Whispers

by Belva Plain

  A familiar smoky scent drifted up the stairs. Robert must be smoking his pipe. Without looking Lynn knew that he was sitting in the corner chair by the window, brooding in the meager light of one lamp, in a room filled with shadows, and with a mind filled with shadows too. At the top of the stairs she hesitated; a part of her wanted to go down and tell him, in what is called a “civilized” fashion—as if anything as brutal as the termination of a marriage begun in passion and total trust could, no matter how many fine words were summoned, be anything but a devastation—that she was unable to continue this way. But another part of her knew that the attempt would lead to a horrified protest, to apologies and promises, then to tears—her own—and perhaps even more frantic blows. Who could be sure anymore? So she turned about and went to bed.

  Every muscle, every nerve, was stretched. There was no sleep in her. Her ears picked up every sound, the swish of a passing car, the far high drone of a plane, and Emily’s slippered steps from the bathroom back to her room. Clearly, she constructed tomorrow’s departure, the final embrace, the giving of the boarding pass to the attendant, the ponytail and the red nylon carry-on disappearing down the jetway.

  “I shall not cry,” she said aloud. “I shall send her off with cheer.”

  And she reminded herself that Emily knew twice as much about the world as she had known at Emily’s age.…

  The screen door clicked shut as Robert brought Juliet inside. A moment later they came upstairs, the dog with tinkling collar tags and Robert with a heavy, dreary tread. Always, his footsteps had revealed his mood, and she knew what was to follow: He would sit down in the darkness and talk.

  He began, “I’m sorry about this morning, Lynn. It was nasty, and I know it.”

  “That it was. Very nasty, and that hardly describes it.”

  He was probably waiting for her to say more, probably bracing himself for an attack of rage such as she had made in the past; he could not know that she was beyond such agonized rage, far beyond it, that she had reached a tragic conclusion.

  Breathing hard, he began again. “It was Emily. I don’t think my spirit has ever sunk so low in all my life. It crushed me, Lynn. And so I lashed out. I was beside myself. That’s my only excuse.”

  Yes, she thought, it’s your only and your usual excuse. When haven’t you had a reason for being “beside yourself”? It’s never been your fault, but always somebody else’s, usually mine.

  “Aren’t you going to say something? Yell at me if you want to. But try to understand me too. Please, Lynn. Please.”

  “I don’t feel like yelling. I’ve had a terrible day.”

  “I’m sorry.” Sighing, he said, “I suppose we just have to tell ourselves that Emily will survive her mistake. What else can we do? What do you think?”

  “I’m too tired to think.”

  Yes, but tomorrow she would weep storms. Weep for Emily, for the turmoil that had thrown her into the arms of Bruce, and for the collapse of this marriage that had been the focus of, the reason for, the central meaning of, her life.

  “Maybe I can give you a piece of good news to make up for the rest,” Robert said now, speaking almost humbly. “Monacco flew in today. He told me they’ll be sending me back across the pond right around the start of the year.”

  And he waited again, this time no doubt for some enthusiasm or congratulations, but when she gave neither, he resumed, letting his own enthusiasms mount.

  “I’ve been thinking that I should go a month or so ahead of you and get things ready. They have some very comfortable houses with gardens in back, very pleasant. We’d need a furnished place, naturally. I’ll have it all cleaned up and ready by the time you arrive with Annie and Bobby. And maybe by that time Emily might—” He broke off.

  “I’m tired,” Lynn said again. “I really want to sleep.”

  “Okay.”

  He turned on the night-light and quietly began to undress. But he was too charged to be still for very long; he was a quivering high-tension wire.

  “I’ve been thinking, too, that we could rent this house. We’re not going to spend the rest of our lives in Europe, and we may want to come back right here. We can put everything in storage. What do you think?”

  “Fine.”

  Emily’s departure had “crushed him,” and yet here he was, hale and strong enough to make his rosy plans. That’s called “putting things into perspective,” I suppose, thought Lynn. I am so bitter. I am so bitter.

