The Golden Cup

by Belva Plain

  The cook dropped the breakfast tray, splattering broken crockery over the hall. Two young maids knelt moaning. One of the farmhands came running from the kitchen. Another grabbed the telephone. The staircase was clogged. Madness took hold.

  Someone covered Hennie’s eyes with a hand and forced her to turn away. Pinned to the wall, she fought to struggle free.

  “What happened? How?”

  “He was alone, he did it.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  “Leah, don’t look, get back!”

  “Meg, take Hank, close his door. Keep him away.”

  “Get the doctor! An ambulance.”

  “Whiskey! Brandy!”

  “Cold water.”

  “Lift him.”

  “Don’t touch him.”

  “He’s gone.”

  Alfie rushed back upstairs. “Somebody take care of Mama—she’ll have a heart attack. And Leah. No, Hennie, you can’t go down, Ben and I will handle it, the ambulance is coming. You women, stay. No, Hennie, no! Jesus Christ, hold her!”

  They held her; she heard herself screech and, knowing that she mustn’t, that they needed all their wits to help Freddy, not her, she cut the cry short.

  “Help him,” she heard herself whisper.

  Then there was Alfie’s voice, quiet and sad, as he held her, still pressed against the wall.

  “Hennie … he’s dead.”

  Many people came. From her bed, she heard the house door opening and closing below; there was a constant traffic on the stairs. People stood around her bed, and someone—it must have been a doctor—said: “Take this, it will make you sleep for a while.”

  When she woke up, blinking, someone was sitting by her bed.

  “It’s all right. I’m here,” Emily whispered.

  Hennie’s speech was thick, her lips were furry. “I have to go out,” she said, rising up.

  “No, no,” Emily said steadily. “Lie back. It’s the best thing for you, Hennie.”

  The telephone was ringing. She was aware of a subdued, continuing bustle in the house. Yes, of course: Freddy was dead.

  “I don’t believe it,” she said.

  Emily took her hand and stroked it, saying nothing.

  “Where’s Leah?”

  “In bed too. The doctor gave her something.”

  “Poor Leah.”

  Still Emily stroked Hennie’s hand; the touch was dry and warm.

  “You’re very good, Emily. You don’t talk, and that’s good.”

  “There isn’t anything to say, except that we love you and we’re here.”

  Hennie turned her face away into the pillow. A spasm shook her, but no tears. There was only a pressure inside, like air going into a paper bag, a terrible pressure that must be relieved if it was not to explode in her.

  She jumped up, thrusting Emily away.

  “I have to go out!”

  “You can’t, it’s raining again, you mustn’t, Hennie—”

  She was already in the hall, going down the stairs, past the spot where he had lain in his blood. But they had cleaned it; a silky golden Oriental mat lay on the polished floor at the foot of the stairs.

  Emily beseeched her. “It’s pouring, Hennie. Where are you going?”

  Then she heard Ben’s voice. “Let her. She must need to. We’ll watch her, not let her go far.”

  The rain lashed her. For an instant she stood bewildered, not knowing where to go, only needing to go. Then she ran to the shelter of trees in what Alfie called the woodlot. She flung her arms around a tree, leaning her cheek on the bark, not caring that it scratched and hurt but hugging it as if to draw the life from the tree into herself.

  Dead! Crushed and dead. Then to rot, like the dark purple leaves that lie all winter where the wind has thrown them; like the poor bodies of little furry animals and birds who are flung at the side of the road.

  Why? Freddy, we were caring for you as best we could. We would have cared for you always. Isn’t life worth anything, even without legs?

  Two hard hands took her by the shoulders. “You can’t stay here all night, Hennie,” Ben said gently. “It’s cold, and you’re soaked through.”

  She looked up at him. The humorous eyes were serious and soft.

  “I want to stay here by myself,” she said.

  “You mustn’t. You mustn’t be sick now. We won’t let you, my dear.”

  The voice was very firm, very kind, very—male. It was to be obeyed. She began to shiver. And in a fog, she allowed him to lead her back inside the house.

