark kitchen. The living-room was dark too. As he turned on a light, he looked at the gin bottle and the bottle of bourbon. Their levels hadn’t gone down. Had she watered the gin? Or did she have a bottle upstairs? A bottle upstairs probably.
He could hear her moving around above him. He sat down in a chair. Soon her footsteps were tapping on the stairs. She came in. The drink had sobered her. She was at that stage. She had combed her hair and put on more lipstick. The swelling under her eye was darker in spite of powder. A little secret smile was playing around her mouth.
Automatically, although he didn’t care anymore, the machinery of his analysis creaked on. Was the smile just self-satisfaction at having outsmarted him by hiding a bottle upstairs? Or was it … ?
She came to him and sat down on the arm of his chair, casual, affectionate, as if nothing had happened. “You’re not still mad at me, are you? I’ll make it all right. I promise. I told them I’d had a drink anyway. It’ll be easy to explain that I didn’t know what I was saying, that I got it all mixed up about you hitting me.”
She ran her hand through his hair. He got up. “For God’s sake, Linda. Let’s go to bed.”
She climbed off the chair arm and hurried to him, putting her hands on his sleeves, smiling up at him with that same, secret, excited smile.
“Darling, we’ll go to bed soon, but not just yet. There’s something I’ve got to tell you.”
Danger signals alerted.
“It’s something terribly important. And you must be sensible about it. You’ve got to realize that there are times —it’s always that way in marriage—times when you’re too close to things, when you can’t see it in the proper proportion, when … Darling, I called Charlie Raines.” He stood looking at her, momentarily stunned.
“I called him at home,” she said. “I told him you were terribly excited about his letter and had asked me to fix up a date because you’d had to go out. It’s all arranged. You’re to meet him tomorrow at six o’clock at the Barberry Room for a drink—just the two of you to talk it over quietly between yourselves. You can take the two o’clock train. It’ll get you there just in time.”
Trust me
, he remembered.
Just this once. It’s so important to trust me.
So, even then, only five minutes after he’d told her the news, she’d decided what she was going to do. That’s why she’d stayed away from the party. The deviousness of it, the enormity of the betrayal brought anger flooding into the vacuum of his exhaustion. And it wasn’t only that. It was worse. Looking at her smiling up at him, sublimely confident of victory already achieved, he realized what he had never realized before. She despised him. Under all the layers of pretense (Dear John, help me! What would I do if it wasn’t for you?) she had him tabbed as a nothing, a piece of play in her hands to be molded into whatever shape her whim directed.
I’m tired of New York. I’d like to live in the country. I’ll get him to give up Raines and Raines.
That’s how she’d seen it in New York. And now she was thinking: I want all that money and I’m bored with it here. I’ll fix it to make him go back. If she hadn’t been drunk, of course, she wouldn’t have been quite so blatant about it. But the same feeling would have been there. Wouldn’t it?
His thoughts reeled away from the complexity of it all and, in his anger, he decided: I’ll call Charlie now. I’ll tell him my wife was drunk—and to hell with his job. But even as he thought it he knew he couldn’t do it. Not over the party line. He’d have to go to New York anyway to undo this damage.
His anger was merged now with the odd, heady feeling that after this he owed her nothing any more, that he was free of her at last.
He said, “You’re smart, aren’t you?”
“Not smart. Just being sensible, that’s all. Sensible for both of us. I understand your pride. Of course I do. You’d rather die than admit the critics were right. It’s only natural. But really, deep inside, you do know—deep inside you know it hasn’t worked out. You’re not going to make the grade. You don’t have it in you. And to ruin everything just for foolish pride. To turn down the only good offer you may ever get just because …”