  “Did you know that our government sponsors a training program for bankers in Hungary so they can learn investment methods? They have no personnel. No accountants, for instance, a handful in the entire country. It’s shocking to us how ignorant they are. Well, a whole generation lived under communism, after all, so all the more of a challenge, I say.”

  The bed creaked as Robert got in. He moved so near to Lynn that she could smell his shaving lotion. If he touches me, she thought, shuddering, if he touches my breasts, if he kisses me, I’ll hit him. I will not be tricked into anything anymore. I will remember my head being slammed against the wall. I will remember Bruce this afternoon. No … no, I don’t want to remember that.

  “Sleeping?” murmured Robert.

  “I would if you didn’t keep waking me up.”

  “I’m sorry,” he apologized, and turned over.

  Yes, tomorrow she would weep storms, tomorrow she would weep for the waste, for the loss of the central meaning of her life. She would set free all the grief that was imploding within the little bony cage where her heart lay, and let it explode instead, to shatter the very walls of this house.

  Then, somehow, she would pick herself up and keep going. If Josie could face death with quiet courage, surely she, Lynn, could face life.

  On the third day Josie died. On the fourth day they saw her home to her grave. It was Josie’s own kind of day, the air was soft after recent rain, pearl-gray clouds hung low, and the smell of wet grass rose among the tombstones. Lynn, almost blindly, read names that were meaningless to her and inscriptions that could only be ineffectual: BELOVED WIFE, DEAR FATHER. For how can a mere adjective describe wretched pain and endless loss?

  And always, always, came the pictures: rain pelting the hearse when they followed her mother through the town and uphill to the burial ground; white flowers on Caroline’s tiny coffin …

  “Astonishing,” Robert whispered as the crowd gathered. “The whole office staff is here. Half the country club, too, it seems, and they didn’t even belong.”

  “Josie had friends,” Lynn said. “Everybody liked her and Bruce.”

  Bruce’s name caught on her tongue. She winced and feared to look at him. He looked like a man of seventy, like a man stricken and condemned.

  “My heart, my right hand,” she overheard him say to someone offering condolences.

  “I know what this means to you,” Robert whispered.

  “How can you know? You never liked her. You were furious with her.”

  “Well, she loved you, and I can appreciate that, at least.”

  Up the small rise people streamed from the parking lot, all kinds and colors and ages of them, the fashionable, the workers and, too, the poor, who must have come to Josie in their need and been comforted, so that they remembered her.

  The many voices were muted. All was muted: the spray of cream-colored roses on the coffin, and even the simple language of the prayers, giving thanks for the blessing of Josie’s life and the memories she had left to those who loved her.

  The brief service came, then, to an end. Too shaken to cry, Lynn looked up into the trees where a flock of crows were making a great stir. And turning her head, she met Tom Lawrence’s somber gaze.

  “If you need help,” Bruce had advised, “ask Tom Lawrence.”

  “I know women inside out,” Tom had told her once. “You’d eat yourself alive with guilt if you ever—”

  And Robert took her arm, saying, “Come. It’s over.” They got into the car and he said, looking almost curious
, “You really loved her, didn’t you? Funny, I should still be mad at her because of Emily, but what’s done is done, and why waste energy? Besides, you’d have to be heartless to look at Bruce’s face just now and not feel something. Who knows what goes through a person’s head at a time like this? I suppose people recall the times they fought and the things they said that now they wish they hadn’t said. But that’s only natural. Nobody’s perfect. Anyway, he looks like a cadaver. He looks as if he’d been starving himself. He hasn’t come to dinner these last few days, and maybe we should keep asking him over for a while until he can straighten himself out.”

  “That’s kind of you,” she said, somewhat surprised. And then, induced perhaps by this compassion that he now showed for a man whom he had never liked, she had a sudden insight into herself: If Eudora hadn’t been a witness, if Bruce hadn’t revealed that he and Josie had always known, might she not have gone on as before, burying the memory, denying it, as indeed she had been doing for years? Maybe she would even have gone on making love to Robert, as he had wanted her to the other night before Emily left, when she had by her silence and immobility rebuffed him. It was an odd, uncertain insight.