  There was some sort of commotion in the living room; it stopped when Hennie and Ben came in. Cold and dripping, she stood in the doorway, wondering dully what else might have happened. Then she saw that Alfie had a piece of paper in his hand and that Leah was crying.

  “What is it? Give it to me,” Hennie said, for Alfie had tried to hide it behind his back.

  “It’s about Freddy, isn’t it? I want to see it. Give it to me! You give it to me!”

  There were only a few words in Freddy’s hand: I have lost everything. I hope you will be happy with Ben. He is more of a man than I am.

  “What does this mean?” Hennie cried.

  No one answered.

  Meg shook, with tears running down into her mouth. “I didn’t mean to tell! I didn’t want to make trouble, but when they found the note it just came out, what I knew, what we saw yesterday at the pond—”

  Leah spoke. “It’s all right, Meg. You have every right to tell what you knew.”

  Hennie looked wildly from Leah to Ben. “Then it’s true? You—you two?”

  Leah pleaded, “It’s not what it may seem. Awful as it is … the truth is that I would have stayed with Freddy for as long as either one of us lived. I would never have abandoned him. Did you really think I would?”

  A great hot hand clenched its fist in Hennie’s chest. She clutched the back of a chair.

  That’s Leah. Look at her, with the tears glistening in her big eyes and the earrings dangling. Face of a stranger. Cheat. What she did to my son. How can that be Leah? I don’t know her.

  “Abandon him?” Hennie stammered; her chest hurt. “You only killed him!”

  “I would never have left him, I tell you! I was good to him, you know I was.”

  “You—you and your lover—do you think your lover would have waited forever? You would have left him to wither! You—I took you from nothing. Have you forgotten? You’re a murderess. I gave you a chance, took you into my family, my home, and you do this? You and he, here—”

  “You must believe Leah!” Ben said. “Yes, I want to marry her more than I’ve wanted anything in my life, but I would never have done so as long as Freddy lived. We would never have hurt him, as much as we love each other.”

  Hennie ignored him. “Oh, Dan will want to kill you! He was right about you, I have to give him credit for that much. He was right about you, Leah.”

  Her raging anguish mounted, and she moved toward Leah, not sure of what she wanted to do, perhaps to slap her or pound her. Alfie caught her arms.

  “Hennie, hysteria won’t help. There’s a child in the house. Think of Hank. We must have some order and reason here,” he said sternly. “Come upstairs with me. Dan has been summoned; he’s the father and must take charge.”

  “I don’t want Dan,” she sobbed as he led her stumbling up the stairs. “Not Dan. I want Paul. Get Paul for me.”

  “Yes, yes, we’re trying to reach him. I’ve left a message.”

  “I’ll be out all day,” Paul told his secretary, who, having just come in, appeared surprised to find that he had been there ahead of her and was already prepared to go out again. “I just came by to look something up; now I’ve got about six stops to make.”

  He was glad of a day like the one ahead, in which he would keep moving. His mind was prepared for the varied clients, bankers, lawyers, and brokers whose challenges he would meet and whom he would persuade to his point of view. It would be a kind of sparring. He w
as wound up, coiled tight. So it felt good to get out of the chair, the room, the office.

  Before picking up hat and briefcase, he took a quick glance over his domain. His eye fell upon the new photograph of Mimi, which he had had made for the office and had handsomely framed in leather to match the desktop. It was a three-quarter pose and she was wearing the kind of dress he most liked; he had, for some unknown reason, always liked to see lace on a woman, and this dress had a double-tiered lace frill, worn high at the back, giving it an Elizabethan look. In her ears were the sapphire pendants he had given her on her last birthday. Her head was slightly lowered in the unconscious attitude of modesty that was characteristic of her; yet the arched nose, imperfect by the standards of the northern European, was fully revealed; there had been no attempt to camouflage it, and this candor gave her a definite air of pride to offset the modesty. A charming refinement was the result.

  His distress was painful. He went out quickly and shut the door.