  They drove on, while Robert ruminated: “I wonder what he’ll do now. He’s the kind who may never marry again. God forbid, if anything were to happen to you, I never would.”

  She had to say something. “You can’t know that,” she said.

  “Yes, I can. I know myself. If I had to stand there in that awful cemetery the way he just did and watch you—I can’t even say it.”

  She was thinking: He will suffer when I leave.

  “I suppose hell just go back to the office in a couple of days, back to his old plodding routine.”

  She thought then: But Robert will have his work. He will get the news, be stunned and furious, and suffer most awfully. She saw him now as clearly as if it had already happened; standing in some strange room on a strange street with a view, perhaps, of cobblestones and medieval towers, he would open her long, sad, careful letter; in expectation of loving words, he would start to read and, not believing his own senses, would read again.… And someday he would become the head of the company and have all the glory he so dearly wanted.

  Her hands, faintly brown, lay on her lap. When she turned them over, the scars, smooth, white pinhead spots, were unmistakable. And on her cheek this morning, the thin red cut was just closing.

  She turned her head to look at Robert, at the lean, fine face. He had scarcely changed. He was as fascinating as he had been when she first had seen him. For her there was something aphrodisiac about the white collar and the dark suit as, so many women admit, there is about a military uniform.

  What you have done to me, to us! she thought. You had so much, we had so much, and could have kept it, but you have thrown it away. What you have done with your filthy rage!

  The house was bleak. Almost it seemed a dangerous place with hazards and avoidances, as if one were walking through a minefield.

  First there was Annie, who, fresh from scout camp, where unfortunately she had not lost a pound, had to be faced with two stupendous changes, the departure of Emily and the death of Josie. The matter of Emily was eased by some telephone calls, but the matter of Josie could only be eased, it seemed, by Bruce.

  Lynn drove her to his house, where she spent the day and came out looking relatively cheerful in spite of her swollen eyelids.

  “Uncle Bruce said it’s all right to cry. He said after I’ve cried, I’ll feel better, and I do. He said Aunt Josie wouldn’t want me to be too sad. She’d want me to remember nice things about her, but she’d mainly want me to do good work in school and have friends and be happy. Why didn’t you come inside, Mom?”

  “I had a lot of errands, and Bobby’s cutting a tooth. He’s cranky.”

  “I think you should tell Uncle Bruce to come to dinner. There’s nothing in his refrigerator.”

  “No? What did you have for lunch?”

  “He opened a can of beans.”

  “He hasn’t got his appetite back. It’s much too soon.”

  “Aren’t you going to tell him to have dinner with us?”

  “He’ll come when he’s ready.”

  If Lynn knew anything at all about Bruce, she knew he would never be ready. The prospect of sitting down to dinner, the two of them facing Robert, would be as dismaying to him as it was to her.

  “Do you suppose he’ll get married now that Aunt Josie’s dead?” asked Annie.

  “How on earth should I know that?” And then, because she had shown such irritation at the question, Lynn made amends. “How about taking Bobby up the road in the stroller? He’d like that. He adores you.”

  The adoration was mutual, for Annie’s reply was prompt. “Okay! You know I’m still the only person in my class who’s got a new baby at home?”

  “Oh? That makes you sort of special, doesn’t it?”

  That night Robert said, “I’ve been making inquiries about schools for Annie. We should really prepare her now and get her used to the idea. We don’t want a too sudden disruption at midterm.”

  Lynn replied quickly, “Not now. She hasn’t been back at school a week yet. Leave her alone for a while.”

  “I suppose you’ve heard from our other daughter?”

  The tone had a knife edge, a serrated knife edge, she thought, saying calmly, “Yes. She likes the place. She’s taking biology, of course, sociology, psychology—”

  Robert stopped her, raising the newspaper like a fence in front of his face.

  “I don’t want the details of her curriculum, Lynn.”