  Once downstairs in the street, the anticipation of his first call filled his mind. The street was alive with nervous speed; everyone was hurrying somewhere. One by one, these narrow streets in the financial district were turning into shaded canyons, as the old three- and four-story houses were being replaced by thirty and forty floors of limestone. The Werner Building was already flanked by two such towers. At the corner, Paul looked back at it: a holdout, it was, and would remain so as long as he had anything to say about the matter. His three floors of worn old brick looked like a countinghouse out of Dickens, he reflected with satisfaction.

  The day was crammed, and that was good. At four o’clock he had finished the last call. He knew he ought to go back to the office, where surely a desk piled with mail would be waiting. Also, he could go home, having “earned his keep” for the day. Neither possibility appealed; the restlessness was upon him once more; he wanted the refreshment of open space and more motion.

  At 59th Street, he entered the park, intending to leave it at Fifth Avenue at 72nd. The sun had hidden behind a ceiling of cloud, sagged like a top of a tent, and in the west the sky was livid. He guessed they must all be having a wet day at Alfie’s place. He walked on through a soft gray mist, an English or Irish afternoon. Not many people were out. At the Bethesda Fountain there was no one except pigeons, mournfully cooing among broken peanut shells. His thoughts, the thoughts that he had controlled since the morning, now came swelling back.

  They had been dammed up ever since that day (was it a lifetime past or only yesterday?) barely two months ago. The recurring images were dizzying, confused and contradictory. Anna on the couch; arms and moist lips; eyes gleaming under lids like petals. Anna rushing down the stairs, wild-faced. Rushing away down the street, with her hair falling out of her hat. So terrified …

  But later she must have calmed enough to think it over, to recollect and weigh. Surely in these past weeks she must have been thinking and, just as he was, asking herself: What is to be done? Is there not something to be done?

  For she had wanted him. There was no mistaking that it had been a totally mutual thing between them from the very beginning, from the day when, coming into his room, he had found her with duster and apron, looking through his art books. He felt himself smiling at the recollection, and a lady with gray curls, walking her dog, looked up in affronted surprise at the impertinence of his smile, whereupon he burst out laughing.

  An instant later he sobered angrily. Everything, everyone, the whole damned world, conspired to keep apart two people who only wanted to be together! From that beginning, all had conspired! And now, even now, when he had told his mother about the visit and the loan, she’d looked startled and questioned him sharply, dared to question him as though he were a boy.

  “You were alone in the house with her? It wasn’t wise of you, Paul. That girl had her eyes on you.”

  Furious, he’d answered her coldly. “Mother, excuse me, but that’s a shameful thing to say.”

  Whereupon his mother, still unshaken and determined, had insisted, “No, Paul, just realistic. You were a catch for someone in her circumstances and married or not, you still are. Let us, as your father says, put all the cards on the table.” And she had looked him straight in the eye.

  Well, then, he would just lay them on the table, that was all! They wouldn’t like what they were to see, and he could feel sorrow about that; to hurt anyone was the last thing he ever wanted to do, but there were some things one had to have, no matter what. And Anna was one of them.

  He had been puzzling, scheming, and discarding schemes. She had no telephone. A letter was obviously too risky. He’d even had a faint foolish hope, knowing better all the time, that Anna might make the first attempt.

  Yet there must be a way; somehow it must be done. Carefully, oh, so carefully! Doing, please God, a minimum of damage to anyone.

  When he opened his front door, Mimi was waiting in the hall. All the world’s sorrow was in her face as she came to him.

  “Darling, darling, I don’t know how to tell you. Freddy is dead.”

  11

  Periodically, after work, and during these last few months since Freddy’s death, Paul had been going downtown to visit Hennie. Once descended from the trolley car, he had to walk through a neighborhood that was almost unrecognizable from the one he had known when he was a child. Gone downhill, it was poorer and dirtier, more crowded and more noisy. Old homes now held shabby ground-floor stores; others had been completely turned over to commerce; trucks filled the street with fumes and racket; innumerable children dodged the trucks. To be sure, there were far worse places on the globe, yet anyone who could possibly do so ought to leave it. Certainly Hennie could, but she chose not to.

  Paul, trudging up the dark stairs, was assailed by the smells of international cooking; Italian sauce was unmistakable, as was some sort of sickening sweet spice, definitely Indian.

  Hennie opened the door. He kissed her cheek.

  “How are you, Hennie?”

  “I don’t know. I keep living.”

  They sat in the dim parlor. He had a feeling, without being able to see whether it was true, that the place hadn’t been dusted. The shades were askew on the double windows, one of them up enough to admit the bleak light that was trapped between the buildings, while the other was halfway down. The ivy, once so exuberantly green, was dying.

  “What are you thinking?” he asked gently, for Hennie, who had not spoken, was staring out of the window at the gray wall.

  She smiled wanly. “Do you really want the truth?”

  “The truth, of course.”

  “I was thinking of the funeral. The cemetery. City of the dead. All the separate faces. I didn’t know that day that I was seeing them at all; I didn’t know anything that day. Yet I must have seen them, because I remember them now. Your wife was holding your arm, and I thought she was thinking how it could have been you who came back from the war like that.”

  Paul threw up his hands. “Thrown dice, that’s what war is. Who happens to be standing where and when and what bullet strikes. The most hideous gamble of all.”

  “Yes, that I understand. That, in the end, comes down to a simple grief. You can put your hand on your chest and feel the place where the sorrow lies. But when I think of this death, I can only cry: Why? Was she worth it, Leah? Worth taking his life?”

  “Ah, a dark mystery, all of it. How can we know?”

  He knew no comfort to give. Is life always worth living? How could he know otherwise when, for him, in spite of everything that weighed so heavily upon him, the future loomed gloriously because—because he would make it be so? No, it must remain a mystery for anyone who hadn’t been where Freddy had been. One could only puzzle over it. Every man who had suffered as Freddy had did not kill himself. Maybe, in those dreadful seconds, shoving off and hurtling down the stairs, Freddy had even wished to undo and turn back. Who could know? Paul only knew that he was sitting here with a poor woman who wanted an explanation, and he had none to give.


  “You’re alone too much,” he said abruptly. “Something has to be done about you.” He came now directly to the thing he had been wanting to say, and, out of discretion, had put off saying: “You won’t tell anyone what went wrong between Dan and you. It can only be something unforgivable … but for me it seems hard to imagine Dan doing anything unforgivable.”

  His silly habit of flirtation? Exasperating to a woman, he supposed, infuriating even, but hardly reason enough to separate after all those years: it was merely a flaw. And Paul wondered what his own most serious flaw might be: love of beauty, to a fault, or else that tendency to overrationalize, both other people’s motives and his own.

  He said again, since Hennie had not responded, “I can’t imagine Dan doing anything unforgivable.”

  For the first time in his life, Hennie’s face closed against him, hard and cold.

  “Forgive me,” he said.

  He saw that she was instantly sorry. “And you,” she asked. “You’re so concerned about me, but how are you?”

  He heard himself saying suddenly, “I’ve seen Anna.” He had no idea why he had said it.

  “Anna? How is that? What happened?”

  “Nothing … she has a child.”

  He wished Hennie would ask him more, not that he knew what he would tell her, certainly nothing of any significance, for he was not yet ready to make disclosures. Maybe he only wanted to say and hear Anna’s name.

  But Hennie asked nothing. She was absorbed in herself.

  “I long to see Hank,” she said. “I haven’t seen him since—since it happened. But I will not go to that house. I despise her, I can’t look at her. That’s one thing Dan and I have in common,” she finished, clipping the words with an air of defiant, bitter satisfaction that did not suit her.

  This unfamiliar coldness in his beloved Hennie dismayed Paul, and angered him, too, so that he replied almost harshly.

  “You’ll be surprised to learn there’s been a great change. He visits there almost every day.”

  “I don’t believe it! He’s not forgiven her, has he?”