  “Are you never going to relent?” she asked.

  The newspaper crackled angrily as he shifted it. “Don’t pin me down. ‘Never’ is a long time.”

  A bleak house indeed.

  As she drove back from a PTA meeting, Lynn’s mind was filled not with its agenda, the school fair and back-to-school night, but with her own uncertainties. Would she be staying in this house? Almost certainly not, for Robert would hardly support a place like this one after she had left him. So there would be a new home to prepare; should it be here where the family’s roots had gradually been taking hold, or would it be better to turn to the older, deeper roots in the Midwest?

  And then there loomed the larger, ominous problem: the severance itself. She had no experience at all with the law. How exactly did one go about this severance? Here on the road, dancing ahead of the car, she seemed to see a swirling cloud of doubt and menace, rising like some dark genie released from its jar.

  The road curved. She was not often in this part of town, but she recognized a turreted Victorian house.

  “It has two hideous stone lions at the foot of the driveway,” Tom Lawrence had said. “Take the next left after you pass it. I’m a quarter of a mile from the turn.”

  The genie threatened to tower over the car, to descend and crush it.… Lynn broke into a chill and a sweat; she drove left beyond the lions and drew up in breathless fear before Tom’s house.

  It had not occurred to her, unthinking as she was just then, that he might not be home. But his car was there, and he answered her ring. She was taken aback at the sight of him. It had been crazy to come here, yet it would have been crazier to turn now and run.

  “I was just passing,” she said.

  That was absurd, and she knew it as she was saying it.

  “Well, then, come in. Or rather, come in and out again. It’s too beautiful to be indoors. Shall we sit in the sun or the shade?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” The chill wanted sun, while the sweat wanted shade.

  He was wearing tennis whites, and a racket lay on a table alongside an open book. A bed of perennials, of delphinium, phlox, and cosmos, pink and blue and mauve, bordered the terrace; from a little pool lying in a grotto came the cool trickle of a tiny fountain. Upon this peace she had intruded, and she was too embarrassed to explain herself.

  “An unexpected visit. An unexpected pleasure,�
�� Tom said, smiling.

  “Now that I’m here, I feel a fool. I’m sorry. I don’t really know why I came.”

  “I do. You’re in trouble, and you need a friend. Isn’t that so?”

  Her eyes filled, and she blinked. Considerately, Tom gazed out toward the garden.

  When she was able, she said in a low, tremulous voice, “I am going to leave Robert.”

  Tom turned quickly. “A mutual agreement, or are you adversaries?”

  A lawyer’s questions, Lynn thought, and said aloud, “He doesn’t know yet. And he will not agree, you may be sure.”

  “Then you’ll need a very good lawyer.”

  “You told me once that if I ever needed help, I should call you.”

  “I meant it. I don’t take matrimonial cases anymore, but I’ll get you somebody who does.”

  “You don’t seem surprised. No, of course you aren’t. You’re thinking of my invitation to our golden wedding.”

  Mechanically, she twisted the straps of her handbag and, in the same low voice, continued, “He struck me. But this time something different happened. I knew I couldn’t—I know I can’t—I can’t take it again.”

  He nodded.

  “I know you think I’m stupid to have put up with what I did. One reads all those articles about battered women and thinks, ‘You idiots! What are you waiting for?’ ”

  “They’re not idiots. There are a hundred different reasons why they stay as long as they do. Surely,” Tom said gently, “you can think of some very cogent reasons yourself. In your own case—”

  She interrupted. “In my own case I never thought of myself as a battered woman.”

  “You didn’t want to. You thought of yourself as a romantic woman.”

  “Oh, yes! I loved him.…”

  “From a woman’s point of view I daresay he’s a very attractive man. A powerful man. Admired.”

  “I wish I could understand it. He can be so loving and, sometimes, so hard. Poor Emily—” And briefly she related, without mention of the pregnancy, what had occurred.

  Tom commented, “That sounds just like Bruce’s generosity. You’ve seen him since the funeral, of course.”